Accra

• 1. Introduction

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  Accra, the capital of Ghana, has more than one answer to the question of how many people live there. The Accra Metropolitan District covers 20.4 square kilometres and held 284,124 people at the 2021 census. The Greater Accra Region, spread over 3245 square kilometres, held 5.46 million. Before 2008, the name Accra usually meant a territory of 199.4 square kilometres. That territory held 1,782,150 inhabitants in 2021, and it is now divided among 13 local government districts. Only the reduced Accra Metropolitan District has city status, and only it is formally called the City of Accra.

  The city sits on Ghana's southern coast, on the Gulf of Guinea, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. In 2020, the think tank Globalization and World Cities Research Network rated Accra a Gamma minus global city. The wider Greater Accra Metropolitan Area is home to about 4 million people, which makes it the thirteenth-largest metropolitan area in Africa.

  Where does the name Accra come from? Who fought over this stretch of coast, and who drew up plans that the city never quite followed? And what is daily life like in Accra now, with its crowded neighbourhoods, its storms and its traffic?

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• 2. Ants and Anthills

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  The name Accra comes from the Akan word Nkran, which means ants. It refers to the many anthills scattered across the countryside around the city, and specifically to soldier ants. Twi speakers applied the word to both the town and its people.

  In the Ga language, the city is called Ga or Gaga, which is also the name of the Ga people. The historian Carl Christian Reindorf confirmed this origin. He proposed a link between the fighting spirit and migratory habits of the local ants and those of the Ga. The Gas used the image of swarming dark-red ants to signal their military strength and their ancient conquest of the Guang speakers on the Accra Plains.

  Anthills carried spiritual weight as well. The tall red mounds in Accra's hinterland were often ringed by sacred fences called aklabatsa. People saw them as small models of the human community, and as meeting points between the known world and the world of the dead.

  The spelling Accra was given to Nkran by Europeans. An earlier Danish spelling was Akra. Linguists note that Ga is a cognate of Akan, one of a few words in which a g sound in Ga matches a k sound in Akan. Those Danes would go on to hold one of the forts around which the modern city grew.

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• 3. Kingdom Under Siege

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  The Tumgwa, the main Ga group, were led by Ayi Kushie and arrived by sea. So many Ga immigrants came that the indigenous Lartehs relocated to the Akuapem ridge. By the late 15th century, the kingdom of Accra ruled the area from its capital at Ayawaso.

  Accra was not at first the leading trading centre. That role belonged to the ports at Ada and Prampram, and to the inland centres of Dodowa and Akuse. Local inhabitants destroyed an early Portuguese fort in 1576, and trade afterwards took place on the beaches. In the mid-17th century the Dutch built Fort Crèvecœur nearby, while the British built James Fort and the Swedes built Christiansborg.

  By 1646 the kingdom was a regional power, helped along by European trade. Yet it depended on the goodwill of the rising Akwamu Kingdom, which controlled the trade routes into the interior. A dispute in 1646 turned into war when Accra invaded Larteh. A civil war weakened Accra at the same time.

  In 1677, Akwamuhene Ansa Sasraku used the circumcision of a visiting Akwamu prince as his pretext for an attack. He sacked Ayawaso and beheaded the king, Okai Koi. The king's son, Ofori, fell back to Small Accra, the town that had grown up under the walls of Fort Crèvecœur. The guns of the Danish Fort Christianborg defeated Ansa Sasraku's attempts to finish off the Accrans.

  Ofori and his people survived a few more years. Then the Akwamu stirred up a rebellion among the Danish garrison, and the fort was turned over to the Portuguese. Ansa Sasraku came back in 1681. He burned Osu town and Small Accra and chased Ofori into exile in Fetu. Even so, Accra regained its independence in 1730, when the Akyem defeated the Akwamu.

  The forts that had both protected and betrayed Ofori would change hands again in the next century, this time by sale.

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• 4. Capital of the Gold Coast

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  Denmark sold Christiansborg and its other forts to Britain in 1851, which began a gradual British takeover of every other country's interests on the coast. The Netherlands was the last to sell out, in 1871. In 1873, after decades of tension with the Ashantis, the British captured Kumasi and destroyed portions of it. They took Accra in 1874. In 1877, at the end of the second Anglo-Asante War, Accra replaced Cape Coast as the capital of the British Gold Coast. The reason given was climate, since Accra was drier than Cape Coast.

  Until then the settlement had been squeezed between Ussher Fort on the east and the Korle Lagoon on the west. Once the administration moved in 1877, colonial administrators and European settlers arrived and built around Christiansborg, in what are now Osu, Ministries, Ridge, Labone and Cantonments. Victoriaborg appeared to the east in the late 19th century as an exclusively European residential neighbourhood. A bubonic plague epidemic pushed the boundaries out again in 1908. That expansion created Adabraka, to the north, a native-only neighbourhood meant to relieve crowding in the city centre.

  By the early 1920s, better transport to the inland cities that produced exportable goods made cocoa Accra's largest export. Commerce then overtook government as the main force in the city. The law mandated segregation of European and African neighbourhoods until 1923, and every new building had to be made of stone or concrete. Even so, European settlers were very hesitant to put large sums into infrastructure or public works.

  That changed under the governorship of Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg. In his time, the three separate settlements of Osu, La and Jamestown merged into modern Accra. His administration laid out the grid neighbourhoods of Tudu, Adabraka and Asylum Down. In 1923 a bridge across the Korle Lagoon drew settlers to Korle Bu, Korle Gonno and Chokor. Guggisberg also oversaw the building of the Korle-Bu hospital and Achimota secondary school. Rural migrants and British businessmen and administrators swelled the population.

  The next big vision for the city came from a planner named Maxwell Fry.

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• 5. Plans and Protest

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  A tight street grid north of Fort Ussher was the centrepiece of the town plan that Maxwell Fry devised in 1944. B.D.W. Treavallion and Alan Flood revised it in 1958. East of the reorganised business district, the planners wanted a broad open space for a restaurant, a country club, and polo and cricket fields. They also pictured public squares, fountains, ornamental pools and statues, plus a vast Parliament complex in the city centre. The coast would become an extension of Victoriaborg and a recreational preserve for the elite. The British Gold Coast ended before any of this was enacted, but the plan shows how Britain imagined the city's future.

  On the 28th of February 1948, unarmed ex-servicemen marched on Christiansborg Castle to hand the colonial governor a petition. They demanded the pay and benefits they had been promised. The march came amid a boycott of European goods organised by Nii Kobina Bonney III, the chief of Osu Alata, in protest at rising prices for essentials. The veterans were fired upon before they reached the castle, after the colonial police chief ordered them to disperse. Three of their leaders were killed, among them Sergeant Nii Adjetey, who now has a memorial in Accra. The shooting led to the 1948 Accra riots.

  Kwame Nkrumah became Ghana's first Prime Minister in 1957 and drew up a plan of his own. He wanted spaces that would inspire pride and nationalism among his people and across Africa. In place of ornamental fountains and a large Parliament complex, he chose landmarks: Independence Square, the State House and the Organisation of African Unity building. He also refurbished Christianborg Castle. He left the Atlantic coast undeveloped so that it would not distract from the Community Centre or Independence Square.

  Nkrumah's plan cared far less about order than the British one. It allowed commercial establishments to keep compressing into the central business district, and it allowed more migration into Jamestown. Today the city still centres on the old forts, with Jamestown near James Fort, Osu near the Danish fort now called Osu Castle, and Ussherstown near Ussher Fort.

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• 6. Housing and Livelihoods

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  About 58 percent of Accra's people live in low-income areas, among them Osu, Jamestown, Chorkor, La, Teshie, Nungua, Nima and Maamobi. Most of the city's informal businesses are located there, and almost all of these areas are built up with little room to expand. The highest density, an average of 69.3 persons per hectare, was recorded in the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. In oldest parts such as Accra New Town, Nima, Jamestown and Usshertown, densities passed 250 persons per hectare. In higher-income areas they ranged between 17.5 and 40.

  Middle-income areas such as Dansoman Estates, Achimota, Adenta and Tesano hold 32 percent of the population. These are usually planned developments with better building materials, though they still need infrastructure. The remaining 10 percent live in high-income areas such as North Ridge, Airport Residential Area and East Legon, which are planned, spacious and landscaped. Across the city, many uncompleted houses stand among pockets of undeveloped land. Owners who lack funds to finish them often end up in litigation.

  Accra is a young city, with 56 percent of its people under 24 years of age. Fifty-one percent are female, giving a ratio of 1.04 women to every man. Migration keeps feeding the population. Immigration has contributed over 35 percent of its growth, and one assessment found that 45 percent of residents are African immigrants. Rapid industrialisation between 1960 and 1970 first drew rural migrants in large numbers, and the stagnant economy of the 1970s slowed the pace.

  In 2008, the World Bank estimated that Accra's economy made up only about US$3 billion of Ghana's gross domestic product. The financial sector includes a central bank, nine commercial banks with 81 branches, and the Ghana Stock Exchange. The service sector is the city's largest, employing about 531,670 people. The second-largest sector employs 22.34 percent of the labour force, or around 183,934 people. About 12.2 percent of the workforce, some 114,198 people, is reportedly unemployed.

  The smallest sector, which employs approximately 91,556 people, is dominated by fishing and urban agriculture. Fishing accounts for 78 percent of production labour, and 10 percent of the catch is exported. Fishing shores at Jamestown, La, Teshie, Nungua and Chorkor are the most active, and deep-water fishing is concentrated between June and September. There are clear indications that fish stocks will be depleted in the near future.

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• 7. Climate and Waste

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  Accra lies in the Dahomey Gap, which gives it a very marginal tropical wet and dry climate bordering on hot semi-arid. Annual rainfall averages about 730 mm and falls mostly in two rainy seasons. The chief season runs from April to mid-July, and a weaker one arrives in October. Storms are brief but intense, and flooding follows wherever drainage channels are obstructed.

  Temperature barely moves through the year. August is the coolest month at 25.9 °C, March is the hottest at 29.6 °C, and the annual average is 27.6 °C. The cooler months are more humid, so the dry heat of the windy harmattan season actually feels less warm. Relative humidity runs from 65 percent in the midafternoon to 95 percent at night. The record wind speed is 107.4 km/h, and thunderstorm squalls often strip roofing material from buildings.

  Sea level rise is a growing threat for a coastal city whose population keeps pressing on the shoreline. Drainage infrastructure is especially at risk, with serious consequences for livelihoods in informal settlements. The Climate and Development Knowledge Network points to weak planning regulation and enforcement, perceived corruption, poor communication between government departments, and little concern for building codes.

  The suburb of Agbogbloshie is known for highly toxic e-waste recycling sites. Kantamanto Market handles an overwhelming flow of used fast fashion from other parts of the world. Both are sources of pollution and trash for the rest of the city. Air pollution averages 49.5 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic metre, measured at three live monitoring sites. A 2021 review by Ghana's Environmental Protection Agency found levels well above both national and international health standards.

  Plastic water sachets, bottles and food packaging, along with plastic use during COVID-19, have driven plastic pollution on the beaches and in the fisheries. Non-profit organisations and a growing network of recyclers collect it. Activists and researchers largely blame upstream use of plastics. Meanwhile, construction is shrinking urban green space. A 2021 study of low-income communities found a strong desire for parks for recreation and health, and a 2018 study found that the green spaces that remain matter for the city's mammal biodiversity.

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• 8. Street Life and Culture

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  Trotros, which are minibuses or cargo vans modified to carry passengers, are the most common way to get around Accra. Popular models include the Nissan Urvan 15-seater and the Mercedes Benz Sprinter. Many carry decals of national flags or football teams, popular sayings, proverbs in English or local languages, and Bible verses. Most routes start and end at big terminals such as Neoplan station or the Achimota Transport Terminal.

  In 2003, the Metro Mass Transit Service was inaugurated as a more comfortable and cheaper alternative to the trotro. The Aayalolo bus system followed in November 2016. It was planned as a bus rapid transit line with dedicated lanes, but the lanes were never provided, so it was renamed the Quality Bus System. In 2019 an agreement was signed for the Accra Skytrain, a five-line, 194 km elevated light railway costing $2.6 billion. As of 2021, construction had not begun.

  Accra has not served as a port city since the 1950s. The Port of Tema, about 29 km to the east, opened in 1961 and can take the larger ships used for deepwater shipping. Most taxis in Accra lack meters, so passengers negotiate the fare. Taxis have yellow or orange bumpers and fenders, and ride-hailing services such as Uber, Taxify and Yango have joined the market.

  Football is the most popular sport. Accra Great Olympics and Accra Hearts of Oak share the Accra Sports Stadium, and Hearts of Oak's main rival is Asante Kotoko of Kumasi. In 2008 the stadium hosted nine matches of the African Cup of Nations. The city is home to the Right to Dream Academy, whose alumni include Michael Essien and Asamoah Gyan. Boxing is popular too, and Ghana has produced world champions such as Azumah Nelson, Joshua Clottey and Ike Quartey. Accra hosted the 2023 African Games.

  The Du Bois Centre holds a research library and a gallery of manuscripts, as well as the graves of the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois. The Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum is the resting place of Ghana's first President. In 1918, the Grand Orange Lodge of Ghana was established in Accra. In 1994, one of its leaders, Emmanuel Aboki Essien, became the first African elected President of the Imperial Orange Council. The lodge still holds orange walks, including one on the 12th of July. In October 2022, UNESCO named Accra World Book Capital for 2023.

  Accra's first documentary about the impacts of climate change premiered in the city on the 14th of October 2022. The Ghana Youth Film Program, a compilation of 12 short documentaries by young Ghanaians aged 18 to 30, took part in the COP27 climate summit on the 9th of November 2022.

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