Ghana
Capital: Accra · West Africa
Named for the medieval Ghana Empire, home of the Asante Kingdom and its Golden Stool, kente cloth, and the coastal forts that anchor Pan-African memory.
Ethnic communities
- Akan (Asante, Fante)Matrilineal kingdoms; kente, adinkra, the Golden Stool
- EweVolta-region communities famed for complex drumming and kente
- Ga-DangmeAccra coastal people; Homowo harvest festival
- Dagomba & Mole-DagbaniNorthern kingdoms with drum-history archives
More communities of Ghana
- Asante · Golden Stool kingdom — kente, gold and Kumasi's court
- Fante · Coastal Akan of asafo flag companies and old forts
- Akuapem · Ridge kingdom where Twi scholarship began
- Akyem · Gold-forest states of the Birim valley
- Bono · The Akan's elder kingdom at Techiman's markets
- Kwahu · Escarpment traders famed for paragliding Easter
- Ga · Accra's founders — Homowo harvest and fantasy coffins
- Dangme (Ada, Krobo) · Bead-craft and dipo initiation keepers
- Dagomba · Dagbon kingdom of drum-history and Damba festival
- Mamprusi · Senior northern kingdom at Gambaga's roots
- Gonja · Cavalry state of the middle belt's crossroads
- Frafra & Kusasi · Upper-east terrace farmers and basket weavers
- Sissala & Wala · Northwestern farming and mosque towns
- Nzema · Western lagoon Akan — Nkrumah's home shore
Languages
Major languages: Akan (Twi, Fante), Ewe, Ga, Dagbani, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Kwa, Gur)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Asante Empire
- • Denkyira
- • Dagbon
- • Fante Confederacy
Heritage sites
- • Forts and Castles of the Gold Coast (Elmina, Cape Coast)
- • Asante traditional buildings
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Ghana
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Sportb. 1964
Abedi Pele
Football
Three-time African Footballer of the Year and the architect of Marseille's 1993 European Cup win.
- Music & the arts1942–2023
Ama Ata Aidoo
Literature and drama
Playwright and novelist who put African women's inner lives at the centre of the continent's literature, and served as Ghana's minister of education.
- Sportb. 1958
Azumah Nelson
Boxing
Held world titles at featherweight and super featherweight and is widely rated the finest African boxer of all time.
- Music & the artsb. 1944
El Anatsui
Sculpture
Builds shimmering wall hangings from flattened bottle tops, linking trade, drink and colonial history. Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at Venice in 2015.
- Science, business & activism1919–2002
Esther Afua Ocloo
Enterprise and microfinance
Started a marmalade business with a few shillings, then co-founded Women's World Banking, which took microcredit to millions of women worldwide.
- Politics & liberation1909–1972
Kwame Nkrumah
Independence and Pan-Africanism
Led Ghana to independence in 1957, the first sub-Saharan colony to break free, and made Pan-African unity a continental project. Deposed by coup in 1966.
Deep-dive community profiles
Agni (Anyi)
The Akan kingdoms of eastern Côte d'Ivoire — Indénié, Sanwi and Moronou, founded by migrants from Asante, keepers of gold regalia and stools, and rulers of one kingdom that has twice petitioned to secede.
Open deep profile →Akan (Asante & Fante)
Matrilineal peoples of the Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire forest belt whose Asante Empire, Golden Stool, kente cloth and adinkra symbol system created one of Africa's most sophisticated courtly civilizations.
Open deep profile →Builsa (Bulsa)
Farmers of Sandema in Ghana's Upper East who defeated the Zabarima slave raiders in the 1890s, and who re-enact that defeat every December in the Feok festival — the only West African festival built entirely around the memory of resisting enslavement.
Open deep profile →Dagomba (Dagbamba)
The drum-history kingdom of northern Ghana — Dagbon, founded by the red hunter Tohazie's line, where lunsi drummers recite seven centuries of kings, and the Damba festival turns Tamale and Yendi into courts of praise.
Open deep profile →Ewe
The people of the Volta estuary and coastal lagoons whose polyrhythmic drumming, kente weaving and Vodu religion shaped three nations — bound by the memory of a shared escape from the tyrant king of Notsé.
Open deep profile →Frafra (Gurunsi of Bolgatanga)
Farmers of the Upper East around Bolgatanga whose women paint the walls of their compounds in bold geometric patterns, whose baskets are exported worldwide, and whose region supplied the labour that built colonial Ghana's south.
Open deep profile →Ga (Ga-Dangme)
The founders of Accra — fisherfolk and traders of the Gulf shore whose Homowo festival 'hoots at hunger', whose twin celebrations honor double blessings, and whose fantasy coffins carry the dead to sea in aeroplanes, fish and cocoa pods.
Open deep profile →Gonja
The cavalry kingdom of northern Ghana — founded by Mande horsemen from Mali in the sixteenth century, ruled by a paramount who rotates among divisional gates, and holder of the Damba festival and one of West Africa's important Arabic chronicles.
Open deep profile →Gurunsi (Kasena-Nankani and Nuna)
The painted-house builders of the Volta basin — farmers whose women decorate every wall with geometric patterns in earth pigment, and whose Tiébélé compound is among the most photographed pieces of architecture in Africa.
Open deep profile →Kassena (Gurunsi)
The painted-house builders of the Burkina–Ghana border — whose women cover the fortress-walls of Tiébélé in bold black, white and ochre geometry, and whose stateless earth-shrine villages held off the horsemen of the savanna kingdoms.
Open deep profile →Konkomba
Yam farmers of the Oti plain on the Ghana-Togo border, a people without chiefs who were administered under other peoples' chiefs for a century, and whose demand for their own paramountcy produced Ghana's deadliest post-independence conflict.
Open deep profile →Lobi
The fiercely independent farmers of the Black Volta — builders of fortress-houses (soukala), carvers of the bateba shrine figures that stand for the thila spirits, and a people who never accepted a chief, a king or a colonial officer without a fight.
Open deep profile →Mamprusi
The senior of the Mole-Dagbani kingdoms of northern Ghana, whose Nayiri at Nalerigu claims descent from the founder from whom the Dagomba and Mossi kings also trace, and whose succession dispute has kept Bawku under curfew for two decades.
Open deep profile →Mossi
The kingdom-builders of the Volta basin, whose Mogho Naba still holds court in Ouagadougou every Friday — a 500-year unbroken monarchy of horsemen, farmers and mask societies on the West African savanna.
Open deep profile →Nzema
The people of Ghana's south-western corner — Akan-speaking coastal farmers and fishers who gave the continent Kwame Nkrumah, whose Kundum festival lasts weeks, and whose stilt village of Nzulezo stands on a lagoon.
Open deep profile →Tem (Kotokoli)
The Muslim traders of central Togo — a kingdom at Tchamba and Sokodé whose long-distance merchants linked the forest to the Sahel, and whose Adossa knife festival at the end of Ramadan has men in trance driving blades against their own bodies.
Open deep profile →