Ghana

From the gold-rich Akan forest states and the mighty Asante Empire to the brutal Atlantic trade, British conquest, and Africa's pioneering independence under Kwame Nkrumah.

Modern Ghana borrows its name from a great medieval West African empire, though that Ghana lay hundreds of miles to the northwest, in present-day Mauritania and Mali, and had no territorial link to the modern state. The land that is Ghana today was the cradle of the Akan peoples, whose Bono, Denkyira, Akwamu, Fante, and above all Asante states grew wealthy on gold and trade. From 1482, when the Portuguese raised Elmina Castle, European powers studded the coast with forts that channelled first gold and then enslaved Africans into the Atlantic trade. In the nineteenth century Britain fought a series of wars against the Asante and forged the Gold Coast colony, until a nationalist movement led by Kwame Nkrumah won independence on 6 March 1957 — making Ghana the first sub-Saharan African colony to throw off European rule. After decades of coups and short-lived republics, Ghana returned to constitutional democracy with the Fourth Republic in 1993 and has since become one of Africa's most stable democracies, with repeated peaceful transfers of power.