Accra’s name means ants in Akan
Ghana’s coastal capital grew from British Fort James, Dutch Fort Crêvecoeur and Danish Christiansborg melting into Jamestown, Usshertown and Christiansborg districts. Akan Nkran—“ants,” specifically soldier ants—named the place for countryside anthills. Greater Accra’s metro holds about four million people.
In the local Ga tongue the city is simply Ga or Gaga, the same word as the people's name and related to the Akan form. Historian Carl Christian Reindorf linked the swarming, warlike red ants to the Ga themselves, who invoked them to recall their ancient conquest of Guang speakers on the Accra Plains. Tall red anthills in the hinterland, sometimes fenced off as sacred, were treated as models of human community and gateways to the land of the dead. Europeans produced the spelling Accra; the Danes had written Akra.
By the 15th century a kingdom of Accra ruled from its capital at Ayawaso, and local people tore down a Portuguese fort in 1576, after which trade moved to the beaches. In 1677 the Akwamu ruler Ansa Sasraku sacked Ayawaso and beheaded King Okai Koi; the king's son Ofori held out in the town beneath Fort Crèvecœur until a second assault in 1681 drove him into exile. Britain bought out its rivals piece by piece, starting with Denmark's forts in 1851 and ending with the Dutch in 1871, took Accra in 1874, and in 1877 made it capital of the Gold Coast in place of Cape Coast, whose climate was wetter.
The colonial city spread outward: Victoriaborg became a Europeans-only quarter, a plague outbreak in 1908 led to boundary changes, and Governor Guggisberg bridged the Korle Lagoon in 1923 and built Korle-Bu hospital and Achimota school. Better inland transport in the 1920s made cocoa the chief export. In 1948 Osu chief Nii Kobina Bonney III led a national boycott of European goods over soaring prices, and after 1957 Kwame Nkrumah reshaped the capital to stir African pride.
Accra houses Parliament, the Supreme Court, Black Star Square and the Bank of Ghana. More than half its people are under 24, services employ over half a million workers, and the city ranks as a Gamma-minus global city. Its low coastline leaves drainage exposed to rising seas.
Source: Accra
