A modern republic borrowed its name from a medieval gold title
West Africa's Ghana covers 239,567 square kilometres between Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Togo on the Gulf of Guinea. The English name echoes Wagadu—an empire Arab traders called Ghana—from the ruler title Kaya Maghan, "ruler of gold."
Ghana has an Atlantic coastline of roughly 560 kilometres and sits a few degrees north of the Equator; the Prime Meridian runs through Tema near Accra, so no country lies closer to where the Greenwich line crosses the Equator. Low coastal plains rise to forested hills around the Ashanti uplands and give way to savanna in the north, and the summit is Mount Afadja at 885 metres. The southwest is hot and humid, the eastern coast warm and fairly dry, the north hot and dry.
The White and Black Volta rivers feed Lake Volta, created by the Akosombo Dam in 1965; it is the world's largest reservoir by surface area and third by volume. Forest reaches as far as 320 kilometres inland from the coast, and five terrestrial ecoregions span the country, from Eastern Guinean forests to savanna mosaics.
Bonoman in the south existed by the 11th century and Dagbon rose in the north; from the 17th century Akan states such as Adansi and Asante grew rich on gold. The Ga-Dangme came west from southwestern Nigeria, and the Ewe moved in from the Ketu area of Benin by way of the walled town of Nortsie. Portuguese traders arrived in the 15th century and set up the Portuguese Gold Coast; Swedes, Danes and others followed, building more than 30 forts and castles and joining the Atlantic slave trade.
The name was a deliberate choice. Around 1900 Rev. J. B. Anaman first linked Gold Coast peoples to ancient Ghana, and Rev. W. T. Balmer taught from 1907 to 1911 that the Akan had migrated from the Upper Niger, a claim Jack Goody said lacked evidence. Schools such as Achimota spread the idea in the 1920s, and J. B. Danquah championed it in print. Kwame Nkrumah formed the Convention People's Party in 1949 and led the country from 1957 to 1966, by which time the name stood for precolonial prestige and national unity.
Source: Ghana
