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1,000 Years of Ghana, Told Straight

Ghana-Net.com · History & Empires · Online since December 2000

Ghanaian History Timeline: 1,000 Years, Told Straight

From the gold towns of Begho and Bono to the Fourth Republic, era by era, with every date linked to the full story on Ghana-Net.com and our network. This is not a school summary. It covers the kingdoms that sold captives as well as the ones that fought Europe, the forts and the people locked inside them, the coups and the executions, and the heritage still being lost today. Where the sources disagree, we say so.

Start here: the big hubs

Before 1000: the deep past

Ghana's history does not start with the Portuguese, or even with the Akan kingdoms. It is simply the part least visited, least funded and least told.

  • Stone Age — Stone tools in the Tongo Hills and elsewhere show people living here long before any kingdom. The dates are still unknown.
  • c. 2500–1400 BCE — The Kintampo culture of the forest–savanna edge (today's Bono East) builds some of West Africa's earliest farming villages. Base: Techiman.
  • First millennium CE — Iron working spreads, and the northern savanna is drawn into the trade routes that cross the Sahara.
  • Name note — The old empire of Ghana (Wagadu) lay far to the northwest, in today's Mauritania and Mali. The Gold Coast took its name in 1957. See Names of Past and Present.

Why you cannot visit most of it: read our The oldest places in Ghana and why you cannot visit any of them on GhanaMuseums.com.

1000–1400: gold towns and the first states

  • c. 11th century — Begho, near today's Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire border, grows into a trading town where Akan gold and kola meet Mande (Dyula) traders from the north. It flourishes until about 1700.
  • c. 13th–14th century — The Bono state, centred on Bono Manso near Techiman, becomes one of the first Akan kingdoms, rich in gold. Asante conquers it in 1723.
  • Migrations — Ga and Dangme communities settle the coastal plains; Homowo remembers a Ga famine.
  • Migrations — Ewe groups move west from Ketu to Notsie in today's Togo. The later escape from Notsie is celebrated in Hogbetsotso and Dodoleglime.
  • Mole-Dagbani states — Tradition traces Dagbon, Mamprugu and Nanumba to Naa Gbewaa at Pusiga. The dates are uncertain, usually placed around the 14th–15th century. Mamprugu's capital is Nalerigu.

1400–1500: the mosques, and the ships

Our dedicated site: ElminaCastle.info, online since 2007. For Elmina's festival of the lagoon, see Bakatue.

1500–1650: Portugal loses its monopoly

1650–1750: forts everywhere, and the rise of Asante

1750–1807: the height of the slave trade

The forts were not trading posts with a dark side. For a century and a half their main business was people, and African states and merchants were partners in that trade. Read Who sold whom? Ghana's slave history without the marketing.

1806–1844: Asante against the coast

1844–1901: from protectorate to colony

  • 1847 — The Bremen Mission reaches Peki in Ewe country.
  • 1850 — Denmark sells its forts, Christiansborg included, to Britain.
  • 1868–1873 — After Britain and the Netherlands swap forts, the Fante states found the Fante Confederacy, with King Ghartey IV of Winneba as its first president, and write the first African constitution on the Gold Coast (1871). Britain arrests its ministers.
  • 1872 — The Dutch leave; Elmina passes to Britain.
  • 1873–1874 — The Sagrenti War: Wolseley burns Kumasi. Asantehene Kofi Karikari is deposed.
  • 24 July 1874 — The Gold Coast Colony is proclaimed, and slavery is abolished in it by ordinance.
  • 1877 — The capital moves from Cape Coast to Accra.
  • 1879 — Tetteh Quarshie plants cocoa at Mampong.
  • 1880s–1890s — The slave raider Babatu ravages the north; the Builsa remember their resistance in Fiok.
  • 1896 — Britain occupies Kumasi and exiles Prempeh I. In December, Germany invades Dagbon: Adibo Dali. Read 1896: the year Britain took Kumasi and Germany took Yendi.
  • 1897 — Britain builds Kumasi Fort. In Cape Coast, the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society defeats the Lands Bill.
  • 1900 — The War of the Golden Stool, led by Yaa Asantewaa.
  • 1901–1902 — Asante is annexed and the Northern Territories become a protectorate: the borders of today's Ghana, minus Togoland, are set.

1901–1945: the colonial Gold Coast

  • 1906 — The White Fathers reach Navrongo; the mud cathedral follows in 1920.
  • 1911 — British troops attack the Tongo Hills shrines, and again in 1915. The same year, the Gold Coast becomes the world's largest cocoa producer.
  • 1914 — British and French troops take German Togoland.
  • 1917 — The Basel missionaries are expelled; the African churches take over.
  • 1920 — J. E. Casely Hayford leads the National Congress of British West Africa.
  • 1924 — Prempeh I returns from exile; in 1935 the Asante Confederacy is restored.
  • 1928 — Takoradi harbour opens: see Sekondi-Takoradi.
  • 1931 — J. B. Danquah defends a Nana Tongo priest against the colonial government.
  • 1937–1938 — The great cocoa hold-up: farmers refuse to sell to the European buying pool.
  • 1939–1945 — Gold Coast soldiers fight in Burma and East Africa. Some rest in Osu Military Cemetery.

How the colony was run: British Colonial Administration: The Making of Modern Ghana, 1901–1957.

1945–1957: the road to independence

  • 1945 — The Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester: Du Bois, Padmore and a Gold Coast student named Nkrumah.
  • 1947 — The United Gold Coast Convention is founded; Nkrumah becomes its secretary. Meet the Big Six, including Edward Akufo-Addo.
  • 28 February 1948 — The Christiansborg Crossroads shooting: three ex-servicemen killed, riots follow.
  • 12 June 1949 — Nkrumah founds the Convention People's Party.
  • 1951 — The CPP wins the election; Nkrumah goes from prison to Leader of Government Business. The Assembly sits in the Old Parliament House.
  • 9 May 1956 — British Togoland votes to join the Gold Coast: the 1956 plebiscite.
  • 6 March 1957 — Ghana becomes independent, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break free. Nkrumah declares it at the Old Polo Ground, now the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park.

1957–1966: Nkrumah's Ghana

Pan-African Accra: our Du Bois Centre site, Du Bois on MyGhana2027, and Ghana: the first to go free, and the first to find out what that meant.

1966–1992: coups, executions and the long way back

  • 1966–1969 — The National Liberation Council rules. In 1969 Kofi Busia is elected.
  • 13 January 1972 — Colonel Acheampong overthrows Busia. In 1978 General Akuffo replaces him.
  • 4 June 1979 — Junior officers under Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings seize power. Within weeks, three former heads of state, Acheampong, Akuffo and Afrifa, are executed.
  • 1979 — Dr Hilla Limann is elected president.
  • 31 December 1981 — Rawlings seizes power again and rules through the PNDC.
  • 30 June 1982 — Three High Court judges and a retired army officer are abducted and murdered: Martyrs of the Rule of Law.
  • 1983 — Famine, a million Ghanaians expelled from Nigeria, and another coup attempt, followed by more death sentences.
  • 28 April 1992 — A referendum approves the Fourth Republican constitution.

The full account: Ghana's Coups, 1966–1983: soldiers, executions and the road back to democracy. Every head of state: Leaders of Ghana on MyGhana2027.

1993–today: the Fourth Republic

Our own 25 years: 25 years of Ghana-Net, a critical review, and the photographer and publisher behind Ghana-Net since 2000.

People index

Every person on Ghana-Net.com with a page of their own, grouped roughly by role. Start anywhere.

Asante kings and queen mothers

Other kings, chiefs and rulers

Europeans on the coast

Thinkers, fighters and presidents

Places where the history happened

Accra

The coast

The forest and the Volta

The north

Our network: go deeper

Ghana-Net.com is the hub. These sites hold the in-depth history, the field reports and the history stories.

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The honest verdict

A thousand years of Ghanaian history is not a straight line from kingdoms to colony to freedom. Its states fought each other as often as they fought Europe. Some of its kings grew rich on the slave trade while others were destroyed by it. Independence was won by ordinary people, ex-servicemen, cocoa farmers and market women, as much as by the Big Six. Its first republic ended in a coup, and its heroes include people the state itself executed. Much of the physical evidence, the forts, the mosques, the shrines, the objects taken to Europe, is decaying or out of reach. This timeline links to all of it, because the only way to protect history is to tell it properly.

Verified: 28 September 2026. Dates follow the individual pages linked above, each with its own sources. Where the sources disagree, as on the dating of Naa Gbewaa, Larabanga or the first cocoa, we give a range or name the tradition. This page replaces the earlier timeline, which dated the Anglo-Asante wars to 1806–1824 (the first Anglo-Asante war began in 1823; the fighting of 1806–1816 was between Asante and the Fante coast) and gave the Ewe homeland as Ketu alone. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.

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