Ghana

Ghana’s map is dominated by a lake it made itself. In the 1960s the Akosombo Dam closed the Volta River and backed up Lake Volta, a reservoir reaching far inland. South and west of it, rainforest and cocoa farms cover the hills of Ashanti, and a coast of lagoons, surf and fishing towns faces the Gulf of Guinea. The north is flatter savannah of shea trees and baobabs, parched each winter by the harmattan, where elephants roam Mole National Park.

Portuguese traders built Elmina Castle in 1482, and Dutch, Danish and British forts followed along the shore, trading first in gold and then in enslaved Africans. Inland, the Asante kingdom rose around Kumasi about 1700, bound together by the Golden Stool, and fought Britain repeatedly; Yaa Asantewaa led its last rising in 1900. Under Kwame Nkrumah the Gold Coast won independence in March 1957, among the first African colonies to do so, and took the name of a medieval empire far to the north-west.

Kente, the strip cloth woven by Asante weavers at Bonwire and in Ewe villages, is worn at weddings and festivals, and each stamped adinkra symbol stands for a proverb. Highlife guitar bands set the sound of the 1950s, and Ghanaians argue cheerfully with Nigerians over whose jollof rice is better. Cocoa from smallholder farms built the colonial economy and remains a mainstay, beside gold from Obuasi and Tarkwa, offshore oil and the port of Tema.