Accra, Ghana

ACCRA, GHANA | "The Gateway of Africa"

Accra is the most culturally confident city in West Africa — a sprawling, creative, politically self-assured capital of three million people on the Gulf of Guinea, where the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah's pan-African vision, the energy of the Ghanaian music and fashion industry, and the return of the diaspora under the Year of Return programme have combined to produce the most dynamic urban culture on the continent. The city was the capital of the Gold Coast — the British colonial territory whose gold and cocoa financed the industrial economy of nineteenth-century Britain — and it became the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve independence in 1957 under Nkrumah's leadership. The Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, set in the former polo grounds where independence was declared, is the physical center of this legacy: a black and white marble structure surrounded by a reflecting pool and fountain statues, occupying the precise coordinates where Nkrumah declared that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation of the African continent.

The colors are specific and extraordinary: the deep terracotta-red of the laterite soil that underlies the entire coastal plain, the brilliant Kente gold and crimson of the cloth that is the most recognized visual symbol of Ghanaian identity, the deep green of the Gulf of Guinea at the Labadi beach in the afternoon light, and the warm amber of the colonial-era limestone buildings of James Town — a palette that exists nowhere else in West Africa and that changes entirely between the harmattan dust season and the green season rains.