Beneath Ghana’s capital stands an older kingdom. Accra is a metropolis of millions now — but its first family, the Ga, were on this shore centuries before the city had a name, and the city still answers to theirs.

The long march

Ojekoo — you have woken up again. That is the Ga morning greeting, and the Ga story begins with a waking of another kind: a people on the move.

Tradition says they came from the east, from the region of Lake Chad, walking west across kingdoms and centuries toward a sea they had never seen. The chronicles name their leader as King Ayi Kushi, who marched his people out of the east and left them seven laws — the puritan code at the root of Ga culture. They rested at Ile-Ife, where the Ga and Yoruba tongues touched. They crossed the up-and-down mountains of Togo — country they named in their own language for its rising and falling ground. They did not come once; they came in waves, over generations, the way the sea itself arrives.

By the thirteen hundreds, the first of them were on the Accra plains: flat grassland dotted with anthills, lagoons shining behind the dunes. The Akan called the place Nkran — an army of ants. The name stuck, and softened, and became Accra. The first settlement rose where Jamestown stands today — Ngleshie — in the fourteen hundreds. They were farmers of millet and yam who learned the lagoons first, working them for salt and fish, and then learned the harder art of the open sea.

Six towns, six stools

Out of the waves rose six towns — Accra, Osu, La, Teshie, Nungua, Tema — each independent, each with its own stool. The stool was the centre of Ga ritual and war: the soul of the town in carved wood. In Accra itself, the Ga Mashie organised into seven quarters — Asere, Abola, Gbese, Otublohum, Sempe, Ngleshie, Akanmadzen — each a clan, each a small republic.

Above the towns stands the Ga Mantse, the paramount chief, a stool whose succession has been fiercely contested in our own time. The chiefs of the towns — the Mantsemei — gather in council, each keeping the autonomy of the quarter that raised him; none rules the other. The Gbese Mantse holds the title of Adobten, head of the military, and beside every chief stands the Mankralo, the second in command. Above the chiefs stand the priests: the Wulomo, who guard the gods of the town, and the Nai Wulomo, the high priest, who keeps the rites of the sea. Every town raised its asafo, citizen companies with shrines and banners, sworn to defend their quarter. And through it all the Ga kept their own order — descent through the father, the patrilineal line — and a language the sea could not wash away.

In the 1670s the Akwamu swallowed the coast, and the Ga bowed for a season. Then they outlasted the yoke, the way the shore outlasts every wave.

Hooting at hunger

The Ga remember a hungrier time. On the long march the rains failed — a famine that took the weak and tested the rest. They prayed, and they planted maize — and the rains answered with a bumper harvest. And the people decided that hunger would be mocked, forever.

The feast is Homowo: hooting at hunger. Its meal is kpokpoi — unfermented corn dough — eaten with palm soup and fish, and eaten in a hurry, like people who remember being hungry. Every May the maize for the feast is sown, and then falls the silence: thirty days of no drumming, no singing, no loud music, because noise, they say, troubles the growing corn.

On the Thursday before the feast, the Soobii — Thursday’s people — pour home from every city on earth, and the greeting rings out: Oooba kɛ̃ — you were surely going to come. Friday is the Haajii, the day of the twins. Once twins were feared, and killed; then the Gbese chief Nii Okaija saved his own twin sons, and the killing ended. Now twins feast in white, and at sunset they carry the leftovers to the seashore and cast them to the water.

Saturday is the climax. The Ga Mantse sprinkles kpokpoi at the twenty-one houses of the Ga stool. The Gbese Mantse — the Adobten — leads the procession through the streets to Ussher Fort. The food is scattered at family houses, at crossroads, at the graves, to nourish the gods and the dead: the ancestors are fed first, and then the living eat. And the festival rolls on town by town — Nungua, Ga Mashie, Osu, La, Ningo, Tema — each independent, each hooting at hunger in its own week.

Three forts on one shore

The Europeans came by sea and built in stone, and on Ga soil they built three forts along the same strip of coast. First the Dutch, in 1649: Fort Crêvecoeur — the heartbreaker — which passed to Britain in 1868 and took the name Ussher Fort. Then the Danes at Osu: Christiansborg, in 1652, a fort the Ga kept friendly terms with, which grew in time into the seat of government. Then the English: Fort James in 1673, raised by the Royal African Company for gold and slaves, named for James, Duke of York. Jamestown took its name from the fort. The first lighthouse rose there in 1871; the red-and-white tower over the harbour today went up in the 1930s, twenty-eight metres above the fishing boats.

The forts traded in human cargo too; their dungeons fed the ships, on this shore as on the Fante coast west of it. And in 1876 the British moved the capital of the Gold Coast from Cape Coast to Accra. The Ga fishing town had become the seat of an empire’s colony — and everything that followed, followed on Ga land.

The crossroads

In January 1948, a Ga chief — Nii Kwabena Bonne III of Osu Alata — called a boycott of the European merchants, and Accra listened: the shops emptied. On 28 February, unarmed ex-servicemen marched toward Christiansborg Castle to demand the pensions they had been promised. At Christiansborg Crossroads the police stopped them. Superintendent Imray seized a rifle and fired into the crowd. Sergeant Adjetey, Corporal Attipoe, Private Odartey Lamptey — three men fell dead. Accra exploded into five days of rioting.

The British blamed the nationalists. The Big Six were arrested on 12 March. But the Watson Commission that followed called the old colonial constitution outmoded at birth — and the door to self-rule swung open. In 1950, Kwame Nkrumah was locked in Fort James with common criminals. He won his Accra Central seat in the election of February 1951 from inside his cell, with 22,780 of the 23,122 votes cast, and walked free days later. On 6 March 1957, Ghana was born — and it was born in Accra, on Ga soil, under a flag the whole world would learn.

Still awake

Today Jamestown and Usshertown remain what they were: fishing quarters, Ga to the bone, where the city’s oldest stories are still told in the Ga tongue. In Bukom the boxing gyms never sleep, and the champions of the nation still come up from these streets. The Azonto dance was born here. Every year the Chale Wote festival turns Jamestown’s walls into a gallery — the old town painting its own portrait.

Around the Ga towns a metropolis of some five million has risen — ministries, markets, motorways. The Ga are few in their own capital now, and the hardest question is the oldest one: the land — who owns the ground the city stands on. The Ga say the stool lands are theirs; the courts, the chiefs, and the crowds are still settling it. But every August the drums return — Homowo in Accra, in London, in New York — the Soobii coming home, the kpokpoi sprinkled, the hunger hooted at, again.

Ojekoo began this story. The Ga woke on these shores centuries ago — and they are still awake.