The involvement of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) in World War II began with the declaration of war on Nazi Germany by the British Empire in September, 1939. Though no combat occurred in the Gold Coast colony, the colony supplied resources and manpower for the Allies.
Two days after the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany. Due to the German loss in World War I, the country possessed no African colonies. German Togoland was added to the Gold Coast under British colonial rule. The Gold Coast still came to have an involvement in the war.
Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast, hosted Allied aircraft as they flew between the United States, Europe and the Pacific Ocean. Colonial troops also played an important role in the taking control of Italian East Africa, particularly what is now Ethiopia.
The Gold Coast benefited financially from the war. By 1945, increased British government spending and the introduction of an income tax led to an expansion of local revenue.
World War II changed the demographics of the Gold Coast, concentrating workers in a few large towns and cities. The colonial government launched a program to deal with a housing shortage, by constructing inexpensive but sturdy local building material (an earthquake in 1939 had badly damaged infrastructure in many cities and towns). In 1943, British architect Maxwell Fry launched a simultaneous effort to plan the Gold Coast's cities. Fry prepared blueprints for the future layout and development of Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi.
Prior to 1943, Gold Coast was an extractive colony producing gold and cocoa. During the war, U-boat attacks limited commercial shipping to West Africa. As a result, the Colonial Development Fund was used to finance the West African Institute of Industries, Arts and Social Sciences, in 1943, under the direction of British official Herman Meyerowitz. Although the institute was intended for all British colonies in West Africa, it benefited the Gold Coast disproportionately. The institute lasted for two years, until Meyerowitz's death in 1945. During that time, it supported the development of a local tile, brick and ceramic industry in Ghana and cotton textiles in Togo. The construction of new buildings in Gold Coast cities also benefited the lumber industry, which was able to export four million cubic feet of timber in 1946.
The Gold Coast was a British Crown colony on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa from 1821 until its independence in 1957 as Ghana. The term Gold Coast is also often used to describe all of the four separate jurisdictions that were under the administration of the Governor of the Gold Coast. These were the Gold Coast itself, Ashanti, the Northern Territories protectorate and the British Togoland trust territory.
British Togoland, officially the Mandate Territory of Togoland and later officially the Trust Territory of Togoland, was a territory in West Africa under the administration of the United Kingdom, which subsequently entered a union with Ghana, part of which became its Volta Region. The territory was effectively formed in 1916 by the splitting of the German protectorate of Togoland into two territories, French Togoland and British Togoland, during the First World War. Initially, it was a League of Nations Class B mandate. In 1922, British Togoland was formally placed under British rule, and French Togoland, now Togo, was placed under French rule.
Togoland was a German Empire protectorate in West Africa from 1884 to 1914, encompassing what is now the nation of Togo and most of what is now the Volta Region of Ghana, approximately 90,400 km2 in size. During the period known as the "Scramble for Africa", the colony was established in 1884 and was gradually extended inland.
The Accra riots started on 28 February 1948 in Accra, the capital of the then British colony of the Gold Coast. A protest march by unarmed ex-servicemen who were agitating for their benefits as veterans of World War II, who had fought with the Gold Coast Regiment of the Royal West African Frontier Force, was broken up by police, leaving three leaders of the group dead. They were Sergeant Nii Adjetey, Corporal Patrick Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey. who has since been memorialized in Accra.
The decolonisation of Africa largely took place from the mid-1950s to 1975 during the Cold War, with radical changes in governance on the continent taking place as colonial governments gave way to Sovereign states. The process was often marred by violence, political turmoil, widespread unrest, and organised revolts in both northern and sub-Saharan countries including the Mau Mau rebellion in British Kenya, the Algerian War in French Algeria, the Congo Crisis in the Belgian Congo, the Angolan War of Independence in Portuguese Angola, the Zanzibar Revolution in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and the events leading to the Nigerian Civil War in the secessionist state of Biafra.
British West Africa was the collective name for British colonies in West Africa during the colonial period, either in the general geographical sense or the formal colonial administrative entity. British West Africa as a colonial entity was originally officially known as Colony of Sierra Leone and its Dependencies, then British West African Territories and finally British West African Settlements.
Raphael Ernest Grail Armattoe was a Ghanaian scientist and political activist. He was nominated for the 1948 Nobel Peace Prize and was a campaigner for unification of British and French Togoland. He was called by the New York Post "the 'Irishman' from West Africa", and the BBC producer Henry Swanzy referred to him as the "African Paracelsus".
The Gold Coast was the name for a region on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa that was rich in gold, petroleum, sweet crude oil and natural gas. This former region is now known as the country Ghana.
Germany colonized Africa during two distinct periods. In the 1680s, the Margraviate of Brandenburg, then leading the broader realm of Brandenburg-Prussia, pursued limited imperial efforts in West Africa. The Brandenburg African Company was chartered in 1682 and established two small settlements on the Gold Coast of what is today Ghana. Five years later, a treaty with the king of Arguin in Mauritania established a protectorate over that island, and Brandenburg occupied an abandoned fort originally constructed there by Portugal. Brandenburg — after 1701, the Kingdom of Prussia — pursued these colonial efforts until 1721, when Arguin was captured by the French and the Gold Coast settlements were sold to the Dutch Republic.
Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz was an artist, educator and British colonial administrator in South Africa and Lesotho, and then later in the British Gold Coast colony.
West Africa Command was a Command of the British Army. Conflicting information indicates that the command was either based at Achimota College in Accra or in Nigeria. It was disbanded in 1956.
This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of Togo.
The Togoland campaign was a French and British invasion of the German colony of Togoland in West Africa, which began the West African campaign of the First World War. German colonial forces withdrew from the capital Lomé and the coastal province to fight delaying actions on the route north to Kamina, where the Kamina Funkstation linked the government in Berlin to Togoland, the Atlantic and South America.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Accra, Ghana.
Kamina Funkstation was a wireless transmitter in the German-occupied colony of Togoland in West Africa. The wireless station was built by Telefunken near the village of Kamina, in Togoland, where the nearest large settlement was Atakpamé. The transmitter was built by Telefunken, on behalf of the German government from 1911 to 1914. The station was designed as a node and switching point for other German colonial radio stations. Shortly after the beginning of the First World War, Togoland was invaded by British and French forces from the neighbouring colonies of Gold Coast (Ghana) to the west and French Dahomey (Benin) to the east. The station was destroyed by the operators to prevent it from coming under British and French control.
The Ewe Unification Movement was a series of west African ethno-nationalist efforts which sought the unification of the Ewe peoples spread across what are now modern Ghana and Togo. It emerged as a direct political goal around 1945 under the colonial mandate of French Togoland, however the ideal of unifying the group has been an identifiable sentiment present amongst the ethnicity's leadership and wider population ever since their initial colonial partitions by the British and German Empires from 1874 to 1884. While there have been many efforts to bring about unification, none have ultimately been successful due to both the platform itself often being a secondary concern for political leadership, or inter/intrastate conflicts overshadowing them.
General elections were held in Gold Coast in 1935.
The Ghana–Togo border is 1,098 km in length and runs from the tripoint with Burkina Faso in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south.
Germany–Ghana relations are good and Ghana is one of the priority countries for German development aid. Official diplomatic relations between the two countries were established in the 1950s, but contacts between the two societies go back much further and can be traced back to the 17th century.
