When the Gold Coast’s colonial government opened a deep-water harbour at Takoradi in 1928, it changed more than the colony’s trade routes. The port pulled a small coastal settlement level with its older and better-connected neighbour, Sekondi. Within 18 years the two towns had become one city.

A set of Gold Coast-era photographs shared by Fante Voice Studios on social media, and reported by GhanaWeb on 10 October 2026, has renewed interest in that history. The images show how separate the towns once were, and how much of Sekondi’s early character came from its Fante residents.

Sekondi came first

Sekondi is the older settlement. The Sekondi Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly has suggested that Sekondi was already a town by 1894, decades before Takoradi had much to its name.

The railway gave it an early lead. A railway and a deep-water seaport were built in Sekondi and Takoradi in 1903 and 1928, after which both became important economic centres. The line linked Sekondi’s coast to the gold-mining districts inland and to Kumasi. Government offices and institutions settled in Sekondi, and it served as the area’s administrative centre.

A harbour few believed in

Takoradi’s rise was not inevitable. A study of the city’s economic history, published in an academic journal, describes a private bid to develop the site long before the state moved. Around 1903, a man named Lefeber spotted Takoradi’s potential as a harbour town. His successor kept paying rent on the land in the hope that a port would follow, while the colonial government focused on building a harbour at Sekondi instead.

The faith ran out. Around 1913 the rent payments stopped because the leaseholders no longer believed Takoradi would ever get a harbour.

They were wrong. The harbour was built in 1928 as part of the 10-year development plan of Gordon Guggisberg, then governor of the Gold Coast. It became West Africa’s first artificial harbour and was served mainly by rail. Shipping companies, trading firms and workers followed the cargo, and Takoradi grew quickly as the colony’s commercial gateway.

During the Second World War the port and a neighbouring airfield became a staging point on an Allied air route that ferried aircraft across Africa to the North African front.

Union in 1946

As both towns spread along the coast, the gap between them closed. The two were formally amalgamated on 2 December 1946, combining Sekondi’s administrative role with Takoradi’s port economy.

The names themselves carry older traces. Researchers note that “Takoradi” and “Sekondi” are local forms of the Prussian names “Taccarary” and “Secundis”, recorded during the 17th century when European trading powers competed along this stretch of coast.

Today Sekondi-Takoradi is the capital of both the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly and the Western Region. Since Ghana began producing oil from the offshore Jubilee field in 2010, the metropolis has also become the main onshore base for the industry, and academic work has described it as West Africa’s newest oil city.

Faces from Sekondi’s past

The photographs shared by Fante Voice Studios focus on Sekondi before the merger. They show Fante women and girls, artisans and community groups, with the town named as the location. One image, captioned as Morphy’s Hotel, is presented by the collection as an example of Fante-built architecture.

The captions also bring out how outsiders wrote the name of the people. Gold Coast-era documents use spellings such as “Fanti”, “Fantee” and “Fantyn”. “Fante” is the standard modern English form, while speakers of the language use “Fantse”.

The Dutch built a fort at Sekondi in 1642. It now serves as a lighthouse.