By Ahanta Apemenyimheneba Kwofie III
The chief of Takoradi sits on the Nyanke Baforo stool, one of the stools in Ahanta that still carries its original name. It has kept that identity even as some of our Fante relations argue that Takoradi is Fante land. They say the name comes from an “Ntakor” tree. I disagree. Takoradi is Ahanta.
My subject here is the people of Takoradi: Ahantas who resisted the European colonisers through war after war, until their town was burned to the ground. The descendants of Nyanke Baforo stood with Ahanta and fought the Europeans on every front. Where the Europeans were concerned, they never sought peace.
A market before a town
According to Ahanta tradition, the settlement began as a great market that the Ahantas called “Gualekezilozo”, meaning the big market. It stood near where Takoradi Harbour is today, and people came from far and near to trade. From that market a town grew, becoming a commercial centre alongside Sekondi and Butre. The name the Europeans later used, which the Portuguese rendered as “Taccrada”, came afterwards.
The Portuguese are turned away
The first Europeans to explore this coast, the Portuguese navigators João de Santarém and Pedro Escobar, sailed in the service of the Lisbon merchant Fernão Gomes in the early 1470s. Takoradi mattered to such sailors for one reason above all: fresh water.
In January 1482, Diogo de Azambuja landed at Elmina and began building Elmina Castle. Ahanta accounts hold that his men pushed west, made contact with the people of Takoradi and set up a trading post. They also hold that the Ahantas attacked the post so persistently that the Portuguese came to regard them as warlike and soon abandoned it. In those accounts, the Portuguese never managed to trade peacefully at Takoradi, though it was one of Ahanta’s biggest markets.
The Dutch fare no better
The Dutch came next, and the people of Takoradi met them the same way. The Dutch built Fort Witsen, also known as Fort Tacorary, at Takoradi in the mid-1660s. This was a period when the English and the Dutch were fighting each other for this stretch of coast. The people of Takoradi wanted both of them gone.
The fort was never a secure foothold for the Dutch. It was abandoned and reoccupied over the years, and at times the Dutch tried to use it for the slave trade. In the Ahanta memory, the people of Takoradi made that trade impossible by attacking ships that tried to call there.
1837 and 1838: Takoradi pays the price
The resistance reached its peak under Badu Bonsu II, king of Ahanta. In 1837, after his forces killed two Dutch envoys, the acting Dutch commander, Hendrik Tonneboeijer, marched an expedition into Ahanta. On 28 October 1837 it was ambushed. Tonneboeijer was killed, together with about 45 of his men, in front of Fort Witsen at Takoradi.
The Netherlands sent a punitive force under Major-General Jan Verveer. It landed at Elmina in May 1838 and, reinforced by thousands of African allies, set out for Ahanta on 30 June. Badu Bonsu II was handed over to the Dutch and executed in July 1838. His head was shipped to the Netherlands and only returned to Ghana in 2009. Takoradi and Busua were destroyed, and Takoradi was left in ashes.
From the Dutch to the British
The Dutch handed their Gold Coast possessions to the British in 1872 and left. The people of Takoradi had fought the Portuguese and the Dutch, and they did not welcome the British either.
In the 1920s, under Governor Gordon Guggisberg, the British built Takoradi Harbour, the Gold Coast’s first deep-water harbour. The original community made way for it and resettled at what is now New Takoradi. The colonial city grew up around the harbour, largely apart from the people whose land it was.
But by then, political awakening was spreading across the Gold Coast, and the people of Takoradi joined the wider struggle for self-rule. In 1957, Ghana gained its independence. Takoradi entered it with the scars of a fight it had waged from the day the first European ship came to its shore.
The writer signs as Ahanta Apemenyimheneba Kwofie III.
