It’s been thirty-three years since I walked the streets of Takoradi—over three decades that feel less like time passed than the tide gone out. And now, out of nowhere, fresh footage arrives of low-bellied tankers at dawn, gliding past the harbour walls Guggisberg built more than a century ago, my laptop beaming as if the ships not just carrying oil and cargo, but precious moments there.

I think of all that must have flowed through those waters. Cocoa in burlap sacks from the forest belt—Ashanti and the Eastern Region—hauled by train to the harbour. Then Manganese, its vague shimmer tied to Nkrumah’s dream after independence. Nkrumah, father of Pan-Africanism, spoke of steel, of harnessing rivers, of Ghana lifting itself through resources. But the Volta River project, though vast and full of promise, couldn’t quite carry it. The current faltered, as currents sometimes do.

Takoradi in 1992 moved at a slower pace than today. Market Circle brimmed with women in bright cloth. Bowls of smoked fish balanced on heads. Voices rose and fell above distilled petrol stoves. The sound of the marketplace was like music. Outside the post office, taxi drivers leaned against battered Peugeots waiting for fares along the road to Sekondi. Certain inner visuals insist we remember.

Ships queued patiently in 1992, their silhouettes more Conrad than Spearman, more Amma Darko than pulp fiction. Porters shouldered sacks of cocoa while radios crackled with Jerry Rawlings’ great experiment. A Fourth Republic. Ballots instead of decrees. One afternoon I saw Rawlings’ Lear jet against the blue sky.

Evenings gathered slowly. Families drank palm wine as laughter pushed through the humid air. Teenagers chalked goalposts between warehouses.  Footballs smashed against corrugated iron. One boy tugged at my sleeve asking if Bobby Charlton—“friend to Ghana”—had truly been knighted. By the shore at neighbouring Sekondi, fishermen dragged paint-peeled canoes past old colonial villas. Abandoned British gravestones lay cracked and tilted and forgotten among the undergrowth. Locals smiled and warned of hunting spiders and green mamba snakes.

Fast forward to 2025: the footage handheld, consistent. Cranes towering like gods. The Western Railway torn up and relaid in new steel. The harbour humming. A likely chatter of logistics firms. Sodium lights flaring across container stacks as if manufacturing fake dawn.

And yet, through the noise and befuddled light, something in the footage endures. The rhythm of the place is harsher, but the pulse familiar. Fingerprints of the English remain not just in headstones. The skull-white castles will still be further east, whose “Doors of No Return” opened endlessly to the Atlantic—the stones, mute but unyielding, still accusing.

The principal groups involved in the transatlantic slave trade included the Asante, Fante, Denkyira, Akyem, Ga, and Ewe. Of the encouraging Europeans, it was Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and of course British (who built forts such as Cape Coast Castle and eventually became the leading European power in the region), each purchasing enslaved Africans and transporting them across the Atlantic.

American slave traders, especially from New England and the southern colonies, participated heavily, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries. American ships sometimes picked up enslaved people directly from the Gold Coast—what gained independence in 1957 as Ghana—or indirectly via Caribbean ports.

Takoradi today becomes a hinge. A dusty export town in 1992, blinking back into democracy. A sleepless port in 2025, blinking into global capitalism. In both: endurance, invention, mirth at the edge of hardship. Fish and cocoa, curfews and credit, oil and gold—circling back in new costume.

Today, Ghana stands as Africa’s largest gold producer. In 2024 the mines broke all records, and the output still climbs—gold traded for oil, gold converted into foreign exchange. It’s the paradox of plenty—abundance pressed into scarcity, wealth translated into debt. Back in Jubilee House, John Dramani Mahama performs “the choreography of IMF orthodoxy”—each gesture a promise of relief, each step angled towards bondholders. Cocoa harvests falter, lights flicker between brightness and dumsor—the electricity still staging its own unpredictable vanishing acts.

One recent UK-backed mining project, fed with millions of pounds of taxpayer money, evaporated in mismanagement—proof the plundered earth does not always yield to spreadsheets. One industry voice, speaking with bluntness, told me it was almost inevitable. “West Africa is, in truth, less stable than ever. Perhaps the surprise is not that it failed, but that anyone believed it might succeed.”

And yet, at a distance, Ghana retains for me a kind of magic. The sort a privateer might blank. Extraordinarily, it is a nation with no true enemies. This is surely a massive achievement. Not Côte d’Ivoire, not Togo, not even the restless desert to the north. No, its adversaries are different. They are amorphous, ungraspable: the occasional seepage of Sahelian militants across the borderlands, the stubbornness of ethnic feuds, the cold arithmetic of international finance. These are struggles not with nations, but with conditions—dependency, fragility, the invisible structures that outlast leaders.

The Ghanaian poet Awoonor once wrote, “What has been broken shall be woven, / the house shall stand, the feast shall be eaten.” His voice lingers even after his death in the famous shopping mall incident in Nairobi. It is written for Ghanaians as if the words themselves a promise. Watching all this footage, a part of me has breathed again. The harbour alive, cranes turning. History circles, but—as I keep saying—Ghana endures.

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