There is a phrase — “the Year of Return” — that the Ghanaian government used to describe 2019, the year they invited the African diaspora to return to Ghana for the 400th anniversary of the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. What happened was larger than the government expected: Joseph Kwame, Cardi B, Idris Elba, Angela Bassett, Boris Kodjoe, and tens of thousands of African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Black British people came to Ghana — to Accra specifically — and many of them kept coming, and some of them stayed, and the cultural energy that resulted is still visible in the city’s creative districts four years later. Accra has a music scene — Afrobeats, highlife, hiplife — that is among the most globally influential in any city of its size on earth. It has a restaurant and bar culture in the Airport Hills and Cantonments and Labone neighbourhoods that is the most sophisticated in West Africa. It has a contemporary art scene centred on the Nubuke Foundation and the numerous galleries of Osu that is producing work of genuine international significance. It has the Cape Coast and Elmina slave castles two hours west along the coast, which are among the most important historical sites in the African diaspora’s story and among the most emotionally significant places any visitor to sub-Saharan Africa can encounter. And it has the specific quality that makes West African cities uniquely compelling for visitors who have primarily travelled in Europe or Asia: the overwhelming generosity of the people, the colour and density of the markets, the music coming from every direction, the jollof rice that is simultaneously the best version and the subject of a continental argument with Nigeria that Ghanaians consider settled and Nigerians do not. Accra is the city that visitors to West Africa should be going to, and increasingly they are.

Jamestown, the Makola Market, and Old Accra

Jamestown is the oldest district of Accra — the fishing community that preceded the British colonial capital and that retains, despite the development pressures of a growing city, the most direct connection to pre-colonial coastal Ghana. The Jamestown Lighthouse (built 1871), the James Fort (a 17th-century British fort that became a prison and is now a heritage site), the colonial-era low-rise buildings of the waterfront, and the fishing community itself — the canoes pulled up on the beach, the nets being repaired in the morning, the fish being smoked in the afternoon — constitute a district of genuine historical texture that the tourist infrastructure has not yet smoothed into uniformity. The boxing gyms of Jamestown (boxing is the community sport here in a way that it has been since the colonial period produced Ghanaian boxing champions who competed internationally) and the street art that has accumulated on the walls of the old district since the mid-2010s are the contemporary layers on a community that has been here since before Accra existed as a colonial city. The Makola Market — the main commercial market of central Accra, several hectares of covered and open-air stalls organised by trade in the dense, overwhelming manner of a West African market that has been operating in this location for decades — is the best experience of West African commercial culture available in a single morning: the fabric merchants, the food vendors, the electronic goods stalls, the wholesale produce section where the yams and plantains and tomatoes come in quantities that reflect a city of 2.5 million people feeding itself. Walking Makola without a purchase agenda — simply moving through the lanes and the stalls and the organised chaos of a market that has its own logic and its own hierarchy — is the most direct available immersion in the daily life of Accra that the visitor can achieve.

Cape Coast and Elmina: The Sites That Make the History Real

Cape Coast and Elmina, two hours west of Accra along the coastal road, are the sites that most visitors to Ghana consider the essential reason to come. Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle are the two largest and most historically significant of the 37 European-built forts along Ghana’s coast — the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade that operated from this coastline from the 15th to the 19th century, through which an estimated 13 million enslaved Africans passed on their way to the Americas. Cape Coast Castle, built by the Swedes in 1653 and subsequently controlled by the Dutch, the Danes, and finally the British, is the site of the Door of No Return — the door in the castle’s seaward wall through which enslaved people were transferred to the ships waiting in the surf, the last piece of African soil they touched. The guided tour of the castle’s dungeons — the dark, low-ceilinged chambers below the officers’ quarters where hundreds of enslaved men and women were held in conditions of extraordinary brutality before embarkation — is the most emotionally difficult and the most historically important experience available in Ghana. The “Year of Return” made this experience visible to the African American community in a way that years of academic history had not fully achieved, and the visitors who come to these castles now — many of them members of the diaspora whose ancestors passed through them — experience something that is simultaneously historical and personal and that the tour guide’s narration, carefully and respectfully delivered, cannot fully prepare you for. Elmina Castle (built by the Portuguese in 1482, the oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa) is adjacent to Elmina town’s active fishing harbour, and the combination of the castle’s dark history and the colourful fishing boats in the bay below it is one of those juxtapositions that history provides without commentary.

The Music, the Nightlife, and the Creative Accra

Accra’s music is the city’s most globally significant cultural export and the most immediately accessible thing about it for the visitor. Highlife — the Ghanaian guitar and brass music that developed in the coastal cities from the 1920s, combining European brass band music with traditional West African rhythms — is the foundation on which the contemporary scene is built: hiplife (highlife plus hip-hop, the genre that dominated the 1990s and 2000s), Afrobeats (the West African pop sound that has gone from regional to global in a decade and that Ghana’s artists have contributed to significantly), and the emerging drill and Afro-fusion scenes that are producing the next wave of international Ghanaian music. The bar and music venue scene of Osu (the most visitor-accessible and most international of Accra’s nightlife districts), Airport Hills, and the newer developments around East Legon operates at a quality and an energy that reflects a city of young professionals with money and cultural ambition: rooftop bars, live music venues, restaurants that serve excellent jollof rice alongside cocktails made with locally produced Akpeteshie gin, all operating at a pace that starts late and runs until the morning in a way that reflects West African nightlife culture’s specific relationship with time. The National Theatre of Ghana and the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre (the American civil rights scholar spent the last years of his life in Ghana under President Nkrumah’s invitation and is buried here) are the cultural institutions that give the creative energy of contemporary Accra its historical grounding. The Nubuke Foundation, in East Legon, is the gallery and cultural centre that has done most to develop the contemporary Ghanaian art scene and that shows the work of Ghanaian artists alongside international visiting exhibitions in a context of genuine institutional seriousness.

Jollof Rice, Waakye, and the Food That Feeds Accra

The jollof wars — the ongoing, entirely serious, and entirely unresolved competition between Ghana and Nigeria for the title of best jollof rice — are the most internationally known expression of a genuine food culture difference that extends well beyond rice. Ghanaian jollof is cooked until the bottom of the pot develops a slightly smoky, slightly caramelised crust (the “bottom pot,” prized above the rest of the rice and distributed to the most important guests at a Ghanaian celebration) — a result of the cooking technique, the longer cooking time over lower heat, and the specific spice combination of the Ghanaian preparation. Waakye is the other essential Ghanaian dish: rice and black-eyed peas cooked together with dried sorghum leaves (which give the dish its characteristic burgundy colour), served with a complex array of accompaniments — spaghetti (yes), fried plantain, fish, meat, egg, shito (the black Ghanaian pepper sauce made from dried fish, shrimp, chilli, and spices that is the most flavour-complex condiment in West African cooking), and the Ghanaian equivalent of a dressed salad — at the waakye stalls that open early in the morning and are the breakfast of choice for a large portion of Accra’s population. Finding a good waakye stall in Accra is the food task that most rewards local knowledge: the best stalls are known in their neighbourhood and have queues before 8am. Kelewele — fried ripe plantain spiced with ginger, chilli, and spices, sold from street carts in the evening — is the Accra street snack that most completely captures the flavour profile of Ghanaian cooking: the sweetness of the ripe plantain, the warmth of the ginger, the heat of the chilli, all combined in a preparation that is both simple and deeply satisfying. Eat it from the paper bag at the cart. Eat it immediately. There is no better version than the one that is still hot from the oil.

Accra is a city that is changing fast enough that the guidebook written three years ago is already partially obsolete — new neighbourhoods, new restaurants, new creative spaces appearing faster than documentation can keep up. The correct approach is to arrive with a skeleton of the canonical sites (Cape Coast, Jamestown, Makola, the Nubuke) and to fill the rest of the time by following what the city produces at the moment you are in it: the music that is coming from the venue on the street you are walking, the waakye stall that has the queue that tells you it is the right one, the rooftop bar where someone is doing something with Ghanaian gin that seems worth investigating. Accra rewards improvisation more completely than most cities because it is a city that improvises with itself — the formal and the informal, the historical and the contemporary, the diaspora and the local, all in conversation and all producing something that is specific to this city at this moment. Come before the moment moves on to the next thing, which it will, because Accra always does.