The target audience for the Kumasi Fort and Military Museum would probably thrill at the sight of sleek pistols seized from Japanese soldiers during World War II, or the chance to climb a tower and stand beside the antique cannon that once signaled the hours.
My husband and I are not war history buffs. We were interested in the fort in Kumasi, capital of Ghana’s Ashanti region, as a window on a broader history.
The fort had been built by the British on the site of a bastion erected by an Ashanti king, or asantehene, in 1820. The asantehene had modelled it on the forts that Europeans built some 130 miles west on the coast, and envisioned it as a bulwark against invading and enslaving colonialists. The British destroyed the fort in 1874. The one they built to replace it was initially an administrative headquarters and later a museum.
The fort came into Ghanaian hands after what had been the Gold Coast gained independence in 1957. Ghanaian curators have added to British exhibitions over the decades.
One gallery is called simply the Coup Room. In it are exhibited the uniforms of the generals who in 1966 overthrew Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president. Nkrumah was a leader in the fight for independence from dictatorial colonial rule, but declared Ghana a one-party state and himself president for life in 1964.
Ghana’s international airport is named for Lieutenant-General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka, a member of the National Liberation Council that came to power after the authoritarian Nkrumah was toppled. But other institutions, including a university in Kumasi, are named for Nkrumah.
Earlier in our visit to Ghana we had seen a statue of Nkrumah at the national museum in Accra. The statue was missing its arms, damage done by crowds who had toppled it from its pedestal outside parliament after the coup. The statue was recovered and placed in a garden outside the museum in 1977, five years after Nkrumah died in exile in Romania. His statue was purposefully left unrepaired when it was placed in the garden, allowing the damage to become part of the story the museum tells.
The European forts on Ghana’s coast started as trade outposts and became slave centers. Today, they are state-run museums that tell stories of trauma and loss. Traditional leaders in Ghana have publicly apologized for their ancestors' role in capturing and selling men, women and children to Europeans. A placard at one of the forts today urges visitors to “let its walls speak to you of the splendor and the sorrow and the suffering and the shame of those who had lived and died here.” Ghanaian and foreign visitors leave flowers in memory of the enslaved people who were tortured and died at the forts. If you were to come upon flowers at a plantation in the United States, it might be because someone had seen fit to celebrate a wedding at what should be a place of mourning.
We happened to be vacationing in Ghana during primary elections in which the current vice president was vying with the current president to represent their party in the 2024 general election. Party politics in Ghana are evidently more open than in the United States. And voting is held on a Saturday, which makes it easier for many people to get to the polls.
The competitive primary and the convenient voting day struck me as healthy muscle-building. As they look to the future, Ghanaians are under no illusions that democracy is any nation’s destiny.
Ghanaians also demonstrate that it’s possible to bring nuance and forthrightness to looking back. Perhaps that’s easier to do in a country without America’s myth of exceptionalism.
History does not necessarily arc toward justice. Sometimes, we have to bend it ourselves, learning how to do so from our mistakes.
Our guide at the Kumasi fort had been casual about the artifacts, inviting us, for example, to feel the weight of World War II soldiers helmets The fort’s equivalent of a sculpture garden was a grassy area on which sat rusting aircraft. I was invited to take a seat in a helicopter that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi had gifted Nkrumah. After I got out, the guide had trouble closing the helicopter’s door. He persisted, slamming it repeatedly until it held.