The Paths of Gold, Salt, and Souls: The Hidden History of Accra’s Old Trade Routes

EXECUTIVE INTRODUCTION

The modern economic geography of Accra is dominated by the port of Tema, the airport, and the arterial highways that funnel imported goods into the city’s markets. This infrastructure, built for the container ship and the cargo plane, obscures a far older, deeper, and more foundational commercial logic. Long before the first European fort was built on the coast, Accra was already a thriving commercial node in a vast, sophisticated, and deeply integrated network of indigenous trade routes that spanned the West African forest, savanna, and Sahel. The city was not discovered by commerce; it was created by it.

This Accra Street Journal analysis is a recovery of that buried commercial geography. It traces the routes that moved gold, salt, kola nuts, slaves, and ideas across thousands of miles, connecting the Ga coast to the Asante heartland, the Hausa city-states, the Mande trading diaspora, and the trans-Saharan caravans. These routes were the economic arteries of pre-colonial West Africa, and their logic still echoes in the city’s market names, its ethnic neighbourhoods, its credit systems, and its deep-rooted cultural identity as a place of transaction, negotiation, and exchange. To understand Accra’s old trade routes is to understand the original operating system on which the city was built, a system that the colonial cash-crop and port infrastructure did not invent but violently rerouted and exploited.

THE GA COAST AS COMMERCIAL FRONTIER: THE PRE-EUROPEAN EXCHANGE

The Ga-Dangme settlements of the Accra coast—Osu, La, Teshie, Nungua, and the inland Ga towns—were not isolated fishing villages that were suddenly “opened up” to trade by the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were already integrated into a regional coastal and lagoon-based trading system. The primary commodities were fish, salt, and locally produced crafts. The Ga were skilled salt producers, extracting sea salt through solar evaporation techniques along the coast, a product in high demand in the interior where salt was scarce and essential for nutrition and food preservation. Dried and smoked fish, processed by the Ga fishmongers, was a critical protein source traded inland, exchanged for agricultural produce, livestock, and craft goods from the forest and savanna zones.

This early trade was conducted along well-established footpaths and through the complex network of coastal lagoons and creeks. The Korle, Kpeshie, and Sakumo lagoons were not just sacred sites; they were sheltered, navigable water highways for the canoe-borne transport of goods between coastal settlements and into the immediate hinterland. The Ga acted as intermediaries, brokers, and hosts, a commercial role that would define Accra’s identity for centuries. The pre-European Accra was already a marketplace, its economic rhythms tied to the fishing season, the salt harvest, and the regular arrival of trading parties from the Akwapim hills and the Akan forest edge. The European arrival did not create trade in Accra; it inserted itself into an existing, vibrant, and complex indigenous commercial system.

THE GOLD AND KOLA CORRIDOR: ACCRA AND THE ASANTE IMPERIUM

The rise of the Asante Kingdom from the late 17th century transformed the scale and strategic significance of the Accra trade routes. Asante, with its vast gold reserves and its rapidly expanding military and political power, needed a reliable southern outlet to the coast for the export of gold and the import of European firearms, textiles, and metals. The Accra coast, with its multiple European trading forts—the Dutch at Ussher Town, the Danish at Osu, and the British at Jamestown—became a fiercely competitive terminus for this trade.

The route connecting Accra to the Asante capital of Kumasi became one of the most important commercial highways in West Africa. It was a dense forest path that crossed the Akuapem ridge, wound through the Pra River basin, and connected to the network of royal roads that the Asante state maintained with military discipline. This route carried gold dust, ivory, and, tragically, enslaved people southwards, and returned northwards with firearms, gunpowder, lead, salt, alcoholic spirits, and imported textiles. The path was the physical infrastructure of the Atlantic economy in this part of Africa, and Accra was its primary coastal valve. The wealth that accumulated in the Ga towns, and the intense European competition for access to the Asante trade, cemented Accra’s position as the premier commercial centre on the eastern Gold Coast, eclipsing rival ports. The echoes of this gold route can still be traced in the modern road network; the Accra-Kumasi highway is the asphalt successor to a path worn deep by generations of traders, porters, and warriors.

THE NORTHERN CORRIDOR: THE SALAGA LINK AND THE HAUSA-MANDE NETWORK

Equally significant, and often overlooked in favour of the gold and slave trade narrative, was the northern trade corridor that linked Accra to the great Sahelian emporia. The principal node on this northern route was Salaga, the vast, cosmopolitan market town in the savanna region of modern-day Northern Ghana. Salaga was the great entrepot where the forest goods of the south—kola nuts, gold, slaves—were exchanged for the goods of the Sahel and the trans-Saharan caravan trade—salt, livestock, leatherwork, and manufactured goods from the Hausa city-states and the Mande commercial networks.

The route from Accra to Salaga was a long, arduous, but reliably active trade corridor. It was dominated by professional, long-distance traders, many of them Muslim Hausa, Wangara (Mande), and Northern Ghanaian merchants who established permanent trading communities, or Zongos, in the Ga towns. These Zongo communities, still present today in areas like Sabon Zongo and Nima, are the living human legacy of this northern trade route. They are the descendants of the kola and cattle traders who settled in Accra, bringing Islam, the Hausa language, and a distinct, sophisticated mercantile culture that remains a vital part of the city’s commercial DNA. The kola nut, a mild stimulant highly prized across the Muslim Sahel, was the cash crop of the forest that flowed north, and the Accra route was a primary artery for this massive, lucrative, and entirely indigenous commerce.

THE SLAVE ROUTE: THE TRAIL OF TEARS TO THE CASTLE DOORS

It is morally and historically impossible to tell the story of Accra’s old trade routes without confronting the central, devastating commodity that moved along them: enslaved human beings. The same paths that carried gold, salt, and kola nuts were also the routes of the Atlantic slave trade. Captives from wars in the interior, victims of judicial processes, and individuals captured by specialised slave-raiding parties were marched, coffled, and transported along these trade corridors to the European forts on the Accra coast—Christiansborg, James Fort, and Ussher Fort—and into the dark, inhuman chambers of the trans-Atlantic crossing.

The slave trade profoundly deformed the economic and political structures of the region. It enriched a class of coastal and inland intermediaries who participated in the trade, militarised political relations, and created a pervasive culture of insecurity and predation. The Ga towns were both beneficiaries and victims of this trade; they profited as commercial brokers but also lived under the constant threat of raids. The physical trace of this route is the most difficult heritage the city carries, a legacy of immense, unquantifiable suffering that the contemporary branding of the “Door of Return” attempts to honour and re-frame, but whose full moral weight remains embedded in the very stones of the old castle forts and the paths that led to their gates.

THE TRADE ROUTE MARKETPLACES: THE PULSING NODES OF THE NETWORK

The trade routes were not just lines on a map; they were organised around a series of specific, powerful marketplaces that acted as the nodal points of exchange, credit, and information. In Accra, the most significant of these was the Salaga Market. The very name of this central Accra market is a living monument to the northern trade route. It was established by the Hausa and northern trading community as the primary distribution point for goods coming from and going to the northern corridor. It was not a Ga creation; it was a transplant, a piece of the Sahelian trading world embedded in the heart of the coastal capital.

Other critical markets included the Makola Market, which evolved from a colonial-era retail centre into the dominant wholesale and retail hub for imported goods, and the various neighbourhood markets that ringed the old Ga towns. These markets were, and remain, far more than simple places of buying and selling. They are complex institutions with internal governance structures, credit systems, and social hierarchies. The “market queen” system, where powerful female traders control specific commodity sectors—tomatoes, yams, imported textiles—has deep roots in the pre-colonial trade networks. The market was a centre of female economic power, a space where women accumulated significant capital and exercised considerable political influence, a tradition that predates the colonial cash economy and continues to shape Accra’s commercial life today.

THE COLONIAL RE-ROUTING: PORT, RAIL, AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE INDIGENOUS SYSTEM

The arrival of the British colonial administration and its systematic infrastructure investment—specifically the deep-water port at Tema and the railway network—fundamentally re-routed and disrupted the ancient indigenous trade corridors. The colonial economic logic was simple: replace the diffuse, multi-nodal indigenous trading system, over which the colonial state had limited control, with a centralised, mono-directional extraction spine. Goods would move from the interior to the coast along the railway, directly into the port for export to Britain, and imported manufactured goods would flow in the opposite direction, all through a single, taxable, controllable channel.

This had a devastating effect on many of the old trade routes and the communities that depended on them. The footpaths and canoe routes that bypassed the colonial railway were marginalised. The economic significance of the northern Salaga route declined as the railway and the road network re-oriented trade flows towards Kumasi and the southern ports. The human porters, the canoe men, the hostel keepers, and the local market operators who serviced the old paths found their livelihoods disappearing. The colonial port-and-rail system did not build on the indigenous commercial geography; it bulldozed through it, replacing a complex, organically evolved ecosystem with a rigid, externally controlled, extraction-oriented skeleton.

THE LIVING LEGACY: HOW THE OLD ROUTES STILL SHAPE ACCRA

Despite the colonial disruption and the subsequent dominance of the road-haulage and container-shipping model, the old trade routes have not vanished. They persist as a powerful, if often invisible, layer of Accra’s modern commercial geography. The ethnic composition of specific trading sectors maps directly onto the historical routes. The dominance of northern Ghanaian and Hausa traders in the yam and livestock trade, the established Mande and Hausa presence in the kola nut and leather sectors, and the historical role of the “market queens” are all living continuities of the pre-colonial trading system.

The physical markets themselves—Salaga, Makola, Kaneshie—remain the primary distributive nodes for food and household goods for the vast majority of the city’s population, far more vital to daily life than the modern shopping mall. The complex, trust-based, informal credit systems that operate in these markets, the susu rotating savings schemes, and the supplier networks that extend deep into the rural hinterland are the descendants of the credit and trust mechanisms that lubricated the long-distance caravans. The old trade routes have simply adapted, using trotro vans, mobile money, and the modern highway instead of the footpath and the canoe, but the fundamental commercial logic—the movement of goods from the producing hinterland to the consuming city through trusted, ethnic and kinship-based networks—remains stubbornly intact. Accra is still, in its deepest economic structure, the marketplace on the Ga coast, the city that the trade routes built.

QUICK FACTS BOX: ACCRA’S OLD TRADE ROUTES

• Pre-European Trade: Indigenous Ga salt, fish, and craft exchange along footpaths and lagoon canoes with the Akan interior.

• Key Commodities (Gold Coast Era): Gold dust, kola nuts, slaves (southbound); firearms, gunpowder, textiles, spirits, metalware (northbound).

• Major Southern Corridor: Accra-Kumasi route via the Akwapim Ridge, connecting the Ga coast to the Asante imperium.

• Major Northern Corridor: Accra-Salaga route, connecting the coast to the Sahelian trade networks and the trans-Saharan caravans.

• Principal Market Nodes: Salaga Market (northern goods hub), Makola Market (colonial and post-colonial retail), local Ga town markets.

• Key Trading Communities: Ga fishmongers and salt producers, Asante gold and kola traders, Hausa and Wangara/Mande long-distance merchants, Northern Ghanaian livestock traders.

• Colonial Disruption: Re-routing of trade flows through the railway and deep-water port, marginalising indigenous footpath and canoe routes.

• Living Legacy: Ethnic specialisation in trade, the power of the “market queen” system, informal credit networks, and the primacy of the open-air market as the city’s primary economic node

Last Updated on July 24, 2026 by Samuel Kwame Boadu

Samuel Kwame Boadu

Samuel Kwame Boadu is a Ghanaian media entrepreneur and storyteller with a passion for amplifying urban voices and uncovering everyday truths. He is the Editor-in-Chief and Founder of Accra Street Journal, a dynamic digital platform dedicated to capturing the pulse of Ghana’s capital—its people, culture, challenges, business, sports and innovations.

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