Location: Accra Our Catalogue Reference: Part of CO 1069/43 This image is part of the Colonial Office photographic collection held at The National Archives, uploaded as part of the Africa Through a Lens project. Feel free to share it within the spirit of the Commons. Our records about many of these images are limited. If you have more information about the people, places or events shown in an image, please use the comments section below. We have attempted to provide place information for the images automatically but our software may not have found the correct location. Alternatively you could use the Suggestify tool to suggest the location of a picture. For high quality reproductions of any item from our collection please contact our image library

Image: Kwame Nkrumah visits a telephone exchange in Accra, Ghana. CO 1069-439-49, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Download PDFs: Ghana, in two parts

Part One: 1941-1952 [254MB]

Part Two: 1952-1957 [230MB]

Volume Details: Series B Volume 1. First published by The Stationery Office in 1992. Electronic version reproduced with permission of the editor under an Open Government Licence.

Editor Details: RICHARD RATHBONE is Emeritus Professor of African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of multiple volumes on African history, including Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana (1993), Nkrumah and the Chiefs (2000) and co-editor, with David Anderson, of Africa’s Urban Past  (1999).

Selection from Introduction:

This collection of documents is intended to illuminate some of the processes which led to the end of British colonial rule in the Gold Coast on 6 March 1957. Whilst South Africa and then the Sudan had paved the way to independent status for African dependencies and protectorates, Ghana, as the Gold Coast was to be renamed by its government at independence, was the first tropical African state to achieve full nation-statehood after a colonial period which in the case of the littoral of the Gold Coast had lasted for just over a century.” (Part One, p.xxxi)