Busua

The bay belongs to the Ahanta, one of the Akan-speaking peoples of the western coast, whose small states traded gold and salt long before Europeans reached the shore. From the late fifteenth century Portuguese, Dutch, English, Swedish and Brandenburger traders worked this stretch of coast, and the deep inlet at Dixcove — the harbour the English called Dick's Cove — became one of its busiest anchorages. The English fort above it, first called Fort Dixcove and later Fort Metal Cross, was built for the gold trade and was later used as a slave prison.

East of Busua, at the mouth of the Butre river, the Dutch built Fort Batenstein and in 1656 signed a treaty with the Ahanta that placed the area under Dutch protection; signed on 27 August 1656, it stayed in force until the Dutch sold their Gold Coast possessions to Britain in 1872. The Ahanta rose against Dutch authority in 1837, and their king Badu Bonsu II was executed the following year and his head taken to the Netherlands, from where it was returned for burial in 2009.

Busua itself stayed a fishing village through the colonial period and the first decades of independence, with a small beach hotel on the bay. Its reputation changed in the 2000s, when Ghanaian and foreign surfers found the reliable, gentle break at the western end of the bay and board hire, lessons and small guesthouses grew up along the sand. The offshore oil found off the Western Region, which from about 2010 made Takoradi an oil city, left the village itself much as it was, and fishing and visitors now support it in roughly equal measure.

Busua is an Ahanta village, and the Ahanta language, chieftaincy and stool traditions are its framework. The paramount and divisional chiefs still settle disputes and lead ceremonies, and the asafo companies of the coast take part in funerals and festivals. Kundum, the harvest festival shared with the Nzema further west, moves from town to town along the coast at harvest time and lasts four weeks in each, with drumming, masked dancing and a durbar at which chiefs receive their people.

Fishing shapes the calendar as much as the church does. A weekly rest day keeps the canoes ashore, and the sea has its own observances and prohibitions. Christianity is dominant, with chapels and all-night services, and funerals fill the weekends here as everywhere in southern Ghana, with matching cloth, canopies and brass bands.

The surf scene has added something unusual for a Ghanaian village: a small, mixed community of local and visiting surfers, skateboarding sessions for children in the evenings, and a steady trickle of long-staying visitors who become familiar faces. Relations between the village and the beach businesses are generally easy but the gap in money is obvious, and visitors who greet people, learn a few words of Ahanta or Fante and ask before taking photographs are treated very differently from those who do not.

A few thousand people live in Busua, and the village has no large employer. Men crew the canoes that launch from the eastern end of the bay, often at night; women buy the catch, smoke it in clay ovens and carry it to the markets at Agona Junction and Takoradi. Others work land inland, growing cassava, plantain and coconut, or tap palm wine.

Tourism is the second economy: guesthouses, cooks, board hire, guides for the headland walk and boat trips, and the building trade that serves them. It is seasonal, strongest from December to March, and much of the money passes through a small number of hands. Young people leave for Takoradi, where the port and the oil industry pay better, and remittances come back the other way.

Days start before dawn on the water and in the kitchens, the middle of the day is spent out of the sun, and evenings bring football on the sand, music from the beach bars and the smell of charcoal. Electricity and water supply are erratic, the road down from the junction is rough in the rains, and the recurring worries are falling fish catches, coastal erosion and the sargassum weed that washes ashore in some years and fouls the nets and the beach.

The bay eats fish, and it eats it fresh. Tilapia, snapper, cassava fish, barracuda and, in season, lobster and crab are grilled over charcoal or fried, and come with banku, the sour maize-and-cassava dough, or with rice, chips or kenkey, and always with a ground pepper sauce of chilli, onion and tomato. Shito, the dark chilli and dried-fish paste, is on every table.

The village kitchens cook the standard food of the southern Ghanaian coast: fufu pounded from cassava and plantain, served in light soup, groundnut soup or abenkwan, the palm-nut soup; jollof and waakye rice; red red, the bean stew with fried plantain; and nkontomire, the cocoyam-leaf stew, spooned over boiled yam or plantain. Smoked fish from the ovens behind the beach goes into most of the soups.

Coconut palms line the shore and green coconuts are cut open for their water; palm wine is tapped inland and sold fresh, with akpeteshie, the distilled spirit, poured at ceremonies. Sobolo, the hibiscus drink, ginger juice and bottled lager fill the beach bars, and the Western Region's own crop, cocoa, is turned into chocolate sold in Takoradi and Accra.