Elmina

The Fante town the local people call Edina stood on this spit of land before Europeans arrived, living by fishing and by trading gold brought down from the forest. In 1482 a Portuguese expedition under Diogo de Azambuja negotiated with the local ruler and built São Jorge da Mina, a fortified trading post that gave the surrounding coast its name, A Mina — the mine. It is the oldest surviving European building south of the Sahara, and for a century and a half Portugal ran the gold trade from it.

The Dutch West India Company took the castle in 1637, attacking from the hill where they then built Fort Coenraadsburg to make sure nobody repeated the manoeuvre, and held Elmina as the capital of the Dutch Gold Coast for 235 years. The trade shifted from gold to captives, and the castle's cells, the courtyard where women were selected and the narrow sea gate remain as the record. A community of Euro-African families grew up in the town, and in the nineteenth century the Dutch recruited soldiers here for the East Indies, the origin of lasting links between Elmina and Java.

In 1872 the Dutch sold their Gold Coast possessions to Britain. The king of Asante, who claimed suzerainty over Elmina, objected to the transfer, and the third Anglo-Asante war followed in 1873–74. Elmina was rebuilt as a fishing port and has stayed one. The castle and Fort St Jago were restored in the twentieth century and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979 as part of Ghana's forts and castles.

Elmina is Fante, and the traditional state of Edina has its own paramount chief and a set of asafo companies whose rivalries organise much of town life. Their posuban shrines — concrete structures painted in bright colours and modelled as ships, aeroplanes, lions or biblical scenes — stand in the quarters, and their flags and drumming appear at every festival. Bakatue, on the first Tuesday of July, opens the fishing season with a net cast into the lagoon, a canoe regatta and a durbar of chiefs.

The town keeps traces of its European centuries that exist nowhere else in Ghana. Edina Buronya, celebrated in early January, is a local version of Christmas inherited from the Dutch, and Dutch and Portuguese surnames are still carried by old families. Catholicism arrived with the Portuguese and remains strong beside Methodism and the newer Pentecostal churches, and traditional priests continue to serve the lagoon gods.

Fishing sets the rules. A weekly rest day keeps the canoes ashore, and the lagoon and the sea have their own taboos and offerings. The castle brings a steady flow of visitors from the African diaspora, for whom this is a place of return rather than sightseeing, and ceremonies are held in the dungeons and on the shore.

About 34,000 people lived in the town at a 2013 count, with more in the district spreading inland. Almost everything turns on the canoe fleet: crews of a dozen or more go out at night or before dawn, the catch is landed at the wharves and auctioned, and women known as fishmongers buy, smoke and sell it on to markets across southern Ghana. Boatbuilders, net menders, ice sellers and outboard-motor mechanics work along the same stretch of water.

Catches have declined, blamed locally on industrial trawling, small mesh nets and the use of light and chemicals, and closed seasons imposed by the government are argued over every year. Salt production, small trade and government jobs in a district capital make up much of the rest, and tourism supports guides, drivers, craft sellers and the beach hotels west of town, though the money it brings is unevenly spread.

The old town is dense, low-built and short of space, with families in nineteenth-century houses subdivided many times over; newer building spreads inland along the Cape Coast road. Days start before dawn on the water, the market runs through the morning, and evenings belong to food stalls, church services and televised football. Waste in the lagoon, erosion of the shore and the state of the old houses are the recurring local arguments.

Elmina eats what the canoes bring in. Grilled tilapia and snapper, fried mackerel, smoked herring and anchovy appear at every meal, alongside banku, the sour maize-and-cassava dough, and Fante kenkey, maize dough fermented and steamed in plantain leaves. Pepper — ground fresh with onion and tomato, or as shito, the dark chilli and dried-fish paste — is served with all of them.

Fante fante, fish stewed in palm oil with pepper and onion, is the local dish above all others, and abenkwan, the palm-nut soup, is eaten with fufu pounded from cassava and plantain. Etsew, plain rice with fish stew, and abom, a ground vegetable relish, are chop-bar standards, and the smoking ovens behind the wharves turn a large share of the catch into the dried and smoked fish sold inland.

Street food follows the day: koko, the spiced millet porridge, with koose bean fritters in the morning; waakye at midday; and in the evening khebab skewers, fried yam, roasted plantain with groundnuts and bofrot dough balls. Sobolo, the hibiscus drink, and coconut water are sold from carts, and palm wine and akpeteshie come in from the villages inland.