Koforidua

Tradition traces the town's name to a hunter called Kofi and the tree, dua in Twi, under which he settled — Kofi's tree. The site lay in Akyem Abuakwa country, and the settlement that grew into modern Koforidua was founded in 1875 by people from Juaben in Ashanti, who left their home after the wars with Britain and the upheavals of that decade and were granted land here. Their community became known as New Juaben, and its paramount chief still has his palace in the town, a small Ashanti state transplanted into Akyem land.

Cocoa made the place. Seed brought into the Akuapem ridge late in the nineteenth century spread quickly through the eastern forests, and within a generation these were among the Gold Coast's main cocoa districts. Koforidua sat at the meeting of the buying routes, filled with brokers, storekeepers and transport owners, and the railway completed in 1923 made it an important road and rail junction. Colonial offices, schools and mission churches followed, and the town became the administrative centre of the eastern districts.

Swollen shoot disease later tore through the Eastern Region's farms and infected trees were cut out in great numbers; the cocoa belt's centre of gravity moved west, and Koforidua's fortunes flattened. It kept its role as capital of the Eastern Region after independence, and has grown steadily since on government offices, schools and colleges, trade with the villages around it and the traffic passing between Accra, Kumasi and the Volta.

Koforidua is an Akan town that speaks Twi, and its public life follows Akan custom: chiefs are enstooled rather than crowned, linguists carrying gold-topped staffs speak for them, and the New Juaben court keeps the drums, umbrellas and regalia its founders carried from Ashanti. The Akwantukese festival, which recalls that migration, brings the chiefs out in state and draws people home from Accra and abroad. Funerals are the other great gathering: printed invitations, matching cloth, brass bands and canopies filling the streets from Friday to Sunday.

The town is best known outside Ghana for beads. The Krobo towns a short way east — Odumase, Somanya and the villages around them — have made powder-glass beads for generations, and Koforidua's market is where much of that work is traded, alongside imported and antique strands. Bead-making is bound up with Krobo custom, above all the Dipo rites that mark a girl's passage to adulthood, when beads are worn in quantity.

Christianity is strong, from the Presbyterian congregations descended from Basel Mission work on the ridge to large charismatic churches whose services fill Sunday mornings and whose crusades take over open ground. The zongo keeps a Muslim minority with its own mosques and schools. Koforidua Technical University and several colleges give the town a student population, and highlife, gospel and hiplife carry from shops and drinking spots in the evenings.

Koforidua had an estimated 151,255 people in 2025, which makes it a medium-sized Ghanaian town: big enough for regional offices, a regional hospital and a university, small enough that most journeys are made by shared taxi for a few cedis. Government, health and education employ much of the salaried workforce, while trade, transport and workshops occupy far more people informally.

The centre is given over to the market and the lorry parks, and residence spreads outward to Adweso, Effiduase and the newer estates on the hills, where land has been built on quickly as people priced out of Accra move up the road. Farming continues on the edges — cocoa, oil palm, plantain, cassava and vegetables — and the town is the point where that produce is bought and sent south.

Days start early, with market sellers and schoolchildren on the road by six and trading at its peak in the mid-morning cool. Thursday, the bead-market day, is the busiest of the week. The standing complaints are the state of the roads, the cost of living, and water and power supply. Illegal small-scale gold mining, galamsey, is argued over bitterly across the Eastern Region for what it has done to rivers and farmland.

Koforidua eats the food of the Akan forest. Fufu, cassava and plantain pounded together in a wooden mortar, is the centrepiece, served in light soup with goat, chicken or fish, in abenkwan, the palm-nut soup made from boiled palm fruit, or in nkatenkwan, groundnut soup. Ampesi, boiled yam, plantain or cocoyam, comes with nkontomire, a stew of cocoyam leaves with melon seeds and smoked fish. Kokonte, a dark dough of dried cassava flour, is the cheaper everyday staple.

The street food is much the same as Accra's: waakye, rice cooked with beans and served with spaghetti, egg, gari and shito pepper sauce, sold from dawn; kenkey and banku, fermented maize doughs, with fried fish and ground pepper; red red, bean stew with fried plantain; kelewele, plantain cubes fried with ginger and chilli, in the evenings. Khebab skewers grill at the zongo stalls and along the main roads after dark.

Palm wine is tapped in the villages around the town and drunk fresh, and akpeteshie, the strong spirit distilled from it, is poured at wakes and in drinking spots. Sobolo, a chilled hibiscus drink spiced with ginger, and fresh coconut are sold from barrows, and the cocoa grown in the district now also reaches the town as locally made chocolate.