Can Ghana Turn Its Many Histories into a Common Wealth?

Ghanafuor, if Abu Dhabi is right that culture can be a superpower, Ghana’s answer is already written across the land: in traditions we still live, the landscapes of Mole National Park and Kakum, the historic routes by which enslaved people were taken from north to coast, and the European castles and forts along our shoreline.

This is a living inheritance with the power to draw visitors and deepen our sense of who we are.

But a country’s inheritance is not yet its power. It becomes power only when people can understand it, care for it and make a living from it without surrendering its meaning.

That is the question Ghana should take from the Gulf example: not how to become another Abu Dhabi, but how to turn our own cultural plurality into a shared civic ethic and a source of durable prosperity.

The temptation is to treat culture as a brochure: a festival here, a monument there, a pleasing sequence of attractions for the visitor’s camera. Ghana has more than enough material for such a catalogue.

The deeper opportunity lies in seeing how the parts speak to one another. Mole and Kakum, the routes by which enslaved people were taken from the north towards the coast, and the European forts and castles along the shoreline are not interchangeable attractions.

They hold different histories, some beautiful, some grievous, some difficult to tell without discomfort. Together, they ask a larger question about the country we have become and the one we might yet choose to be.

A journey through Ghana could be more than movement between sites. It could teach us how geography, memory and culture have shaped a nation.

A route tracing the passage of enslaved people from the north towards the coast cannot be reduced to a scenic trail. It would require careful historical interpretation, respect for the people whose ancestors were caught in that history, and the participation of communities along its length.

The castles and forts on the coast, too, should not be presented as picturesque remnants detached from the violence they witnessed. Telling these stories honestly would not weaken tourism. It would give visitors a reason to stay, listen and return.

A country can attract attention by selling an image of itself. It earns deeper regard by inviting people into a truthful encounter.

Ghana’s cultural life is not confined to heritage sites. It lives in the languages people speak, the music and forms of worship through which they gather, the food and craft carried across generations, and the ways communities negotiate difference in everyday life.

Our plurality is not a decorative fact. It is a continuing practice: the work of living together without requiring everyone to become the same.

This is where culture becomes civic infrastructure. A society that can see its different histories as part of a common inheritance is better equipped to resist the politics of suspicion, in which one group’s memory is treated as another group’s accusation.

Shared inheritance does not mean a single, seamless national story. It means making room for stories that complicate one another, and building enough trust to hear them.

Unity that depends on silence is brittle. Unity that can survive honest memory has a stronger foundation.

There is an economic argument, too, though it should not be made crudely. Culture-based tourism can support guides, drivers, food producers, craftspeople, performers, conservation workers and small businesses far beyond the places where visitors sleep.

But value does not arise automatically because a site is beautiful or historically important. It depends on access, maintenance, interpretation, local skill and a fair share of the proceeds.

If communities are asked to perform their heritage while decisions and earnings travel elsewhere, “development” becomes another promise made at their expense.

Ghana could begin by treating its cultural and natural places as parts of connected public life, rather than isolated attractions. That means supporting credible interpretation, training local guides, protecting the ecological settings that draw people in the first place, and designing routes that connect north and coast without reducing either to a stage set.

It means listening to communities before deciding how their histories will be told. And it means measuring success not only by visitor numbers, but by whether local people gain skills, income and a lasting stake in what is being built.

Abu Dhabi’s claim that culture is a superpower is useful precisely because it makes us look again at what we already possess. The Gulf’s choices belong to its own history and ambitions. Ghana need not borrow its architecture of identity.

Our proposition is both older and more demanding: a republic shaped by many peoples, landscapes and memories, held together not by sameness but by the possibility of a shared future.

That possibility is not guaranteed. Pluralism can be neglected, exploited or turned into a contest over who belongs most.

But it can also become Ghana’s uncommon advantage: a way of welcoming the world while deepening our obligations to one another. Our forests and parks, our routes of sorrow, our coastal forts and castles, and the living cultures of our communities are not separate chapters waiting for tourists to connect them.

They are materials from which we can make a more truthful account of ourselves, and a more generous country.

The question is whether we will see them that way. Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah’s birthplace and a cultural Mecca for a self-assured African diaspora, can welcome the world on its own terms, turning many histories into a common wealth.