Teshie

Fort Augustaborg — Fort Teshie to locals — was the last of the Gold Coast forts to be built, constructed in 1787 and named for Princess Louise Augusta of Denmark. It stood about 15 kilometres east of Fort Christiansborg, part of the chain of European trading posts that studded this coast. Like its neighbours, it was a post for the Atlantic slave trade, and it is right to say so plainly: these were places where human beings were bought, held and shipped. Five years after the fort went up, Denmark became the first European nation to abolish the slave trade.

On 17 August 1850 the fort was one of five Danish forts purchased by Queen Victoria, and it passed to the new Ghanaian administration after independence in 1957. Today it is a ruin. The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board notes that the British never occupied it and that it is now untraceable; a single cannon is all a visitor can see at the site. Along with 32 other forts and castles on Ghana's coast, Fort Augustaborg is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing 'Forts and Castles, Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western Regions', inscribed in 1979. Come with modest expectations and a long view: what remains is a marker, not a monument.

Teshie is best known for design coffins — abebuu adekai, 'boxes with proverbs' in Ga. The Ga believe life continues in the next world much as it did here, and that ancestors retain power over the living; a coffin shaped like a fisherman's canoe, a farmer's cocoa pod or a driver's car speaks for the person inside it. Some shapes carry clan meaning: animals such as lions, cockerels and crabs stand for totems, and only those of appropriate status may be buried in certain forms.

The craft grew out of figurative palanquins, the carved litters in which Ga chiefs were carried and sometimes buried. Custom coffins were used at first only by chiefs and priests, and became widespread in local funeral culture from around 1960. Seth Kane Kwei (1922–1992), a Ga carpenter in Teshie, is long credited with inventing them in the early 1950s, though anthropologists including Regula Tschumi have questioned that account and traced the practice to palanquin-making, with Ataa Oko of La possibly working in the same vein from around 1945. What is not in doubt is Teshie's centrality. The Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop has run here since the 1950s and trained or inspired makers including Paa Joe, Daniel 'Hello' Mensah and Kane Kwei's grandson Eric Adjetey Anang, who took over the studio in 2005. Around ten workshops in Teshie and the wider Accra region still make similar coffins.

The wider world arrived in 1989, when seven coffins by Kane Kwei and Paa Joe were shown in Les Magiciens de la terre at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Since then these objects have moved between ritual and gallery: shown at the Honolulu Museum of Art, LACMA and beyond, and made in harder woods such as limba and African mahogany for export as artworks, while lighter wawa and emien serve local funerals. In the workshops, the process is unhurried and unsketched — the maker studies a photograph or a living animal, builds in three dimensions, lines the inside, polishes and sprays the outside, and hands it to a painter.

Teshie is one of the independent towns of the Ga state, and every August it celebrates Homowo — 'hooting at hunger' — the harvest festival that remembers a famine in Ga history. The town's ritual life centres on the Osabu-Ayiku Shrine and the Teshie Wulomo, its chief priest. The Homowo season opens with the Bloahejuu rites, performed at dawn by the Osabu-Ayiku Wulomo to cleanse the township ahead of the festivities. A couple of weeks later comes Abele kuu, the sacred corn rites: libation is poured to seek the blessing and guidance of the ancestral spirits, corn is hung at the entrance to the shrine room as a plea for abundant rains and a good harvest, and the heap of corn is sorted and shared among the heads of Teshie's five divisions — Lenshie We, Agbawe We, Krobo, Kle Musuŋ and Gbuglah — and the divisional chiefs.

These are working rites, not performances. The Bloahejuu ceremony is held indoors at dawn and participation is restricted to traditional leaders and initiates. In 2022 both sets of rites had to be moved from the shrine to the Nii Adjei Sankuma We, because the final customary rites for the late Wulomo, Nuumo Adjei Kwaako II, were incomplete and it was taboo to enter the shrine. That year's Bloahejuu was performed through heavy rain, which the elders read as a sign that the deities and ancestral spirits had endorsed the ceremony. Visitors who happen to be in Teshie during the season should watch from a respectful distance, dress modestly, and follow the lead of local hosts.

Teshie stretches from the Kpeshie Lagoon east to the Teshie-Nungua Estates, along the Teshie Road. It is a fishing town as much as a suburb: the Ga were originally farmers, but fishing and trading are now the principal occupations, and trading is largely in the hands of women. The beach is a working shoreline, not a resort — canoes, nets, smoke, and the early-morning business of putting to sea.

That shoreline is also under pressure. Ghana's coast is eroding at an average of about two metres a year, and the 150-kilometre eastern coastline from Aflao to Prampram has been identified as the most vulnerable stretch. Research on the Teshie coastline has recorded shoreline change ranging from about -2.5 to +2.85 metres a year, and found that erosion has affected residents' socio-economic lives through low fish catches and the loss of landing sites. Fishermen interviewed at Teshie, Nungua, Labadi and James Town describe going further out for smaller catches and losing canoes to storms. Sea defence works at La and Teshie have been part of the government's coastal protection programme. This is not a reason to stay away — it is a reason to look at the beach as the living, contested place it is.