No individual coined the name ‘Ghana’ – Historian reveals

An astute historian, Yaw Anokye Frimpong, has stated that the name ‘Ghana’ was not coined by any individual as perceived by some members of the public.

According to him, the name existed 600 years ago before Kwame Nkrumah popped up on the political scene in then Gold Coast.

Ghana, he cleared, was the first of the western Sudanese empires that were formed.

In an interview with Kafui Dey on his YouTube channel, Yaw Anokye Frimpong talked about how the name Ghana came into existence.

“The name, the concept, the entity Ghana, you know, is first mentioned in the Sahara many, many years ago, more than 600 years before Kwame Nkrumah mentioned the word Ghana.

“Today we say that it is traced to the area between Mali, southern Mauritania, and then the eastern part of Guinea. It was a very vast empire. This is the Ghana empire, the Ghana empire. It was the first of the Western Sudanese empires. We had three Western Sudanese empires Ghana, Mali, and Songai.”

The historian further detailed how the plethora of gold in Ghana made the country gain global recognition.

“It was the first of the Western Sudanese empires. We had three Western Sudanese empires Ghana, Mali, and Songai. We are told that Ghana, which was the first of the empires, was an empire noted for gold.

“Anytime the mention of Ghana came in, you immediately thought of gold and it became associated with us somehow because of certain similarities,” he said.

He further shared gold was so common in the empire that it was even used gold to bury the dead.

“They buried the dead with gold. They poured libation. Their women wore earrings and they wore clothes as the Ewes do. They also discovered that some of the people were in nature, just like Akans took plenty of gold and went away with it.

“When they weighed the gold, it became the biggest amount that could be imagined anywhere in the world,” he noted.