A newly independent nation broke away from the British Crown in 1957. Four years later, it rushed one of its most important monuments to completion so that Crown could come admire it.
Ghana had become the first sub-Saharan African country to shake off colonial rule on 6 March 1957. By 1960, its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overseeing construction on a public square large enough to hold national parades, military ceremonies, and state occasions for decades to come, an arch, a gate, stands built to seat 30,000 people. The whole complex was finished in 1961 for a specific, almost contrary reason: Queen Elizabeth II was due to visit.
An Independence Monument, Built for a Royal Audience
The timing still reads oddly six decades later. A country that had spent years fighting to leave the British Empire finished one of its central independence monuments specifically so the monarchy it had just left could come see it. The square, known variously as Independence Square and Black Star Square, sits along the Atlantic near Osu, and ranks among the largest public squares anywhere in the world.
Carved into the arch is Ghana's national motto, "Freedom and Justice," alongside the inscription "AD 1957," the year the independence it commemorates actually took place. Standing opposite it is the Liberation Day Monument, honouring the Ghanaian soldiers who died securing that freedom, a number of whom had first served in British colonial forces during the Second World War before returning home to fight for their own.
A Jamaican Symbol at the Center of a Ghanaian Monument
Above the arch sits the Black Star Gate, topped by a five-pointed black star that Nkrumah adopted while still a student abroad, drawing directly on the work of Marcus Garvey. Garvey, the Jamaican Pan-Africanist, had founded the Black Star Line shipping company in the 1920s, part cargo business, part vehicle for Black economic independence, part literal ferry service back to Africa for anyone who wanted to make the crossing. He died in 1940, seventeen years before Ghana existed as an independent state, and never visited the country whose central monument would eventually carry his symbol. Nkrumah built around it anyway, then extended the star further: onto Ghana's national airline, its national football team, and the flag itself.
Ghanaian architect Theo Lawson designed the square on ground that had previously served as colonial playing fields. It has hosted nearly every major national event since, Independence Day parades every 6 March, state funerals, visits from sitting foreign heads of state, a site repurposed so thoroughly that its original colonial function is now the least memorable thing about it.
The arch photographs well because it's clean, symmetrical architecture set against open ocean, and most visitors leave it at that. The fuller story runs through a queen who came to inspect a monument built at speed for her benefit, and a star overhead that was never hers to begin with.