Brazilian houses
Stone-built, two-storey houses with balconies and verandas, a style that shaped the look of old Accra.
Ghana-Net.com · Accra · Jamestown · Diaspora & Heritage
Most of the people shipped from this coast never came back. In 1836 some did. About seventy freed Africans and their children sailed from Bahia in Brazil, a year after the greatest slave revolt in Brazilian history, and landed at Accra. They spoke Portuguese and answered everything with "tá bom", "it's fine", so the Ga named them the Tabom. They brought masonry, carpentry, tailoring and new crops, married into Ga families, and built houses in the Brazilian style beside the old forts. One of them still stands on Brazil Lane in Jamestown, with a sign calling it the cradle of the Tabom people. It is one of the great stories of Accra, told in one of its most neglected streets.
In January 1835, in Salvador da Bahia, enslaved and freed Africans, many of them Muslim Yoruba and Hausa known in Brazil as malês, rose against their masters. The revolt was crushed within hours. The Brazilian authorities answered with executions, floggings and a wave of suspicion against every free African in the city. Hundreds of freed Africans were deported or decided to leave.
They were part of a larger movement: between the late eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, an estimated three to eight thousand Afro-Brazilians returned to West Africa, where they became the Agudás of Benin and Togo, the Amarôs of Lagos, and in Accra the Tabom.
In 1836 a group of about seventy people from seven families reached Accra and landed at the old port of James Town, between the British James Fort and the Dutch Ussher Fort. Oral tradition names the families Azumah Nelson, Nassu, Vialla, Manuel, Zuzer, Gomez and Peregrino. Some sources suggest earlier arrivals from 1829; the 1836 group is the one the community remembers as its founding.
Their leader, Kangidi Asuman, took the name Azumah Nelson and became Nii Azumah I, the first Tabom chief. The Ga chief of the Otublohum quarter, Nii Kwaku Ankrah, welcomed them and gave them land, and Azumah Nelson shared it out among the families in Jamestown.
The newcomers did not speak Ga. When people greeted or questioned them they would answer in Portuguese, "tá bom", "it's fine, it's good". The Ga began to call them the Tabom (also written Tabon). The name stuck and is still worn with pride.
Within two or three generations the Tabom had married into Ga families, especially the Otublohum, and spoke Ga as their first language. Few speak Portuguese today, but the family names, the memory of Brazil and a few customs, from certain dishes to the agbe drumming still played by Tabom musicians, keep the line to Bahia alive.
Nii Kwaku Ankrah welcomed them because of what they could do. People who had been enslaved in Brazil had learned trades there, and they brought those skills to Accra.
Stone-built, two-storey houses with balconies and verandas, a style that shaped the look of old Accra.
The Tabom are credited with Accra's first tailoring shop, remembered as the First Scissors House, and with skilled smiths and goldsmiths.
They farmed the land north of the old town; Tabom Street in North Ridge recalls their plantations, and old mango trees mark where they worked.
Afro-Brazilian families spread along the coast; Togo's first president, Sylvanus Olympio, came from this Afro-Brazilian world.
The house began as a single-storey home built by Mama Nassu (Mahama Nassu), a respected elder among the returnees, on land given to him on what became Brazil Lane. It was the first house on that strip of land. Over the generations it grew into the two-storey building that stands today, home to Nassu's descendants, who married into the Otublohum royal family, and to tenants.
From 1999 the family, the Ga Mashie Development Agency (GAMADA) and UNESCO Ghana began to restore it. When Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited in 2005 and met the Tabom chief, the Brazilian Embassy raised more money from Brazilian and Ghanaian sponsors, and a museum of Tabom history opened on the ground floor under the sign "Brazil House: Cradle of Tabon People".
The Tabom remain a recognised community with their own chief, the Tabom Mantse, descended from Azumah Nelson. The long-serving Nii Azumah V died in September 2025, aged 89.
That is the official story. The reality today, from three visits by Ghana-Net: the museum that opened after the restoration has not survived as a museum. What remains are basic, sporadic exhibitions: some panels and photographs, sometimes open, often not, with no regular hours and no permanent staff to explain what you are looking at.
A familiar pattern: a foreign head of state visits, money arrives, a building is restored and a plaque goes up. Then nobody pays for the running costs, the guides or the maintenance, and the project slowly returns to what it was before. The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board and the Ministry of Tourism, in our view, have shown little interest in Brazil House or in Brazil Lane as a whole. The same neglect is visible at James Fort next door, at the Padmore Library and at the National Museum.
Jamestown, with Ussher Town the old heart of Ga Accra, holds more history per square metre than almost anywhere in Ghana: two seventeenth-century forts, the lighthouse, the fishing harbour, the Tabom houses, the boxing gyms, the streets where E. T. Mensah grew up and where the independence movement was argued over. It was a political heartland of the CPP. See our story on Jamestown, from political hotbed to fading glory after 1966.
It is also one of the most densely populated and poorest parts of the capital. Many of the historic houses around Brazil Lane are badly run down; some old buildings, like the 1801 Sea-View Hotel, have already been demolished. Crime is a real issue, and residents are, understandably, tired of outsiders photographing their poverty. The result is a paradox: the most historic quarter of Accra is one of the hardest to promote to visitors, beyond James Fort, Ussher Fort and the lighthouse.
Our honest view: Jamestown does not need to be made "pretty" for tourists. It needs investment for the people who live there, and heritage sites that are actually open, staffed and maintained. Until then, visit it with respect and with someone who knows it.
Guided tours of Accra and the coast: a guided walk is the best way to see Jamestown safely. Tours below are booked through Viator; Ghana-Net may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Trading fort, then prison until 2007, where Nkrumah was held. Guided visits only. Don't miss the forgotten graves.
The Dutch fort of the Otublohum quarter that welcomed the Tabom, and another of Nkrumah's prisons.
Christiansborg, the third of Accra's great forts, a short drive east along the coast.
About ten minutes by taxi from Jamestown.
The story of the Tabom is one of the most remarkable in Ghana: people born into slavery or descended from it, freed in Brazil, who crossed the Atlantic back to Africa long before anyone organised a Year of Return, and built a new life beside the forts from which others had been shipped away. Brazil House is the last physical anchor of that story. It deserves a proper museum, open and staffed, in a street that has been cared for. What it has instead is a faded plaque, sporadic displays and a neighbourhood left to fend for itself. Go, with a Ghanaian friend, with respect and your camera away, and hear the story from the people whose ancestors lived it. Then ask why the state that markets "return" to the diaspora has done so little for the first returnees.
Verified: 30 September 2026. The arrival of about seventy Afro-Brazilians from seven families in 1836, the link to the 1835 Malê Revolt in Bahia, the welcome by Otublohum chief Nii Kwaku Ankrah, Azumah Nelson (Nii Azumah I) as first chief, Mama Nassu's first house on Brazil Lane, the restoration from 1999 with GAMADA and UNESCO Ghana, President Lula's 2005 visit and the death of Nii Azumah V in September 2025 follow Brasil de Fato, Syracuse University research, Pambazuka/AllAfrica and Wikipedia. The present state of the house and the advice for visitors are from Ghana-Net's own three visits. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.