When it was founded
You will see both dates. They refer to different things: 1681 is the first treaty with Ahanta chiefs, 1683 is the flag on the hill and the start of the fort. Pages that say "built 1681" have merged the two.
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Ghana-Net.com · Western Region · Ahanta West
On 1 January 1683 a small Baltic state raised its flag on a hill above this beach and declared a colony. Thirty-four years later it sold the lot and went home. The man who actually ran the place did not accept the sale. He took the fort and held it against the Dutch for seven years.
Go along the coast of the Western Region and you learn to expect Portuguese, Dutch, British and Danish. Then you reach Princes Town and find something else: a fort built by Brandenburg-Prussia, a north German state with barely a navy, no colonies anywhere, and no obvious business on the Gulf of Guinea.
It stands on Manfro Hill above the village the Ahanta call Pokesu. It was not Brandenburg's only fort here: a second, Fort Dorothea at Akwida, stood a short way east, and a small post at Takrama barely registers in the record. But Dorothea is now little more than foundations, and Groß Friedrichsburg is the only German fort in Ghana still standing. Most Ghanaians have never heard of it, and most Germans have no idea their country held a foothold in West Africa two hundred years before Togo and Cameroon.
The name explains the town. The fort was named for Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg — the Great Elector. Because it carried a prince's name, the settlement around it became Princes Town. A Ghanaian town named after a German prince who never saw it.
The Great Elector wanted what everyone else had: gold, and a share of the Atlantic trade. What he did not have was ships, money, or anyone with experience of West Africa.
The expertise was hired from the Netherlands. Benjamin Raule, a Dutch shipowner in Brandenburg service, organised the first voyage, and in 1681 his captain Philipp Pietersen Blonck signed a treaty with Ahanta chiefs near Cape Three Points. In 1682 the Elector chartered the Brandenburg African Company to follow it up.
Two ships sailed that year: the Churprinz von Brandenburg, with thirty-two guns, and the smaller Morian, with twelve. In command was Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, a Prussian nobleman of just twenty-five. They reached the coast in late December 1682, and on 1 January 1683 the Brandenburg flag went up on the hill at Pokesu.
The treaty is the hinge of the whole story. This fort was built by agreement, not by conquest. The Brandenburgers negotiated with the Ahanta, and they paid for the ground it stood on. Everything that happened thirty-four years later follows from that one arrangement.
Von der Groeben did not stay. He left the coast in 1683, wrote a book about his travels, and died in Prussia in 1728 without ever returning.
The fort was well armed for its size, and it needed to be. The Dutch resented the intrusion and said so with warships.
Fort Dorothea at Akwida followed within a year or two. The Dutch took it in 1687 and held it until 1698. A third, smaller post at Takrama barely registers in the record at all.
The deeper problem was traffic. Brandenburg ships arrived rarely, so the fort survived by trading with whoever turned up — Dutch interlopers, English ships dodging their own company's monopoly, anyone with a hold to fill. The German outpost on the Gold Coast stayed alive largely by handling other people's business.
When the Elector's son crowned himself King in Prussia in 1701, the possessions became the Prussian Gold Coast. The name changed. The shortage of ships did not.
The man who makes this fort worth the journey was not German.
John Conny — Jan Conny, also written Konny or Canoe — was an Ahanta chief and merchant who worked as the Brandenburgers' broker, handling gold, ivory and people from the interior. He was very good at it: good enough to draw trade away from the Dutch posts at Butre, Axim and Sekondi and the English at Dixcove, and to become the most powerful man on this stretch of coast.
Then Prussia gave up. In 1717 the Gold Coast possessions were sold to the Dutch West India Company. Conny did not accept the sale.
He took the fort and kept it.
His position, as it comes down to us: the Europeans might have bought each other's cannon, brick and stone, but they had not bought the ground the fort stood on. That ground was never the Germans' to sell. They had paid for the right to be there, and he did not intend to hand it to anyone else.
The Dutch tried to take the fort by force and failed. Conny's men were well armed and knew the ground, and the landing parties were beaten back among the houses and bush of the town.
He held it for roughly seven years, trading with all comers and undercutting everyone on the price of gold, until the Dutch finally drove him out in 1724. They renamed the fort Hollandia.
He is still a hero in Princes Town three centuries later, and there is a persistent tradition linking his name to the John Canoe masquerade of Jamaica and the Caribbean — Jonkonnu. Whether the connection is real is disputed among historians, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Almost every account of this fort online contains at least one error. Four points are worth setting out plainly rather than smoothing over.
You will see both dates. They refer to different things: 1681 is the first treaty with Ahanta chiefs, 1683 is the flag on the hill and the start of the fort. Pages that say "built 1681" have merged the two.
Some accounts give the sale to the Dutch as 1717, others as 1720 or 1721. The deal was agreed in 1717 and completed some years later. Conny's occupation began around 1717 either way.
Most accounts say 1724, a few 1725. What recurs across all of them is roughly seven years of Conny holding the fort against the Dutch.
One widely copied Ghanaian page says 300,000 Africans were shipped through this fort. That does not stand up. The entire Brandenburg-Prussian slave trade, across all its posts and three decades, is estimated in the low tens of thousands. The real figure here was a fraction of the claim — which does not make it small, and does not make the fort innocent.
It is worth saying plainly. Brandenburg came for gold and stayed for the trade in people. The Prussian Gold Coast was a slaving operation like every other fort on this shore, distinguished mainly by being poorer at it than its rivals.
German public memory of it, where it exists at all, treats it as a curiosity — a footnote about the Great Elector's African adventure, sometimes dressed up as a national achievement. It was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century just as Germany was looking for colonial precedents, and it was put to work in that argument.
The Ghanaian memory is different, and more interesting: this is where an Ahanta ruler told a European power that the land had never been theirs to sell, and then held it for seven years.
For the scale of the trade these forts served, and who profited from it, see The Forgotten Giants of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Who Sold Whom.
West along the Takoradi–Tarkwa road to Agona Nkwanta, the junction for the whole Ahanta coast, then south towards Princes Town. Roughly 50 to 60 kilometres. The last stretch is slower than the distance suggests, and considerably slower in the rains.
Trotro or shared taxi from Takoradi to Agona, then a taxi on. Agree the fare and a waiting time before setting off, and do not pay for the return leg in advance.
Egyambra crocodile pond and Fort Dorothea at Akwida nearby, then west to Axim and Beyin.
Busua, Dixcove, Akwidaa or Princes Town itself. Options across the region on ghanahotels.biz; flights into the country on ghanaflights.info.
Base yourself in Sekondi-Takoradi, the regional capital, or on the coast at Busua. This is not a day trip from Accra.
Check before travelling. Opening arrangements at Ghanaian monuments change without notice. Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, 2 Barnes Road, Adabraka, Accra: +233 302 221633 or +233 302 221635.
No tour we know of goes to Princes Town — for this fort you arrange your own transport. The castle tours below cover Cape Coast and Elmina, and work well as the first leg of a trip that carries on west.
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The Ahanta and Nzema coast carries more forts per kilometre than almost anywhere else in Ghana, and hardly any of them see visitors.
Brandenburg's second fort, a short way east. Taken by the Dutch in 1687 and held until 1698. Today little more than foundations in a fishing village.
Above the fishing harbour at Dixcove, and one of the strangest stories on this coast — leased to a British private individual in the 2000s, prompting a dispute about who can hold a World Heritage site.
Where the Dutch signed a treaty with the Ahanta in 1656 that held until 1872 — one of the longest-standing agreements between a European power and an African state anywhere.
Portugal's second fort on the Gold Coast, on a rock at the edge of Axim. Taken by the Dutch in 1642.
The westernmost fort in Ghana, now a museum of Nzema history — and the starting point for the Nzulezu stilt village.
About ten kilometres from Princes Town, a shrine where a priest calls wild crocodiles out of the water and feeds them. Not a fort, and the best reason to stay on this coast a second day.
All of them, in order: Forts and Castles of Ghana — the complete directory, fort by fort, with a dedicated site for almost every one.
Nobody comes to Ghana for a German fort, and you should not either. Come for the hill, the view down the Ahanta coast, and a story almost nobody tells properly: a European power that paid for the ground it built on, walked away after thirty-four years, and found that the local ruler had a very clear view of what had and had not been sold.
Combine it with Egyambra, the ruins of Fort Dorothea and the beaches at Akwidaa, take a guide from the village, and expect no interpretation panels. What you get instead is somebody telling you about John Conny as though it happened to his own family — which, in a sense, it did.
Verified: 26 September 2026. The 1681 treaty, the expedition of 1682 and the flag-raising of 1 January 1683 follow standard reference accounts of the Brandenburg-Prussian Gold Coast and of Otto Friedrich von der Groeben (1657–1728). The sale to the Dutch is given variously as 1717 to 1721, and the Dutch capture as 1724 or 1725; the discrepancies are noted rather than resolved. John Conny's stance towards the Dutch is reported in secondary accounts and given as reported. The claim that 300,000 people were shipped through this fort appears on at least one Ghanaian website and is rejected here as unsupported. Corrected 26 September 2026: an earlier version called this the only German fort in Ghana; Fort Dorothea at Akwida was a second, now in ruins. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.