For union with the Gold Coast
Roughly 93,000 votes for union against 67,500 for separation. Strongest support in the north and in the Buem and Krachi areas.
Ghana-Net.com · History · Volta, Oti & the North · 1884–1957
Ho, Hohoe, Kpando, Kete Krachi, Yendi — for thirty years they were German. The first shot fired by a soldier of the British Empire in the First World War was fired here. Then the colony was cut in two, handed to Britain and France, and in 1956 its British half voted to join Ghana — while the districts around Ho voted no. This is how a German colony became part of Ghana, and why not everyone agreed.
German Togoland (Schutzgebiet Togo) was a strip of West Africa running from the coast at Lomé some 500 kilometres inland to the savannah. It was far larger than today's Republic of Togo. Its western part is now in Ghana.
That western part covers most of today's Volta Region north of the coastal Anlo lands — Ho, Hohoe, Kpando, Amedzofe, Wli — much of the Oti Region including Kete Krachi, and a band of the north that took in Yendi, the seat of the Dagbon kingdom. Keta and the coast around the Volta mouth were not German: they belonged to the British Gold Coast.
Why it matters for visitors. When you stand under Wli Falls or climb Mount Afadjato, you are in former German territory. Much of what makes the Volta Region feel different from the rest of Ghana — its churches, its schools, its long-standing links across the border with Togo — goes back to this history.
Germany arrived late to Africa and grabbed what the other powers had left between them.
On 5 July 1884 the German envoy Gustav Nachtigal signed a protection treaty with Mlapa III of Togo on the coast east of Lomé. Germany then pushed inland, signing treaties where it could and fighting where it could not. Lomé became the capital in 1897.
Germany called Togo its Musterkolonie — its "model colony" — because it paid for itself. It did so through head taxes, forced labour on roads and railways, and a colonial economy built around cotton, palm oil and cocoa for export. Three railways ran inland from Lomé. The "model" was a model for Berlin, not for the people who built it.
In the north the conquest was violent. In December 1896 German forces attacked the Dagbon kingdom and burned Yendi — the event remembered as Adibo. Further south, the Germans moved against the powerful Dente shrine at Kete Krachi, whose priests had resisted them.
The German invasion of Dagbon: Adibo Dali, 1896 — the day Germany invaded the kingdom of Dagbon.
Togoland was home to one of the most important radio stations in the German Empire, at Kamina near Atakpamé, able to reach Berlin and German ships in the Atlantic. When war broke out in Europe, Britain and France moved against it within days.
On 12 August 1914, near Lomé, Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi of the Gold Coast Regiment fired what is recorded as the first shot by a soldier of the British Empire in the First World War. He was a Ghanaian from the north.
British forces from the Gold Coast and French forces from Dahomey advanced on Kamina. The Germans destroyed the radio station and surrendered on 26 August 1914. It was the first Allied victory of the war — and it was won largely by African soldiers.
Ghanaian soldiers went on to fight in Cameroon and East Africa in that war, and in Burma in the next. What happened to some of them when they came home in 1948: The 1948 Christiansborg Crossroads Shooting.
Britain and France divided the colony between them — first in 1914, then formally in 1919.
The line agreed in the Milner–Simon Declaration of 1919 gave France the larger eastern part, with Lomé and the railways, and Britain a long western strip. The border was drawn by officials in Europe. It cut through the Ewe people in the south and through traditional states in the north, separating families, farms and markets.
In 1922 the two halves became League of Nations mandates, and after 1946 United Nations Trust Territories: British Togoland and French Togoland. In practice, British Togoland was run from the Gold Coast as if it were part of it. The northern part was administered with the Northern Territories, which reunited Yendi with the rest of Dagbon.
As the Gold Coast approached independence, the United Nations had to decide what would happen to British Togoland. On 9 May 1956 its people voted in a UN-supervised plebiscite on two options: union with an independent Gold Coast, or separation as a trust territory until its future could be decided.
Roughly 93,000 votes for union against 67,500 for separation. Strongest support in the north and in the Buem and Krachi areas.
In the southern Ewe districts of Ho and Kpandu, most voters chose separation. Many wanted Ewe unification across the border rather than union with the Gold Coast.
The result was taken for British Togoland as a whole, not district by district. On 6 March 1957 it became part of independent Ghana.
The heart of the grievance. Had the vote been counted district by district, the south might have gone the other way. It was not — and that choice, made in 1956, still echoes in the Volta Region today.
The former British Togoland was folded into Ghana's regions: the south became the core of the Volta Region, with Ho as its capital; the north went with the Northern Region. French Togoland became the independent Republic of Togo in 1960. In 2019 the northern part of the Volta Region was split off as the Oti Region.
The question of 1956 never quite went away. A separatist movement calling for "Western Togoland" has resurfaced repeatedly, most visibly in 2020. Most people in the Volta Region do not support it — but the grievances behind it, from the plebiscite to development, are real and deserve to be understood rather than dismissed.
The full story of that question, told from Ho, on our Volta site: The Volta Region and the Western Togoland question. The wider journey: From Togoland to Ghana — Ho and the Volta Region's historic journey.
The North German Mission from Bremen was working among the Ewe from the 1850s, decades before the colony. Its churches, schools and the Ewe written language it helped to shape are the most lasting German legacy in the region.
The regional capital grew as a German-era station and mission town. Start at the Volta Regional Museum and the Ho page.
Amedzofe, Hohoe, Wli Falls and Mount Afadjato — all former German territory, all close to the border.
Lomé, Kpalimé and Atakpamé in today's Togo hold much of the German-era architecture. See Ghana and Togo — a connected journey.
Base yourself in Ho. More on the region: The Volta Region and all its districts on HoInGhana.com. Hotels on ghanahotels.biz.
The German attack on Yendi and the kingdom of Dagbon, and what was taken.
Ho and the Volta Region's journey from German colony to Ghanaian region.
Colonial borders, unresolved grievances and the struggle for identity in the Volta Region.
The language the German-era missions helped to write down — with Ewe naming traditions.
Two centuries before Togoland, Brandenburg-Prussia held forts on the Ahanta coast.
The northern part of former British Togoland, now a region of its own.
Most visitors to the Volta Region come for waterfalls and mountains and leave without knowing that they spent the day in a former German colony, divided by Europeans and joined to Ghana by a vote that its own heartland rejected. That history explains the region better than any guidebook — and Germany, which prefers to forget its colonies, has more reason than anyone to remember it.
Verified: 26 September 2026. The 1884 treaty, the 1896 attack on Yendi, the first British Empire shot by RSM Alhaji Grunshi on 12 August 1914, the German surrender after the destruction of Kamina on 26 August 1914, the 1919 Milner–Simon partition, the League mandate and UN trusteeship, and the plebiscite of 9 May 1956 follow standard historical accounts. Plebiscite figures are given rounded; district results for Ho and Kpandu are as generally reported. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.