Accra · Landmarks
Old Parliament House: The Building Where Ghana Became Independent
Independence was formally handed over inside this building. Nkrumah’s statue stood in front of it until a mob tore the head off in 1966 — and that head was missing for forty-three years before an old woman brought it back. It stands directly across the road from the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, and almost every visitor to the Park walks past it without a glance.
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Where it is, and why you keep missing it
Stand in the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, turn your back on the mausoleum, and look across the road. The building facing you is the Old Parliament House. Every year tens of thousands of people — Ghanaians, diaspora visitors, tour groups — stand in that park photographing the statue, and only a handful of them ever turn round.
There is a trick of geometry worth knowing about, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it. Photograph the main Nkrumah statue from behind, from the park side, and the raised arm reads as though he is pointing directly at the Old Parliament House across the street. He is not, of course. But the accident is a better piece of storytelling than most of the interpretation on the site, because that building is where his government sat, and its forecourt is where his likeness was destroyed.
6 March 1957: the handover
The photographs everyone knows — Nkrumah in a fugu on a platform, arms raised, the crowd behind him, Ghana, your beloved country is free forever — were taken at the Old Polo Grounds. That is the ground the Memorial Park now occupies, and Nkrumah chose it deliberately: the polo grounds had been for Europeans only, and he declared the end of colonial rule standing on them.
But the constitutional act itself happened indoors, across the road. Inside the Old Parliament House, the representatives of Queen Elizabeth II, the Governor-General Lord Listowel, Nkrumah and the others gathered to formally mark the country’s independence, while the enormous crowd waited outside on the polo grounds.
The celebration is the photograph everybody has seen. The transfer of power happened in a room in the building nobody photographs.
That division — the ceremony outside, the paperwork inside — is why the Memorial Park has become a national shrine and the Old Parliament House has become a building people walk past. It is also why the two sites only make sense together.
The statue outside the door
The statue was commissioned in 1956, before independence, and unveiled on 5 March 1958 at the first anniversary. It stood in front of the Old Parliament House.
It was made by the Italian sculptor Nicola Cataudella, who took his composition from a press photograph of the moment Nkrumah declared independence. Nkrumah steps forward in a fugu — the northern smock, his favourite dress — with his right hand raised in salute and a traditional walking stick in his left. Contemporary accounts say Nkrumah supervised the details personally.
It did not have a peaceful life. In 1961 it was damaged in a bomb attack by militant opponents of his government. Ghana was already a place where people tried to destroy this object, five years before anyone succeeded.
An honest complication. Two damaged Nkrumah statues survive — one missing its arms, one missing its head — and both carry inscriptions describing themselves as the original that stood in front of Parliament House. Academic research on Ghana’s “monument wars” suggests the armless one may be the piece damaged in the 1961 bombing, and the headless one its replacement, mounted in 1963 and toppled in 1966. Nobody has established this conclusively. We flag it because a great many published accounts state it as settled, and it is not.
24 February 1966
Nkrumah had left Ghana. He was travelling to Hanoi, on a mission to broker peace in the Vietnam War, when the National Liberation Council — a joint military and police coup led by Lieutenant-General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka — removed his government.
A crowd gathered at the Old Parliament House, at the statue. It was pulled from its pedestal and smashed. In the course of it the head came off, and an arm.
The news photographs from those days are among the most reproduced images in modern African history: a bronze arm still pointing upward from the rubble, children playing on the fallen figure. What is often lost is where it happened. Not some symbolic public square chosen for effect — the forecourt of the building where the man had governed, and where independence had been signed over eight years earlier.
The remains were recovered for the National Museum in 1975. A historical marker was erected and unveiled on 3 March 1977 by the Commissioner for Education and Culture. The head and one arm were not among what was recovered.
The head that came back
For decades the head was simply gone. Officials at the Memorial Park believed it was being kept privately by someone — in 1997, during the fortieth independence anniversary, the severed head and arm reportedly appeared in public and then vanished again. A director of the Park told the press he suspected somebody was holding them as personal treasures, and appealed publicly for their return on the grounds that they were now state property.
In 2009 the head came back.
It was returned by an elderly woman who had kept it for forty-three years. She had been a supporter of Nkrumah, and by her own account she had taken and held it out of devotion rather than trophy-hunting — then decided, in old age, that it belonged to Ghana.
Think about what that means practically. Through the NLC, through Busia, through Acheampong, through two Rawlings coups and into the Fourth Republic, a woman in Accra had the head of Kwame Nkrumah in her house. Through every swing of official opinion about whether he was a founding father or a dictator. She kept it, and she gave it back when she judged the country was ready for it.
The head and the body are today displayed at the Memorial Park separately, a few steps apart, and that is deliberate. The Park’s management has been explicit: the statue is kept in the state it was last seen in, and the two parts remain apart, in order to preserve the history rather than tidy it away.
It is a genuinely brave curatorial decision and it has been argued about ever since. Commentators have called repeatedly for the statue to be restored to its original state. Others — including Nkrumahists — objected when the beheaded figure was erected behind the mausoleum for the Ghana@50 celebrations, regarding it as a fresh insult. The argument is not settled and probably should not be.
Most countries repair the monuments their mobs break. Ghana put the pieces on display and left them apart.
Three republics, three coups
The building outlived the man, and then outlived two more constitutional orders.
Independence formally marked here. Nkrumah’s parliaments sit here through the CPP years until the NLC coup of 24 February 1966 removes the government and suspends the constitution.
The NLC organises elections in 1969, won by Dr Kofi Abrefa Busia’s Progress Party with 105 of 143 seats — the CPP having been proscribed and most of its people banned from standing. The National Alliance of Liberals under Komla Agbeli Gbedemah forms the opposition. This Parliament sits in the same building until 13 January 1972, when Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong’s National Redemption Council suspends the constitution and abolishes Parliament.
Constitutional rule returns and the legislature sits here again, until the coup of 31 December 1981 brings the Provisional National Defence Council to power and ends parliamentary government for over a decade.
When Parliament returns under the Fourth Republic it does not come back here. It sits in Parliament House in the East Ridge district, where it remains.
Three separate constitutional republics debated in this building and every one of them was ended by soldiers. That is not a mood or an atmosphere; it is a documented sequence, and it is the reason the Fourth Republic’s uninterrupted run since 1993 matters as much as it does to Ghanaians.
What it is now
The Old Parliament House today serves the courts — it is in judicial use, part of the machinery of the Judicial Service rather than the legislature. It is a working government building. There is no visitor provision, no interpretation, no plaque explaining to the people in the park opposite what they are looking at.
There is a certain symmetry in it having gone from the legislature to the judiciary, in a country where both were repeatedly suspended by the same means. The building that housed three parliaments ended by coups now houses part of the institution whose judges were murdered in 1982.
Nobody planned that. It is simply what happened to a good building in a small government quarter.
Seeing it properly
Do this from the Memorial Park side. Buy your ticket to the Park, see the mausoleum and the museum, then walk to the road-facing edge and look across. From there you can take in the whole geography at once: the polo grounds where the crowd stood, the building where the handover was signed, and the broken statue that once stood between them.
Ask the Park guides about the Old Parliament House and about the head. The good ones know the story in detail and it is not in the standard patter — you have to ask.
Accra city and historical tours
Every Accra city tour includes the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, which means every one of them puts you within fifty metres of the Old Parliament House. Almost none mention it. Book the tour for the Park, Independence Square and Jamestown — then use what is on this page to ask your guide the questions the standard route skips.
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Combine it with
Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park
Directly opposite. The mausoleum, the museum, the beheaded statue and the recovered head. Allow a proper hour; most people give it twenty minutes and miss the point.
National Museum of Ghana
A short distance away, and where the wrecked statue was kept for years after 1975. A statuary park and historical marker stand nearby.
The Martyrs of the Rule of Law memorial
In the same judicial quarter. Three High Court judges murdered in 1982 — the other end of the story this building tells.
Independence Square and the Black Star Gate
Fifteen minutes away, and the monumental version of what happened here in 1957.
The verdict
You cannot go in and there is nothing to see except a building. Judged as an attraction it is worth thirty seconds, and any honest page has to say so.
Judged as a place, it is one of the most important addresses in Africa. Independence was handed over inside it. Three republics sat in it and soldiers ended all three. Its forecourt is where a crowd tore the head off the man who had made the country, and that head spent forty-three years in a private house before an old woman decided it was time. Learn that before you visit the Memorial Park, and then turn round when you get there. Thirty seconds, properly informed, beats an hour of not knowing what you are looking at.
Connected reading on ghana-net.com
Verified: 22 August 2026.
Parliamentary history of the building compiled from Graphic Online’s account of the Old Parliament House and the constitutional record of the First, Second and Third Republics. Statue details — commission in 1956, unveiling on 5 March 1958, sculptor Nicola Cataudella, the 1961 bomb damage, the toppling of 24 February 1966, recovery for the National Museum in 1975 and mounting at the Memorial Park in 2007 — from Ghana Museums and Monuments Board records, the 1977 historical marker inscription, Ghanaian Times and GhanaWeb reporting, and the Heritage and Cultural Society of Africa Foundation documentation of the Memorial Park. The 2009 return of the severed head after 43 years and the decision to display head and body separately are as stated publicly by directors of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. The identification of which surviving damaged statue stood at Parliament House is disputed in academic literature on Ghana’s monument controversies and is presented here as unresolved. Current use of the building is as reported; access arrangements at government buildings change without notice.