Ghanas Inspiring History Unveiled
Discover Ghanas rich history, from ancient kingdoms to modern democracy, through vibrant festivals, stunning…
The elminacastle.info website established, and operated under an agreement established with the then-Minister of Tourism Hon. Juliana Azumah Mensah, and Remo Kurka in 2009, during the administration of the late President John Evans Atta Mills.
One person writes the text, takes the photographs and builds the pages. That is not a boast — it is a disclosure. You are entitled to know whose eyes you are looking through.
The Guardian · Der Tagesspiegel · Discover Britain · Transport Africa
My name is Remo Kurka. In December 2000 I put ghana-net.com online. At the time there was almost nothing on the web about Ghana's forts, museums and heritage sites that had actually been written by somebody who had stood in front of them. Twenty-six years later I am still doing the same thing, only across more of the continent.
I am not a tourism board, an agency, or a content company. There is no editorial team behind this network and no advertising budget funding it. When you read a page here, you are reading one person who went to the place, photographed it, asked questions, and came back and wrote it down.
The habit started long before Ghana. In December 1989 I was standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, in a crowd the East German border guards had stopped being able to control. Everybody around me was watching. I was already thinking about the frame — that a single photograph could not hold what was happening, and that four of them, carefully overlapped and stitched by hand, might. Today software does that in one click. The instinct behind it has not changed: the official frame is never wide enough.
Trained originally in nursing. Working since as a journalist, photographer and web architect, between Ghana, Germany and Britain.
There is a house style in African travel writing that I have spent a quarter of a century refusing. You know it when you read it: everything is vibrant, every welcome is warm, every site is a hidden gem, and no sentence contains a fact that could be checked. It is written by people who have not been there, for people who will not go, and it is useless to both.
First-hand or flagged. If I have been to a place, the page says when. If I am relying on somebody else's account, the page says whose. I do not launder second-hand information into confident description.
My own photographs. No licensed stock. No agency filler (some very, very few photos are not my own). If you are looking at a picture of Elmina, Kumasi Fort, Volta Regional Museum or the National Museum on this network, I took it, and I can tell you what day.
Dated, not evergreen. Conditions in Ghana change. Sites close for restoration and reopen. Prices move. Roads wash out. Pages here carry a verification date so you can judge how much to trust them, rather than a timeless tone that quietly rots.
No advertising. Not Google's, not anyone's. Where you see a booking link on this network — Viator or Expedia — it is a US-facing affiliate addition, disclosed, and it does not decide what appears on the page or how it is described. Nobody has ever paid me to call a place worth visiting.
Free to the institutions and Ghana festival guys. Several of the heritage bodies documented here had no website of their own when I built theirs. Some still do not. Those sites were provided at no charge — hosting and updates included — for years, and remain so.
Wrong is fixable. If you find an error on any page in this network, tell me. I would rather be corrected than quoted. Corrections are made and dated, not silently overwritten.
What began as one Ghana site is now roughly twenty plus domains and more than sixty subdomains. The structure is deliberate: rather than one thin page per subject, each significant place gets its own dedicated portal, with room for history, photography, field reports and the awkward details a single paragraph would have to leave out.
The original site and the anchor of everything since. Regions, heritage, museums, festivals, history, and roughly thirty dedicated sub-portals covering individual forts, museums and national parks.
The continental project — country coverage beyond Ghana, a growing pan-African live radio directory, and a running series on remarkable African figures.
Dedicated coverage of Elmina Castle, running since 2009 under an agreement established with the then Minister of Tourism, Hon. Juliana Azumah Mensah, during the administration of the late President John Evans Atta Mills.
Cape Coast heritage and the Oguaa Fetu Afahye festival, with its own dedicated festival subdomain.
First-hand reporting on the condition of Ghana's museums and heritage sites, including open letters where reporting alone was not enough.
Built and maintained since 2014/2015 — one of the earliest dedicated online sources for the memorial centre, which had no website of its own at the time.
The photographic archive behind this network runs from 2001 to the present and covers heritage architecture, museum collections, festivals, street life and infrastructure. It also extends well beyond Ghana — Berlin, Wales, Ireland and the former East Prussia.
You do not have to take my word for any of it. The work is licensed independently through commercial agencies and has been bought and published by national newspapers, which means every claim on this page can be checked by somebody who has never met me.
Global Development, 25 July 2017 — a feature on how bicycles are changing the dynamic on Africa's roads, illustrated with photography from Ghana.
Berlin daily, founded 1945 — an autumn feature on Marzahn-Hellersdorf in the east of the city.
Print and online — Welsh travel photography for a feature on the best day trips from Cardiff.
Continental transport news and research platform — Ghanaian road and cycling photography.
The licensable stills archive: Ghana's Parliament and Flagstaff House, Teshie-Nungua fantasy coffins, the Ghana–Burkina Faso border, the Tannenberg Memorial in former East Prussia, and Accra's Olympic swimming pool, photographed in 2008 as it crumbled and before it was demolished with no replacement. Buyers to date in the UK, USA, Ghana, China and Japan.
Video footage and stills from Ghana and West Africa, licensed to film-makers, broadcasters and producers worldwide.
Registered with the French society of authors in the graphic and plastic arts, identity number 1564345. Direct licensing and print sales are also handled personally.
Every image on this network is copyright Remo Kurka. Nothing here is public domain and nothing here is free to reuse, including for blogs, tour operators, school projects and social media. Permission is often granted — sometimes at no cost, particularly for Ghanaian institutions and educational use — but it has to be asked for. Ask first and the answer is usually yes.