Christiansborg
The Danish headquarters. Dedicated site.
Ghana-Net.com · Forts & Castles · Greater Accra and Volta
Denmark was a small player on the Gold Coast, and it made up for it in the east. From Christiansborg at Osu to Keta at the edge of the Volta, the Danes held the coast the Dutch and English did not want. They lost their castle to Akwamu, shipped around 100,000 people across the Atlantic, were the first European state to decree an end to the slave trade, brought the Basel missionaries, and sold the lot to Britain in 1850. This is the hub for every Danish fort and story on Ghana-Net.
Denmark's Gold Coast began with a defection. Hendrik Carloff, a German-born trader who had helped set up the Swedish Gold Coast, changed sides. He sailed from Glückstadt, then a Danish port, in December 1657 and in January 1658 seized the Swedish forts, including Carolusborg at Cape Coast.
Carolusborg did not stay Danish; it became English Cape Coast Castle. But on the hill beside it the Danes built Fort Frederiksborg at Amanful, on land granted by the king of Fetu in 1659. Squeezed between the Dutch and English, the Danes soon looked east.
At Osu, among the Ga towns east of Accra, the Danes took over a small lodge in the 1660s and built it into Christiansborg, today Osu Castle. For almost two centuries it was the headquarters of the Danish Gold Coast, a few kilometres from the English at James Fort and the Dutch at Fort Crèvecoeur.
Its later life: Christiansborg became the seat of the British colonial government, then of Ghanaian presidents. It was the target of the ex-servicemen's march in 1948, and W.E.B. Du Bois and George Padmore were first buried beside it. Beneath its courtyard lie some 300 castle slaves, unmarked. Our dedicated site: osucastle.ghana-net.com.
In 1693 the kingdom of Akwamu, then the strongest power behind the Accra coast, captured Christiansborg. The operation was led by Asameni, an Akwamu trader who got into the castle posing as a customer. For about a year the castle flew Akwamu's own flag and traded on Akwamu's terms, until the Danes bought it back in 1694.
The keys never came back. Akwamu kept the castle keys, and tradition holds that they are still part of the Akwamu regalia. It is one of the few times a European castle on this coast was taken and run by an African state. See Ghana's traditional kingdoms.
In the eighteenth century the Danes pushed east of Accra along the Dangme and Ewe coast, where the Dutch and English had little interest.
The Danish headquarters. Dedicated site.
The "fort of peace" at Old Ningo, a slave-trading post. Part of an arch wall survives; the dungeons are probably buried.
The king's stone at the mouth of the Volta, now taken by the sea. See the Volta estuary.
Built after the Danish war with Anlo, and half-eaten by the sea. Dedicated site.
Largely ruined, not cared for by the GMMB, with people living in parts of it. Dedicated site.
The house of a Danish-Ga trading family that became a slave fort in its own right.
Not Danish: Fort Vernon at Prampram, between Christiansborg and Fredensborg, was an English post. The Danes and English traded side by side along this coast.
Roughly 100,000 Africans were shipped under the Danish flag, most from these eastern forts, most to the Danish West Indies: St Thomas, St John and St Croix, today the US Virgin Islands. It was a small share of the Gold Coast trade, rising to around a tenth by the 1780s, and no less brutal for that.
On 16 March 1792 Denmark became the first European state to decree an end to its slave trade, but with a ten-year grace period, effective only in 1803. In those years Danish ships carried more captives than ever, to stock the islands before the ban.
The end of the export trade was not the end of slavery. Enslaved people stayed on the Danish forts, in the towns and on the plantations until the Danes left. Read Whispers in the Ledgers and Who sold whom?
By the 1840s the Danish Gold Coast cost more than it earned. In 1850 Denmark sold all its forts and claims on the Gold Coast to Britain, for £10,000. Christiansborg became British, and the east of today's Greater Accra and the Volta coast came under British influence two decades before the Dutch left.
What remains: Danish family names along the Ga coast, Danish graves at Osu, the Basel Mission churches, and forts that the sea and the state are both letting go. Read Ghana's Ghosts: forts, castles and the graves they're letting die and Prinzenstein's paper promises.
The Danish headquarters, from the 1660s to the presidents, and the castle slaves buried beneath it.
The Volta coast after the Danes, with the Ewe mini-dictionary.
The Danish missionary who took the Basel Mission from Christiansborg to Akropong.
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Denmark likes to remember that it was the first country to decree an end to the slave trade. It remembers less often that it gave itself ten years' notice and used them to ship more people than ever. The Danish Gold Coast was small, but it shaped the Accra and Volta coast: Christiansborg, the Basel Mission, the eastern forts. It also left one of the best stories on the coast, the year Akwamu ran a European castle. Most of the Danish forts are now ruins, eaten by the sea or lived in, and nobody is paying to save them.
Verified: 28 September 2026. Carloff's 1658 seizure, the fort dates, the roughly 100,000 captives, the 1792 decree effective 1803 and the 1850 sale to Britain follow standard histories of the Danish Gold Coast. The 1693 Akwamu capture follows histories of Akwamu and Christiansborg; the keys are Akwamu tradition. The state of Augustaborg and Fredensborg is our own observation. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.