If you are passing by the Foyle Room on the first floor there is a new display there show-casing some of the library’s items on Ghanaian history covering the last five hundred years.

Included are works taken from our Portuguese and Low Countries collections which highlight the early European presence in West Africa from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Among this selection is a reproduction of a chapter from the Crónica de D. João II by Garcia de Resende (1470–c. 1536) which describes how John II commissioned Diogo d’Azambuja to construct Elmina Castle (first of many constructed by the Europeans)

Also displayed are a number of works taken from the library’s Colonial Africa collection which document the British presence in and occupation of the area. Included here a two accounts – one Ghanaian, the other British – of the Ashanti Wars which were waged intermittently from 1823 to 1900 between the Ashanti Empire and the invading British.

2017 also marks sixty years since Ghana declared its independence from the British Empire. Negotiations were on-going for many year prior to 1957 as shown by another item in the display detailing a speech made by Kwame Nkrumah in 1953 describing the talks with the British government and what still needed to be achieved.