Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"On the great day in 1957, heavy with anticipation, representatives from all over the world attended the ceremony at Christianborg Castle in Accra. At midnight, the British flag was lowered and the Black Star was hoisted. The Gold Coast was no more: Ghana, the first African colony to gain independence, had been born." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "No other country demonstrated the decline of Africa so graphically as Ghana. Once one of the most prosperous tropical countries in the world, it had been reduced by 1980 to a pauper." [The Fate of Africa, p. 283] "Among the coastal states, Ghana (population: 28 million), known in colonial times as the Gold Coast, was the first modern West African state to achieve independence, with a democratic government and a sound commercial economy based on cocoa exports. Both democracy and the economy soon failed. In the 1990s, a military regime was replaced by a stable representative government, and recovery began. By 2007, Ghana celebrated 50 years of independence, its democracy maturing, its economy forging ahead, corruption persistent but declining, and its international stature rising." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 306-7]