Ghana

CricketArchive records a team representing the Gold Coast, a British colony, as having played its first match in May 1904, against Lagos Colony (in present-day Nigeria). Similar fixtures were played in the following two seasons, with the venue alternating between Lagos and Accra. A team representing the Southern Nigeria Protectorate toured in April 1907.

Similar matches were played again in 1911, 1912, and 1913, with the host alternating each year. Although the sport had been introduced by British settlers, representative teams were multiracial from an early stage – the 1912 Gold Coast–Southern Nigeria fixture, the only pre-war match for which a scorecard is available, featured names like Otoo, Sagoe, Agbokpo, and Akufo (for Gold Coast), and Layode and Oseni (for Southern Nigeria). Gold Coast's Otoo took six wickets in Southern Nigeria's second innings, helping Gold Coast to an innings victory.

However, European-only matches were introduced around the same time, beginning in 1906 and ending only in 1956, the year before Ghanaian independence. The Gold Coast's leading run-scorer in the inaugural European-only fixture was Gordon Guggisberg, who had earlier played a single first-class match (and was later Governor of the Gold Coast, from 1919 to 1927). After a long gap, inter-colonial matches resumed in April 1926, when the Gold Coast played the Nigerian national team in Lagos.

Gold Coast–Nigeria fixtures, both multiracial and European-only, were played almost annually from 1926 to 1939, and resumed again after World War II. In several years the European-only fixtures were played in provincial cities like Kumasi and Ibadan, although multiracial games were played only in the capitals. Gold Coast sides were occasionally bolstered by players of first-class standard – for instance, Cecil Pullan (Oxford University and Worcestershire) and Michael Green (Gloucestershire and Essex) appeared together in a 1937 match, with Pullan appearing again after the war.

The national side played its first match as "Ghana" less than a month after Kwame Nkrumah's independence declaration in March 1957, with annual Ghana–Nigeria matches occurring until 1964.