Green, yellow and red form the Pan-African colours, a palette that spread across the continent after Ethiopia's flag became a symbol of independence for nations still under colonial rule.
Ethiopia was one of the only African nations never colonised, which made its flag a rare, genuine symbol of independence at a time when nearly the entire rest of the continent was under some European flag or other. That gave green, yellow and red a weight the colours of a colonised territory simply couldn't carry. When countries started gaining independence through the mid-20th century, reaching for Ethiopia's colours was a way of saying something specific: we belong to the same story of African self-rule that Ethiopia already had.
Ghana was the country that made this a movement rather than a one-off tribute. When it became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence, on 6 March 1957, it needed a flag, and the job fell to Theodosia Okoh, a Ghanaian teacher and artist who was also, somewhat improbably, a serious figure in Ghanaian field hockey administration.
Her design took Ethiopia's green, gold and red and added something new: a black five-pointed star sitting in the middle of the gold stripe. The star wasn't a generic symbol she invented. It was a direct nod to the Black Star Line, a shipping company Marcus Garvey founded in 1919 as part of his Back-to-Africa movement. Garvey had modelled the company's name on the existing White Star Line, the famous shipping company whose most notorious ship was the Titanic, and deliberately flipped white to black to make the point that this line was owned and built by Black people, not for them. By the time Okoh was designing Ghana's flag almost forty years later, Garvey's black star had become shorthand across the diaspora for exactly the kind of independence Ghana had just won, and it made sense as the flag's centrepiece.
The flag wasn't even permanent right out of the gate. Under Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana briefly swapped the gold stripe for white between 1964 and 1966, a change tangled up in the domestic politics of the time, before reverting to Okoh's original red-gold-green-and-black-star design after Nkrumah was overthrown, and it's stayed that way since. Okoh lived long enough to see her design become one of the most recognised flags in Africa, and to watch Ghana's national football team adopt "the Black Stars" as their nickname, named after the exact star she'd put on the flag. She died in 2015, at 92, and was given a state funeral.
More than a dozen African nations followed with some version of green, gold or yellow, and red, often adding their own emblem in the middle the way Ghana did with its star, which is why the pattern reads as unmistakably regional today even though it started as one country paying tribute to another.
A pie chart with green, yellow (or gold), and red in roughly even thirds is one of the strongest single hints in the whole game, it points almost exclusively toward Africa.
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