According to the report,the Tabons (70 families in all) arrived 170 years ago on a ship from Brazil after their emancipation and were given land for farming and settlement by the Ga chief of present-day downtown Accra. The settlers greeted all those they encountered by saying “Es ta bon” which is Portuguese for “It is well”. With time,the Brazilian returnees came to be known as Tabon people on account of their style of greeting. Numbering several hundreds of thousands today,they have become fully assimilated into the Ga culture of the Greater Accra area.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the Tabon also claim Yoruba ancestry, bearing in mind that about 30 million of Brazil’s 40 million African descendants claim Yoruba ancestry,the rest variously claiming Fon, Fante, Efik and Ovimbundu ancestry.
