Ghana Books

I have been trying to learn something about the people and culture of Ghana, and have ordered several books from Amazon. This was one of them. Wow, what a book this turned out to be! The author's style was engaging and she painted such vivid pictures of her childhood in Ghana. There were folk tales, lyrics of traditional songs, even recipes woven in with her own story. I am not from Africa, nor am I even Black, but her story and her emotions are so universal that it is easy to identify with much of what she has to say, and sympathize with what is foreign to me. Some parts had me laughing, some brought a tear, other stories made me gasp in shock. I highly recommend this book to anyone, although I suppose it will appeal more to women than to men. This may be one of the best books I have read.

The writer of this book has writen her auto biography. Although i am only a teenager and this would not be my usual read. It realy made me think about world war 2 and how it affected people of african descent. How about if you where taken from england a place that the war was realy taken place and taken to a place where you could not see but only feel the presence of the war. For the person in the book this would turn out to be west africa, ghana in fact. this book is funny,comedic,sad,historical and it even has some romance and eductational value in it. It is poetic yet not,imformatrive yet fiction this is a book of all generes and all ages. This book has realy helped me learn about the 1940s and other peoples coltures in a way that no book has ever done before and i think that everyone should read it.

The book speaks for itself when read;no wonder the Professor won an award for it. Kwabotwe's "Dwin Hwe Kan" lives on even after the period the book covers. It is a must read for all and MOBAs especially.

Now, I had my reservations when my mother bought me this book, I don't tend to read biographies, least of all of C list celebrities. However I was surprised by this book - it is excellent. George Alagiah has an engaging writing style full of wit with a deeply humanistic sentiment, his experiences in Africa from the time he emigrated from Sri Lanka (as a Tamil) to Ghana up until his time as a BBC reporter are used as background to the history of a number of countries and their adjustment to a post-colonial world. He offers explanations of their frequent failures, examples of their successes and his optimistic hopes for the future.

This work draws from journals, reports and books, compiling the findings of much obscure research and making it accessible. It is a great introduction to northern Ghana.

Other ethnographies on Ghana that may prove interesting include works by Madeline Manoukian, Eva Meyerowitz (especially, The Akan of Ghana), David Tait (The Konkomba of Northern Ghana), R. S. Rattray, Meyer Fortes, Ivor Wilks, Nehemia Levtzion, and Esther Goody

This is the first in a trilogy on witchcraft in Ghana. The other two works also by Bannerman-Richter are Don't Cry! My Baby, Don't Cry!: an autobiography of an African Witch and Mmoetia:The Mysterious Little People. You can find them at the University of Ghana in Accra other than that good luck finding copies. However, if you do it is worth your time. This book gives a basic overview of witchcraft as manifest among the akan, the primary people of Ghana. It talks about such things as astral projection and how a person becomes a witch. It is a good read but a little two short. All three of the books are about 170 pages each.

A brilliant exposition, which covers every aspect and type of use made of the art of proverbs in this linguistic region (the Akan peoples inhabit much of the southern half of Ghana, and include the large sub-groups Ashanti and Fante, as well as several others). There are many books which collect large numbers of African proverbs, Akan/Ashanti and otherwise, but few give any sort of pithy account as to how they are used by the people, the part creativity plays in their use, and so on. Nor do they attempt to portray the brilliance of many of the users, how the lists of proverbs are maintained, how choosing a proverb is contextually/determined in a specific situation, etc. There is even the factor of how the correct vs. incorrect and/or creative use of a proverb leads to respect being gained or lessened by the individual using it.

There are proverb performance artists; proverbs are used during judicial proceedings, and in educational and religious contexts. Mr. Kwesi Yankah does a masterly job of dissecting the rhetoric, by citing 72 specific proverbs, documenting and further explaining how each was used in a specific situation. The textual analysis is exemplary. For each of the 72 situations, he identifies the type of interaction (e.g. formal judicial proceedings, church sermon, conversation between two people etc.), size of audience, age and gender and/or occupation of the proverb speaker, place/location, and original language. If the proverb was used in the midst of a longer oratorical passage, enough of that verbiage is included so the context is evident - the proverb itself is italicized.

In an appendix, Yankah lists these 72 situational proverbs in Twi (the language of the Akan peoples) along with the equivalent English. All in all, the treatise is well documented with appropriate footnotes, and there is an ample 14-page bibliography of works cited. This is a well-designed and well-executed work - it's not too difficult reading even for a non-specialist such as myself. There are wider implications for world culture as a whole: it helps to dispel the idea (which is probably still floating around) that African discourse is somehow of less substance than that of say, those of Euro-America and Asia. In 1985, it won Indiana University's Esther Kinsley Award for Best Dissertation.

[One of the earliest Akan proverb collections, J. G. Christaller's 'Tshi Proverbs' (1879), had an odious preface which stated that, in effect, the main use for such a work would be for Christian missionaries to better understand how to manipulate the natives to convert to his religion. Christaller's proverbs remained untranslated until later, when Rattray and others began that further work, and for the same stated objective. Many of these other early collectors/translators were also missionaries.]

Note that here Mr. Yankah's surname is spelled incorrectly as "Yanka". For other of his various, available works - please search the correct spelling.

Also please note that there is a serious pagination error in chapter 8: "Proverb Rhetoric and the Judicial Process". You'll have to read the pages in the following order: 214 . . . 218 . . . 215 . . . 216 . . .217 . . . 219. After that everything reverts to normal.

I want to call attention to a new important book that I think many of our members might have missed. It is The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora, by Ahmad Rahman.

The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah is unlike any other book of history I have ever read. Rahman challenges himself with two problems. First,how to account for Kwame Nkrumah's often out of the ordinary behavior in assessing his life. Second, why does Africa, the richest continent in the world , have the poorest people? To answer these questions Rahman invents a new model. He applies the Call,Quest, Return framework of epics and myths to understand the behavior of Nkrumah in Africa (CALL), the African Diaspora (Quest),and finally back in Africa (Return). He also explains Nkrumah's modern behavior with brilliant parallels to the behavior of epic heroes, like Sundiata,Samori Toure, Mwindi,and Sonson of Kaarta. By doing this,he shows where previous authors have denounced Nkrumah's behavior, Nkrunah was acting within an ancient historical/cultural way of epic "heroes" who dedicated their lives to their people. Rather than take what Rahman calls other authors'"intellectual shortcuts" by denouncing Nkrumah's behavior, Rahman did the meticulous historical research to explain why Nkrumah acted as he did. He showed that Nkrumah joined the black Freemasons when he attended Lincoln University. He proved that the structure of these Prince Hall Masons became Nkrumah's model for his conspiratorial organizing later in London. Rahman's book also showed how the African American messianic religious leader Father Divine became a model for Nkrumah to be Ghana and Africa's "divine father."

In the final chapter, the author used the US State Department and the CIA's own documents. He proves that these two entities conspired so that Africa would not unite. The US government's own documents show them dreading that a united Afica could "shift the balance of power in the world." They first conspired with the Belgians to murder Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to stop the success of Pan-Africanism. Finally, they conspired with Ghanian traitors to murder and /or overthrow Nkrumah.The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah is the most innovative and well-written piece of biography I have ever read. It is well worth the money.

Douglas E. Irwin
Chicago,Ill.

I WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED TO FIND A WRITER WHO IS AFRICAN AND HAD THE BRAVERY TO WRITE A WORK OF FICTION THAT HAD CADENCES OF SCIENCE FICTION,MIXING IT WITH THE WELL USED FOLKLORE OF AFRICA.NOT SINCE THE PALM WINE DRINKARD HAVE I BEEN SO MESMERISED AND MOVED BY THE SHERE INVENTIVENESS OF A BOOK.REMINISCENT OF RUSHDIES GRIMUS,THE STORY WAS A JOY TO READ AND INSPIRED ME TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PRODIGIOUS AUTHOR WHOM I FELT WAS POSSESSED WITH THE RARE GIFT OF INVENTIVE BRAVERY.SADLY,TRY AS I MAY I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO OBTAIN ANOTHER OF HIS WORKS,BUT I HAVE BEEN BREATHTAKEN BY CRITICAL REVIEWS OF WEST AFRICAN MAGICAL REALISM WHICH INCLUDE HIS TWO OTHER WORKS.SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP THIS ENGINE CHURN AGAIN,HE REALLY MOVED ME TO ALMOST STEALING THE ONLY COPY I HAVE EVER SEEN OF HIS BOOK(AT THE LIBRARY).I AM A YOUNG AFRICAN POET,WHO WOULD ONE DAY LOVE TO SEE SUCH WORKS AS KOJO LAINGS RE-READ,RE PRINTED,AND HE,REPAYED FOR HIS GREAT SERVISE.

Told in similar fashion as the Legnds of the World Series, Spider and His Son Find Wisdom is an Akan tale, this is a tale that is from the Asante and Fante peoples of the Akan culture of Ghana, according to the book (which is handy information for young readers to have...it makes discussion of the tale more fun by including the opportunity to find the area on a map). As the tale begins, we are introduced to Ananse, a big headed spider from West Africa. We also learn that he told everyone his head was so big because there in was stored all the nyansa (the wisdom) of the world....and naturally, Ananse offered his wise counsel to everyone in the village. When they don't listen to him, Spider becomes angry and decides that the people are unworthy of his wisdom and that he's collect up all his wisdom, put it in a calabash gourd and hide it from the world in his palm tree. What follows is a humorous accounting of his actions in enlisting his sons help finding a gourd big enough for his fine wisdom, Spider sweeping his knowledge out of his house and the village and his hilarious attempts to get his huge gourd of knowledge up into the tree. In the end, wisdom is set free into the world when he realized that he's not the ONLY one with nyansa and that no one can hoard all the knowledge in the world, so he tips the gourd out of the tree and it breaks open, the wisdom escapes.

Overall, this is a humorous tale from Ghana...the text and the illustrations compliment each other perfectly and the text is simple enough for young readers...meaning this book words as a read aloud or as independent reading for beginner readers! There is a lot of humor here, but also a good lesson and I think it's done in a way that will really engage young readers! Additionally there is a glossary at the back, I recommend you have your young reader read it over before starting the story, so that he or she doesn't have to spend time flipping back to make sure they understand what some of the words mean. I give it five stars, what a fun read and a fine introduction to legends, myths and tall tales from Africa!

The price does seem high for this single volume...we checked this out from the library and would recommned the same or buying used...it's a lovely story that I would recommend in a heart beat, but I can't see my way to paying almost 30.00 for a 30 page book.