Ghana Books

Master Weaver from Ghana is great for the entire family to read together. There are so many wonderful photographs in this book. It is definately one of my family's favorites!!!...

With this book you can understand how much tradition is keept up by the poeple who make these beautiful cloths. Excelent picutes demonstrate in a unique way how the cloth is made from the beginning to the end. A good investment if you like to learn about African clothing and weaving tradition! I just wish it had a few more pages. Don't hesitate longer! It's worth it!

This book describes the daily life of a family of weavers of Kente cloth in Ghana. Every page has color photos of African homes, markets, people, and cloth patterns. Ideal for children who enjoy colorful pictures of other countries and for adults wishing to learn more about the art of Kente strip weaving. Includes lists of resources (books and websites)for both kids and adults. I particularly like this book because it shows how indigenous peoples can enter the modern world without sacrificing their cultural traditions.

Great read for those interested in Ghanaian culture and life. Very insightful for those of us children born to Ghanaian parents in the States on what Ghana life and culture is like.

A young man leaves his village in rural Ghana to look for hissister, Mansa,in the capital. The last time the family saw her wastwelve years ago when she was only ten. Arriving in Accra, the brother looks up Duayaw, a fellow villager, who was his sister's classmate in grade school. Duayaw thinks he's on a crazy mission. Where are they going to find her? Now at the age of twenty-two, she could even be married. The city-wise Duayaw actually suspects worse but being the polite host, he complies. "In the Cutting of a Drink" is one of eleven short stories in No Sweetness Here and Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian writer.

Aidoo's novel, Changes, won the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. No Sweetness Here was originally published in the United States by Doubleday in 1971. But it first appeared the previous year through Longman of Britain. The last Doubleday printing was in 1972. It was re-issued by the Feminist Press, the world's oldest continuing feminist publisher, which is primarily concerned with restoring important out-of-print historical and literary works by women.

On the surface, "In the Cutting of a Drink" is a simple story. But a lot takes place. It demonstrates well the talent possessed by Aidoo who has also written poems and plays and served as Ghana's minister of education from 1982 to 1983. The story is narrated by Mansa's brother to his immediate family, other relatives, and some villagers. Aidoo cherishes the African oral tradition and in the tale the burden rests entirely with her narrating character. He must sustain his audience's attention and he succeeds. The result of his search is withheld till the end.

His amazement of the city sounds exaggerated by today's standards but one has to keep in mind that Aidoo wrote the stories during the decade after Ghana's independence from Britain in 1957. To rural folk, Accra held novelty. "Each time I tried to raise my eyes, I was dizzy from the number of cars which were passing," the narrator explains. At another point he describes his experience while walking along the streets at night with Duayaw: "The whole place was as clear as the sky. Some of these lights are very beautiful indeed." Such descriptions, while captivating to the villagers, are nevertheless delivered in a tone that depicts the city as a crazy place.

When No Sweetness Here was first published, there were already troubling political developments in Ghana. The country, which holds a unique place in the sub-Saharan region for being the first to gain independence, had a military coup in 1966. Its first civilian president, Kwame Nkrumah, the pan-Africanist and pioneering statesman, was toppled. Taken as a whole,these short stories therefore grapple with the social challenges of the first years of independent rule in the country.

Ghanaians, like most Africans, were in between the end of colonial rule and a new nation in the making. Villagers arrived in the city in search of new opportunities. Young Africans--a small elite--returned from western universities and moved into the offices and residences vacated by the British. And corruption by the new public officials began to get noticed. In tackling these issues, Aidoo is a refreshing alternative in the African literary field which is dominated by men. One gets intriguing glimpses of Ghanaian women encountering everyday joys and tragedies.

The short stories in the book are really a listening experience. One is either listening to a monologue or conversation depending on the number of narrators. The strength in Aidoo's emphasis on the oral skills of her characters is that they have a lot of room to be themselves. They pronounce words as some people actually do in Ghana. They say "Klase Tri" for "Class Three," "Chicha" for "Teacher," "Kudiimin-o" for "Good evening" and so on. For the unfamiliar reader, the stories can pose a challenge for one must scramble to learn and visualize the Ghanaian setting. The narrators often don't provide any background--they just start unfolding their tales.

The book's afterword, written by Ketu H. Katrak, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is useful for it provides some context. Today, words and phrases like "highlife," "nation-building," and "white man's land," which are used by Aidoo, sound slightly archaic though they were in vogue during the heady days of independence. Reading No Sweetness Here is to journey back to a period when Africa was supposed to make a fresh start, a period that now feels far away.

Much like Arundhati Roy (in "God of Small Things") and Sandra Cisneros (in "House on Mango Street"), Ama Ata Aidoo often uses the experiences, expectations, and disappointments of children to paint the portrait of a culture and a community. It's not a novel literary device, but in the hands of the right craftswoman, one that can be used to great affect and Aidoo doesn't disappoint. The book includes eleven short stories and a fine, if superfluous, afterword by Ketu Katrak.

This pleasant collection of short stories has something for everyone, especially those who might like to imagine everyday life in West Africa and immigrant experiences in the United States. (The book club average was actually 3.5 stars, but Amazon cannot accommodate half measures.) As other reviews have noted, the best stories take place on Zongo Street, where Ali weaves a vivid tapestry. Many club members felt that the stories based in the US didn't seem as touching. There was almost complete agreement that the story "Rachmaninov" was the least favorite, with some members suggesting the plot line seems derived from the movie "Pulp Fiction". The club was divided on "Live In", some members wishing this story was either longer, or expanded into a complete novel.

Needless to say, my favorites were the ones set in or near Zongo Street, in the West African nation of Ghana (formerly Gold Coast). Here we meet a bizarre assortment of thieves, prophets, bullies, tea store owners and their overweight wives,taxi drivers, ghost masquesaders, and many others, including many not much different than you and me. All these tales are beautifully done and just about perfect, and there is some of the zaniest humor you will ever encounter. So, for some really different world literature, why not press the button, and order this collection right now?!

Mohammed Naseehu Ali's gift is to be captivating. I have walked Zongo Street. Mo, thank you for guiding me there. I knew you as a wizard of the drum, I have found you to be a magician of the pen. Your pen dishes out phenomenal images with which I have never before been infused. Your talents continue to astound and impress me. Your real gift is the gift of yourself that you share so candidly. The Prophet of Zongo Street is delicious. Thank you.

Now, where can I hear you play again? Will you be drumming at your book signings?

In Ghana, paying cinema customer line up around a glorified TV set and watch the dross of American cinema, striaght-to-video stuff starring Jan Michael Vincent or Chuck Norris. And to publicize these films, artists paint posters in raging, primitive style with images not usually found in the films. The art is just incredible and horrendous (in the best meanings of the term) and one can only speculate on what cultural filters go into their making. THE coffee table book of the year.

If you're going to insist on having coffee-table books lying around your house, you might as well have one filled with lurid, hand-painted posters for movies like "Hell Comes to Frogtown," "The Fatal Flying Guillotines," or "Confessions of a Window Cleaner," right? Well, you've come to the right place, 'cause here is just such a book-filled with beautiful color reproductions of posters for these, and many other fine movies, straight outta... Ghana. For a period of about ten years, from the mid-'80s to the mid '90s, entrepreneurs in Ghana ran traveling movie screenings, featuring the latest (or not so latest) videos from America and elsewhere. Their agents would pull into town, rent a public viewing space, set up a TV and VCR running off a little generator, unfurl a poster, and voila-instant movie house. Here, presented for the first time in the West are several hundred of the posters, divided into sections with little one-page celebrity introductions, along with a few art expert essays. It depressingly comes as no surprise that of the 230 pages devoted to the posters, 200 are in the "action/adventure," "war and urban commando," "horror," "science fiction and fantasy," and "martial arts" sections, with only 30 pages on "comedy and drama." Interestingly, this last section is largely filled with homegrown films from Ghana and Nigeria, with very few American entries. Clearly, this is because American humor and drama don't export as well as guns, blood, and sex, which are universal-although this is left unstated.

What is stated in most of the section introductions is fairly bland praise to the tune of "look how movies can cross cultures and have meaning even in Africa" and "see how these movies fit into the rich tradition of storytelling." Screenwriter Walter Hill at least has the honesty to say "many of these posters are more interesting than the films." The essays by the art experts attempting to place these posters in a larger historical context of African art manage to utterly fail. Particularly egregious is Deidre Evans-Pritchard's inane assertion that "Just as British television dramas are culturally repackaged for American audiences, so the hand-painted movie posters serve to claim the movies for the people of West Africa." The notion that one businessman paying an semiprofessional artist to paint an advertising poster for "Leprechaun 2" (page 199) so that other people will pay money to watch it somehow "claims" it, is patently silly. The critical difference with her analogy is that the advertising is slightly repackaged, the content certainly isn't. As I leafed through the book, seeing endless images of guns, bare breasts, blood, Rambo, Van Damme, Delta Force, and the like, I was vaguely unsettled. If, through cultural globalization, this is all they're getting from the U.S., what effect will it have on their cultural production, or on their perception of America? Whatever the answer-this is a great book to leave lying around your coffee table. A great companion to this is What It Is... What It Was, which is a slightly less lavish book on blaxploitation poster art.

I liked this book very much because it covers the entire life of a remarkable man, who I admire so much. I am thankful to Meisler for this in-depth, objective and complete account of so many little-known facts and events from the life of Kofi Annan that I am sure will urge you to read it cover to cover. There is a lot you can and will learn from this book and that's why I highly recommend it.

The United Nations is becalmed. Kofi Annan, the courtly, quietly-spoken Ghanaian, a fixture on our television screens for a decade, has gone; his successor as secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, has yet to stamp his personality on the world body.



In the hiatus Stanley Meisler, journalist, author, UN insider, has led the inevitable rush to publish a summation of the Annan years. He is well qualified to do so.



The dustcover of this book is a pointer to the treatment Meisler gives his subject in a biography which Annan did not authorise, but did not try to block. The former secretary general is pictured half in shadow, looking worried, almost shifty in his dark, pin-striped business suit.



It is not the image we are used to, yet in many ways appropriate, because this was a secretary generalship of sunshine and shadow - the Nobel Peace Prize and the oil-for-food scandal; East Timorese independence and always and inevitably, the Iraq conflict.



It was a time of steadily worsening relations between the UN and the United States, although the antagonism began well before Annan took office and continued despite his best efforts to find a middle way. His relations with the Clinton White House, always testy after the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, plunged to new depths when the neo-conservative-dominated Bush Administration took office in 2001.



He was powerless to influence a presidency determined to avenge the death and destruction of 9/11. The fact he even tried earned condemnation and while President George W. Bush may have talked about the "unique legitimacy" of the United Nations, in the minds of those at the White House the uniqueness and the legitimacy existed only when it was bestowed on the US to do what it wanted to do.



Key Bush adviser Richard Perle openly looked forward to the death of the UN in the wake of the initially successful invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the ultimate insult was delivered with the appointment of the far right ideologue, John Bolton, as American Ambassador to the international body.



The fiction that Bolton was there to promote UN reform was paper thin. As Meisler writes, there were plenty of institutions that needed the reforming touch including, after the 2000 election, the American system of casting and counting votes. "But the clamour for UN reform was different. It was incessant, very loud and very suspicious"....coming too often from "American ideologues who wanted to paint a false image of the UN as corrupt, slovenly, wasteful, inefficient and anti-American".



Throughout these turbulent times, Annan struggled to enhance what little clout the UN possessed in whatever way he could. While his predecessor, Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had been a remote figure, Annan took to the celebrity circuit, becoming a fixture in New York society, attending an endless round of parties giving and receiving advice whenever and wherever he could. While naturally a charming man, one has the feeling that this was not his ideal modus operandi, but circumstances forced him to play the public relations card



Meisler reveals the endless sniping from Washington took its toll on the secretary general. He suffered two bouts of depression to the point where a sympathetic French President, Jacques Chirac, pleaded with him: "You must pull yourself together". On the second occasion at the height of the row over oil-for-food with the American right baying for his blood, a number of colleague persuaded Annan to attend two secret meetings "to shake him out of his low feelings". It is a measure of the man that he responded and returned to task with renewed vigour.



For me some of the most interesting parts of this book deal with Annan's early life. A long-serving UN bureaucrat, he worked mostly out of sight behind the scenes and it was only in the early 1990s that he emerged as a possible contender for the top job. The young Kofi was an athlete with an eye for the girls who briefly considered a career as a businessman running a flour mill in Ghana and served a short term as that country's tourism chief.



Even when he was settled at the UN, his ultimate ambition did not stretch beyond assistant secretary general rank, but fate decreed otherwise.



This is a thoroughly readable book which sheds light on a complicated, brilliant yet vulnerable individual who steered the UN safely though some of the worst years in its history. Whether this course can be maintained by his successor remains to be seen.

This book does a good job of showing the evolution of Kwame Nkrumah's thought. It not only details Nkrumah's many accomplishments but his mistakes especially the ones that led to his fall from power. The book contains many interesting facts about Nkrumah's life, such as his having been baptized as a Catholic and being a choirboy in his youth. Nkrumah spent many years in America where he learned much about America's race problem and met famous African-Americans such as Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright. Despite Nkrumah's overthrow with the help of the CIA, Nkrumah's influence on the African Liberation and Pan-African movement is still strong.

Contrary to my expectations this turned out to be a good biography of Nkrumah and highlighted his many great achievements. It reassessed him and his place in history in a positive light. A must have for Nkrumah admirers.

I bought a total of four books from this website a few weeks ago, three from Amazon and one (stupidly) from a private seller. The books from Amazon were inexpensive, mint-condition, AND they gave me free S & H as well! I am learning Punjabi and Hindi (just a few languages from India) and this book was perfect as it has dialogue, which helps you learn even better than just reading from a narrator's point of view. It's just a great deal and I am extremely happy with it! I happened also to buy this book during a bad weather week that we had, and still it came in two weeks, which for free S & H is wonderful! Good job Amazon, and thank you.

This book is about a leopard who is very proud and his name is Osebo. I liked it when Achicheri (the tortoise) trapped Osebo in his drum. Then Achicheri took the drum with the leopard inside to the sky god, Nyame. A python, an elephant and a monkey all tried to get Osebo's drum, but they failed. But Achicheri got the drum by tricking Osebo. It was a great read.

I love to use "living books" like this instead of textbooks to teach about other countries and cultures. Your children will learn about Kente cloth, and ponder the relationship between the patterns in nature and those we create ourselves. When the spider weaver dances as she spins, webs become things of wonder to the reader--no longer objects to be brushed away, but works of art.

The illustrations are lush and draw you right into the story. The glossary and pronunciation guide at the end are also helpful, especially if you plan to read this aloud. (I found the names surprisingly difficult to pronounce!)

We read The Spider Weaver as part of a unit based on the story of "Joseph's Coat" in the Golden Children's Bible. My children then drew their own Kente cloth patterns.

This is a good, solid, enjoyable tale for all ages. It did not quite reach the level of greatness for me, but my 6-year-old son thought it did.

Two weavers, walking through the jungle on their way home to their Ashanti village, find an amazing web, unlike anything they've ever seen, in a banana tree. Both men want to bring the web home so that they can study its unique and intricate design, but when they try to detach it from the tree, it falls apart and is ruined. When one of the weavers tells his wife about their lost discovery, she suggests that even though they can't find the web again, they may be able to find the weaver. So the two men go back to the banana tree and as they approach, see the beginnings of another marvelous creation. As they watch, they realize that this master web weaver is a spider. The men spend the day watching the spider do her weaving dance, twisting, turning and dipping as she moves back and forth across her web. By the end of the day, the weavers have learned her special technique and hurry home to begin weaving this new design which they name kente-nwen-ntoma, or Kente cloth..... Margaret Musgrove's well researched retelling of this wonderful Ghanaian legend will charm and delight children of all ages. Her simple, gentle text is beautifully complemented by Julia Cairns' bold, vibrant watercolor artwork and together this dynamic duo brings this very visual folktale to life. Perfect for youngsters 5 and up, The Spider Weaver includes an afterword about the story and the history of Kente cloth and is a terrific introduction to African folklore that shouldn't be missed.

I recommend this book for those who desire an introduction to African approaches to religion. With his anthropological methodology, Fisher attempts to remain objective. The reader will also appreciate the study guides at the end of the chapters that help to reinforce the material.

While simply written, I did catch a couple factual errors: Cecil Rhodes was the capitalist baron of South Africa, not "East Africa" (164); and the term "negritude" is more closely associated with Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

I also found that Fisher's view of reality is obscured by his assumptions about the normalcy of European culture. It is obviously implicit that he sees his evolutionary assumptions about life in Africa as "scientific" (14), but relegates the etiological stories of the Akan to "myth" (43). Also, I am surprised that a work that utilized an impressive amount of secondary sources did not incorporate the monumental study of Kofi Owusa Mensa (Saturday God and Adventistm in Ghana. Frankfurt: Lang, 1993). In fact, even in discussing the significance of days (22), Fisher never once mentions that Onyame, the supreme being of the Akan, is also known as Onyame Kwame-the Saturday God. He says there are no "shrines to Nyame" (49), but do shrines have to be physical? Can they be temporal? Hopefully a second edition will fill these significant lacunae.

I have been scouring Amazon for books on the Akan peoples of Western Africa and came up with this one. What a find! Culture, traditional religious beliefs, proverbs, Christianity, and Islam are all here, tied together with a historical perspective that is just what I was looking for. One of the most interesting things was that he uses the book "Things Fall Apart" for much of his discussion. Reading that book at the same time as this one enriched my understanding of both. Definitely worth the time spent.

This is one of my favorite books of the last 200 years for the simple reason that my sister, Nancy, was walking down a street in New York and she heard a commotion from within a Manhattan bookstore, and when she poked her head in, who to her wondering eyes did appear but regal, imperious, humorous poet Maya Angelou reading from what was then (2004) her very latest autobiography. With trepidation, Nancy entered the store and managed to strike up a brief conversation with the author, and when she told Dr. Angelou that her brother, Kevin, was a poet in the Bay Area, the good Doctor grabbed a sharpie and scrawled my name on the title page, with a special message just for me--"Joy." Later I found out that this was not the most joyful time (personally speaking) for Dr. Angelou and that private trials and tribulations were wracking her soul and conscience--but she had the show business stance of, "give your audience what they deserve"and so she was able to impart her words of joy (or one word) to me once the book was wrapped and sitting underneath my Christmas tree. I shook it and held it to my ear, never guessing it was a book, never guessing that every word might have been written directly to be whispered into my ear.

I enjoyed finding out what Malcolm X and Dr., King were like, not as political figures per se, but as friends. We all know their history and the huge place they filled in the civil rights struggle here in America, but in this book, volume 6 of her autobiography, we find out how they (and also Nichelle Nichols from the original STAR TREK) fit into the colorful and florid pattern of Dr. Angelou;s voyage. We are present when she is trying to keep body and soul together by scraping out radio jingles and topical songs based on Philip Roth's PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. (By the way, when is that fugitive track going to appear on the long-awaited boxed set collection of Dr. Angelou's songwriting genius? We were promised this by Rhino over seven years ago!) She brings us to the intimate home life of the beautiful Abbey Lincoln and also Rosa Guy, both of them welcoming spirits who made a place in their homes for the wandering soul of rolling stone Maya Angelou. Is there any place that has not been blessed with a visit from the author?

At bottom the book is sad, because, despite everything, she was in Ghana for much of the period exploring her African roots and the humid tendrils of her sexuality, and therefore she missed seeing firsthand what went down in the Audubon ballroom, a story she has often told. You don't really get a good sense of her relationships with people here, other than Guy a little bit. I think she was too mournful and driven to write this book with the same care as her previous books, but subsequent work both in Hallmark cards and other forms of writing, have seen a triumphant return. I wish her one word-- "Joy." Thanks, Nancy!

This is one of the six autobiographical works by Maya Angelou.

Here, Maya Angelou returns to the U.S. after living in Ghana working with Malcolm X.

When she gets back to her home, she finds out Malcolm X has been assassinated. This saddens and upsets her but confuses her too, since a black man has killed him. Eventually, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asks Maya to go around to black churches to try to gain support for the Poor People's March. But he too gets assassinated.

This work is full of depth and words that will help you delve into yourself and your feelings.

If you like this book, you may like to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which follows this.

First let me say that I am a huge Maya Angelou fan! I couldn't wait to add "A Sung Flung Up to Heaven" to my library. When it arrived, I poured a cup of tea and dug in. When I finished, I felt a little cheated. It seemed that she rushed through this book, leaving me wanting more. It's a lovely book overall, but I expected more detail, more artistry... more Maya... in this final installment. I wanted more personal perspective on her relationships with Malcolm X and Dr. King. I'm still a big fan, but this book missed the mark a bit for me.

I am an avid fan of Ms. Angelou and actively collect her books. Please continue to provide her works, especially her older books.

When a representative of Random House contacted Angelou with the suggestion that she write an autobiography at the tender age of forty, she demurred, and he lay down a challenge by saying that she might be right to refuse, for writing autobiography as literature is nearly impossible to do. Angelou picked up that challenge and met it squarely, for her six-volume autobiography does indeed qualify as literature. As has been noted in several reviews of her other books in this series, she writes not the dry facts of her existence but rather the colorful and expressive interpretation of those facts. Instead of recounting happenings, she paints for the reader her interpretation of them, their significance, and their place in her universe. History may underlie her writing, but it is the view that Angelou has of those historical events that gives her books interest and meaning.

A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN is the concluding volume of Angelou's autobiographical writings, and, by itself, it is of limited instruction for the reader. It is quite brief, easily read in a single sitting. The first short chapters present a skeletal synopsis of her personal history. The final chapter gives wing to her philosophical view of humankind. In between, the reader is given a glimpse of the frustrations leading to the Watts Riots and of the despair occasioned by the assassinations of Malcolm X and of Martin Luther King. This volume also continues earlier books' insightful descriptions of King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, adding much to the understanding of these men by the general public.

This slim volume is indeed the conclusion of the other five books that comprise Angelou's autobiographical works detailing the first half of her life. It is no more logical to begin reading this book without having first read the others than it is to read the final chapter of a novel before enjoying all of the preceding chapters. If one is to comprehend this book fully, he must begin with I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS and follow with its successors until he reaches A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN in the proper course of things.

If a criticism must be lodged against this book, it is only that its brevity is such that it scarcely warrants being published as a separate volume. It could easily have been appended to the preceding book, ALL GOD'S CHILDREN NEED TRAVELING SHOES. The fact that the end of the book comes so quickly forces the reader to wonder whether Angelou tired of her writing project, ran headlong into an ultimate publishing deadline, or wished to eke out a bit more recompense from her publisher by forcing one additional volume through his presses.

Some of the preceding autobiographical volumes have been described as having perhaps a bit too much virulence against Whites, perhaps a little too much hyperbole concerning the enduring effects of historical slavery. Some of Angelou's statements reveal a "reverse racism," to use one of her own phrases. Of course, the social climate in the United States during much of Angelou's life hardly engendered loving relations between White and Black citizens, yet the non-aggression of a Martin Luther King grew and matured in this environment, making Angelou's strident condemnations of the White population as much a factor of her own personality as of her social environment, and, after many pages, that stridency becomes tiresome. This final volume, however, is free of such hostility and is much more accepting of good people regardless of their color.

In brief, if one has read the first five volumes of Angelou's autobiography, then by all means do finish with this sixth one. On the other hand, picking this one up and reading it first will deprive the reader of an accurate appreciation of Angelou's artistry, in both its strengths and its weaknesses, as a prose writer and may well leave the reader with a complete mis-perception of Angelou's autobiographical books. Angelou's autobiographical series is one of those things that really should be experienced in the order of their creation, and doing so will give the reader a captivating view of this most unusual author and poet.