Ghana Books

I never received my order and the company just blamed it on slow mail. I waited over a month before getting my money back.

A rather nice lady gave me this book and asked me to read it. I did. When I returned it to her I asked her why she wanted me to read it. I had never heard of Maya Angelou and unfortunately I found the book very unimpressive. The writing was done well and the phrasing was nice but as far as having something to say, I thought that it was rather shallow. I thought the author of the book to be rather mediocre, somewhat insensitive, and very much enamored with herself. This wasn't the life of Mahatma Gandhi or Desmond Tutu. She seemed to me to be a typical woman on a personal journey to success and all the people around her were stepping stones along that path.
Since that time I have picked up tapes of poetry by Maya and I enjoyed them - not so much for the content but for the presentation. Sorry. We all have our opinions.

her poems are so great. They teach great valuable lessons that we should all here.

I thought it was a great book. It was my first ever read of Maya Angelou. I think the book has made me a fan of her. Her style of writing was mellifluous, sincere, and truthful.

I am not a very emotional person, but the part that made my eyes water was when Maya went to the market in Kato, as the book ended. She met Ewe women who instantly confused her for an Ewe. They were sure Maya was an Ewe decendant because of her features and tone of voice. Once, she was mistaken for a Bambara, and an Ahanta as well. It was beautiful. I admire Maya for her having fortitude and being curious and passionate. She loves her people and was more than willing to come back home to America to help them by working for Malcolm X, promoting civil rights, et al. I have great respect for her. She also learnt how to speak the Fanti language, which I would guess was not easy.

It was a great autobiography. I wonder what would have happened if she had married the Malian Fulfulde man.

From purely a literary standpoint, I find ALL GOD'S CHILDREN NEED TRAVELING SHOES perhaps the best of Angelou's series of autobiographical works that I have encountered thus far. It is the fifth "installment," having been preceded by I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME, SINGIN' AND SWINGIN' AND GETTIN' MERRY LIKE CHRISTMAS, and THE HEART OF A WOMAN. While I suppose that any of these could be read in isolation, to do so would be analogous to reading a single chapter from a full-length novel. One may enjoy the contents of that single chapter but will miss all the background material that explains how the characters reached that point in time and space as well as everything that follows to explain and wrap-up the story. For the same reasons, one really should read each of Angelou's books and in chronological order, too. Consequently, if one is examining reader reviews before purchasing ALL GOD'S CHILDREN, and if this is the first of Angelou's books being considered, please wait. Reading the others first will enhance significantly the reader's enjoyment of this one.

Pure autobiographies tend, in my experience, to be rather dull reading for the most part. Where is the excitement in a list of events and dates? That sort of dry recitation of historical facts is the reason that most of us were likely bored to somnambulance by our high school history textbooks. Happily, this is not at all that sort of autobiography. What one finds in Angelou's books is the world seen through her eyes and interpreted by her mind, and she carries with her the filters built strand by strand by her life experiences.

What "life experiences"? Being born Black into a legally, socially, culturally and thoroughly segregated country. Being abandoned by one's father. Being shipped across country by one's mother to be raised by an aging grandparent. Feeling the constant scorn and belittlement fostered by racial segregation. Bearing a child when one is still herself a child. Being duped by another into prostitution. Failing at an attempt at marriage. On the other hand, conversing with such figures as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Touring Europe as member of a musical cast. Living in Africa. Angelou's experiences, both negative and positive, were emotionally extreme, or at least significant, events, and they created interpretative filters that are quite different from those of essentially all of her readers. This difference is what makes her books captivating to read and worthy of her readers' consideration.

I suggest that the epitome of Angelou's skill as a prose author of the first five books I have mentioned above comes in the closing chapter of ALL GOD'S CHILDREN. Her encounter with the Ewe tribal women in the marketplace in Ghana's village of Keta is expressed in nearly supernatural terms. In the actual event, she is merely mistaken for another person, but, to Angelou, the encounter firmly establishes Africa as her spiritual homeland, the origin of her own ancestors who, generations earlier, were sold into slavery in a strange land across the ocean. The skill with which she describes her feelings at this encounter is one to which any writer might aspire.

I must admit to another aspect of Angelou's writing that I find almost annoying, however, and that is her repeated and continuous reference to the effects of slavery. If any evil exists in the universe, if sin seeks an embodiment, if a cause for all the misery in the contemporary world must be identified, Angelou finds it in slavery. Judging solely by the attitude revealed in these five books, one could conclude only that all Caucasians are blue-eyed devils, that they alone made possible the eternal and unforgivable sin of enslavement, that no redemption is possible and that racial integration is never achievable or even desirable. If there is such a concept as "original sin," it has nothing to do with a mythological Adam or Eve in a "garden of Eden" but rather with the insufferable conceit of Whites and the horror of slavery, most particularly slavery in the United States. To judge by the attitude that pervades these five books, one would think that Angelou was herself born into slavery, exploited economically and sexually by her White masters, and denigrated to the very edge of sanity. Not to excuse or to minimize in any way the physical and emotional pain of slavery, its immorality or absence of any ethical justification whatsoever, but "methinks the lady doth protest too much." She claims for herself an understanding of the debasement of slavery that her own history does not support. She assumes a mantle as spokesperson for long dead generations that she is not qualified to wear. To what extent historical slavery and racial prejudice may bear the blame for what were her own poor choices in life I am hardly qualified to say, yet I would caution the reader to bear in mind the fact that we are seeing events through the author's intellectual filters and that no one's filters are totally objective.

Having said that, I hurriedly add that my critical observation should in no way deter anyone from reading Angelou's books. On the contrary, while I may feel that she is at times presumptuous in assuming spokesperson status on the topics of slavery and contemporary racial bigotry, her perceptions provide many revelations for her readers and are worth noting. On now to the next book of this series, A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN.

Published in 1968, this was Armah's first novel. It depicted corruption and societal breakdown in a newly independent African nation, seen through the eyes of a citizen disillusioned by the materialism and decay he encountered, who found himself struggling to maintain his integrity.

The book was based on the experience of Ghanaians in the late 1950s and 1960s under the administration of Kwame Nkrumah. The nation's first leader after independence, he mismanaged the economy and was overthrown two years before the novel's publication. The work's considered to be among the key novels that began to reflect criticism of newly established native African governments following the exhilaration of freedom from colonial rule.

Regrettably, I found the first two-thirds of the book to be plodding and often obscure, and the action uninteresting. It took 60 pages, one-third of the novel, to get the main character from a bus to an office to his home, through conversations with a bus driver, a relative, his wife and a teacher. Initially, there was little description of the characters' thoughts other than through dialogue. New characters were introduced abruptly, with little clue as to who they were; for example, the woman named Manaan in Chapter 6. Sixty pages into the book, a nameless, first-person narrator began speaking for half a chapter before dropping out.

Too many of these passages went something like this:

"Question bounces off unheeded as the naked man gets up off the bed, takes a pencil from the top of the bookcase near the bed and sticks it in to mark the page. He puts the book on the case and sits back down on the bed, pushing his back against the head and drawing up his knees."

And 40 pages later, this:

"The naked man stood up on the bed and tried to reach over to the door and take down a pair of trousers hanging on a nail behind it, but at his touch the door swung left and away from him, and he had to jump down and go round to get the trousers. He slipped them on over his naked body and took down a T-shirt from another nail."

Many of these passages called to mind the style of the French New Novelists: painstaking description of moment-by-moment action to create a certain atmosphere, combined with a deemphasis of character, background and plot. Maybe this style was considered suitable for conveying the atmosphere of powerlessness. Disliking the style, I found it tedious and hard to appreciate.

Closer toward the book's end, more of the main character's thoughts began to be gradually introduced. The last third of the novel, describing an important dinner at the main character's home with a corrupt representative of the regime and the fateful aftermath, was written in a more realistic way and told a more dramatic story, where plot and character came more sharply into focus. The ending seemed appropriate and was far from optimistic.

For me, the novel was most memorable for its descriptions of the indignities of the new country: enslaving admiration for those with material wealth, no matter how it was gained; the humiliation and envy of those who lacked it; a dead-end job and the virtual absence of hope or an opportunity to better oneself; corruption and the pressure to join in and trade integrity for scraps, for the sake of one's children. And the ultimate futility of it all, what the author called the "horrible cycle of the powerless."

The novel was also memorable for its variety of pungent images of filth, which served to communicate both the urban atmosphere and moral decay:

"Sounds arise and kill all smells as the bus pulls into the dormitory town. Past the big public lavatory the stench claws inward to the throat. Sometimes it is understandable that people spit so much, when all around decaying things push inward and mix all the body's juices with the taste of rot . . . . Hot smell of caked s--- split by afternoon's baking sun, now touched by still evaporating dew. The nostrils, incredibly, are joined in a way that is most horrifying direct to the throat itself and to the entrails right through to their end."

Although I found much of the book's style uninteresting until the last third, by the end the writer had managed to convey a strong sense of what life was like, physically and psychologically, under a corrupt regime.

This is an utterly disgusting book, with major gratuitous bodily fluid scenes in almost every chapter. As I get grossed out easily, it was tough getting through this.

But Armah's extraordinary ability to paint imagery is undeniable, and though you may get images stuck in your head that you didn't exactly want there, this book effectively portrays a culture of corruption and despair in the last months of Kwame Nkrumah's presidency before the coup.

The draw to the story is following the protagonist's noble battle, facing the unenviable dilemma of choosing between the love of those closest to him and preservation of his integrity in a society where corruption and accepting bribes is the norm.

Not any one of Soyinka's or Achebe's books can hold a candle to this particular work by Ayi Kwei Armah. I studied this book for a critical appreciation of Literature course at University in the '80s and until this moment the grating images of corruption and a derelict society that breeds corruption upon itself still erupts vividly in my head. Ayi Kwei Armah succinctly and subtly depicts corruption through his writing with bold imagery and flawless writing.
You would pick this book up to read three decades after it was written, and it would still seem like a novel that just came out; it still rings true to this day in many corrupt societies and it is a book that should be up there with the greatest literary giants of our time.

T.J. Nanna, Author: Mind Untamed: Collected Poems

Beautiful Ones was required reading at secondary school. I didn't quite understand it, all the same it left an impression, and early this year i sought it out. It is an amazing book. Two weeks of careful reading, my copy is left heavily lined and dog-eared.

I strongly recommend it to all budding social revolutionaries.

It is one lone man's struggle against seemingly inescapable corruption and filth. A "settled mind"/resolved principles triumphs in the face of hunger, severe poverty, a nagging wife and his own conscience.

His stance is eventually justified when the corrupt government along with his much envied politician friend falls.

There is a lot of filth- environment, human nature, even language. Nothing is spared. Its easy to get caught up in its general ugliness. This is ironically the beauty of the book and does not rob it of its essence. For those who have not been exposed to widespread corruption, rotteness or had to struggle with "doing the right thing" and against all the odds, it may seem a "sick book".

I have just completed this book and can only say that i would not have read it had i not been required to. It is the story of a poor man in a material world who, despite the pressures around and within him, is able to maintain a sense of dignity within himself. The author manages to create vivd scenes of filth and vileness throughout the novel but the plot leaves something to be desired. Characters are vague and action begins very late in the text. Despite valiant attempts to create a classic, this book still belongs in the attic with all the other dusty volumes. The only people i would recommend this to would be those who love descriptions and those who act too perky.

On the whole I was underwhelmed by this guidebook (this was my first Bradt purchase, I usually stick to Lonely Planet or Rough Guides) It has some good basics and background information, and does cover much of the country. The first person writing style is a bit much but that is a personal preference.

I think my main issue is that when there are hotels and restaurants listed in the guide (without addresses) not on the maps- which by the way don't even have the streets accurately labeled for the second largest town in Ghana (Kumasi)... you know you are in trouble. That kind of a let down is a bit much for me as I often rely on guides for logistics. And while many of my friends who were living in Ghana for 2-3 months bought it, they all seemed to think the same as me. Provides generals, fairly useful as a doorstop, but not so much on the other information.

Honestly since I stuck to the main track (Accra, Cape Coast/Elmina, Kumasi) I probably would have been fine with the LP West Africa guide. I cant honestly suggest the guide (and personally am not likely to get another Bradt Guide), though despite sounding negative I wouldn't say you shouldn't get it... just be aware that it isn't exactly accurate or reliable.

I used the earlier edition of this book in 2000 and it was top notch. However, here in the fall of 2008, the 4th edition is not at all up to par. I have tried to visit many restaurants that have been closed for a long time. The hotel reviews do not match up either. (For instance, Hotel Shangri-la has lost its steam and no one should pay the upper $100 / 130 GHC it now costs - at a minimum! And at night, the restaurant and bar is filled with foreign men and prostitutes... not what most vacationers are looking for.)

The cedi has changed so the book really must change as well. There are also many new roads and buildings.

I would not buy this until they have revised -- and by revising they must come out to revisit and relearn all of the places mentioned!

i have found this book thorough and trustworthy - and definitely much better than the lonely planet. recommended for independent-minded travellers

As I write I am currently traveling in Ghana. The Bradt guide is incredibly thorough and up to date. I have traveled to many different regions relatively hassle free. That is it to say, Ghana works at a very different pace but the Bradt guide helped prepare me.

One note: Buy a map of Ghana and Accra, it will be very helpful. Accra is cluttered and confusing and demands more detail than the 2 page map in the Bradt guide.

Either way the book couldn't be much better.

This book is very detailed and helpful, the only problem is that much of the information has not been updated for quite some time. There are many places listed that are no longer in existance (restaurants, banks, etc) and many new places that are nowhere to be found in the book. It says it was updated in 2007 but I was in Ghana in early 2008 and most of these things I am referring to have been around (or not been around) for quite some time. Also, the prices mentioned in the book are about 50% lower than what can be expected when you go to Ghana, and perhaps even more given the rapid rate of inflation there; the prices of almost everything went up at least some amount during my 4-month stay there, from beach fares down to avocados at the fruit stands.

A few nitpicky details:
The book recommends against taking public busses without air conditioning (and therefore does not give schedules for them). However, on a tight schedule or budget (or even not) the non-air-conditioned busses are more than comfortable.
Also, the book says that a taxi ride to Mole National Park from Tamale should take about 2 hours (or 2.5, I can't remember). This is WRONG, it takes about 5 hours.
The fee to get into Labadi Beach was 2c on weekdays, 4c on weekends and holidays, not the .50c that the book cites. (This discrepancy is probably due to the general unreliability of prices/rapid inflation mentioned earlier.)
The book mentions Macumba nightclub as a popular place in Accra. I lived across the street from Macumba, and the only people for whom it is popular are hookers and the creepy men looking for hookers. To be fair, the book does allude to this. Other popular nightspots that aren't mentioned in the book include Cinderella's, The Office, Tantra, and Aphrodesiac.

Overall, the book is certainly the best on the market as far as Ghana travel goes, if not solely for the reason that it is the only book that I am aware of dedicated to Ghana and not just West Africa with a tiny section on Ghana. It provides reliable enough information to be able to get around the country, as well as valuable background information on Ghanaian culture and history. Travellers should simply be forwarned that not everything in this book can be taken at face value, and travel plans (and budgets) need to be flexible enough to accomodate for this fact.

One lesson of this book is that the pain of history doesn't go away easily. It isn't erased through generations of being American rather than African, and it certainly isn't resolved by just going back to Africa. I read this book before my own trip to Ghana, to get a travelogue sense of what to experience, and came away disappointed. The author spends much time standing around the old slave forts feeling lost and sad, searching for a sense of their evil, while all around her life goes on as normal, as life tends to do. She wants to see some signs of what happened there, something like markers, memorials, grave-like images of loss. She wants acknowledgment. She wants people to be weeping there, wailing, to have heads bowed over the horrible crime. Of course they don't, and of course the locals are used to Western people coming there for the sole purpose of feeling their own self-produced overwhelming emotion. There are thousands of crimes committed against humanity in the last several hundred years, and not all sites, despite the overwhelming scale, are treated as hallowed ground.

Her subject matter is hardly dismissible, but her approach is one-pronged. You can't just go back to the scene of the crime when it was hundreds of years ago and half a world away and find answers. It's a worthy trip, just to see the place if nothing else, but it won't solve everything, and it's a bit painful to follow her musings as you can see things won't be resolved. She is aware of, but absolutely cannot come to grips with, the ideas that Africans are different from her now, that there isn't so much of a connection as she wants, and that Africans are aware and accepting of this. For the Africans, an old slave fort is ancient history; they have other problems now and want to deal with regular life.

As for the journey itself, you don't get much of it in this book. There's much valuable background and history present, but the actual travel details and description of life there now is all but lost. The author's approach moves this book firmly out of the category of travelogue and more into a personal examination.

This is a story of rejection of those of us forced into slavery by force and not by choice, by those who ancestors were in colluson with the eurpeans. This is also a realization that what is the most important is the acceptance of being a stanger in a strange stilen land as european america, but also to know that one cannot go back home as what we were, but how we are now. Knowing that wherever we (Africans) are i n the world, one thing is for sure, we are and will always be part on Mother Africa, and the spirit of our Mother will always accept her lost childrens.,

I had to read it for college, and honestly, it was quite redundant. I can summarize it in one sentence:

"They did not accept me when I went to Africa to find my family."

Chapter after chapter go on and on about how lonely she feels in Africa, which seems obvious to me because she has nothing in common with Africans besides her skin color. If I go out and buy a tub of paint and change my skin color, will I have anything in common with her? No. They grew up on different sides of the planet, with totally different governments, economic situations, weather conditions, and culture. What she was searching for was family, and she didn't find it in Africa. Skin color doesn't equate familiarity or a connection.

As Whoopi Goldberg said, I am not African-American. I did not live in Africa, I wasn't born there, I visited there, once, but I am as American as anyone else.

That being said, I'm sure she is a nice lady.

A deeply moving combination of history, personal memoir and deep reflection,particularly on the heroic and aspirational legacy of slavery as seen by this wonderful writer.

Saidiya Hartman takes us on a journey that is intense, tough and thoroughly rewarding. Impressively, she learned as much about herself as she did about the past she sought, even more.
The beauty of going with her on this journey is that the reader has the same magnificent opportunity, hypnotically led by the author, to ponder and to gain personal insight perhaps too long submerged.

This is an awesome book. I had purchased this book many years ago at a homeschool curriculum fair because I have a friend who is from Ghana. I did not know, at the time, that medieval Ghana is not the same as present day Ghana.

I student taught 7th grade social studies and science this past fall semester and I relied on this book quite a bit to teach the origins of sub-Saharan trading. The few textbooks we had in class gave very little detail about this critical time in Africa's history and I wanted to expand the students' knowledge about Africa's trading routes and slave trading.

I would highly recommend this book as a classroom reference or as an informative book on the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Sonhay.

This book is short and relatively simplistic in its explanations. You would not want to use it as the pillar to your dissertation on Malian history. Nevertheless, it does give a good general introduction to West African history and the great kingdoms that once flourished by the Niger River.

It starts with the creation myths, and then chronologically, explains very simply the beginnings and endings of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhaim. It addresses the mingling of the native religion with Islam, and ends with the downfall of the kingdoms. It also briefly addresses the issue of slavery.

I bought this about a month before visiting a friend who is doing research in Bamako (the Capital of Mali). I vaguely recollected learning about a chapter's worth in seventh grade about the Saharan trade routes and something about Ghana and Songhai and Timbuktu, but could not remember much more than the names of the kingdoms.

This book was excellent, in giving me enough background to be able to appreciate the depth of the history and the people when I visited. That being said, this is an excellent place to START learning about West African history - but hopefully, it is not where you will end your learning, as there are other resources out there that give much deeper and more thorough information about this great region.

I find that the book is a good introduction to the study of the history of the West African kingdoms. However, it does not give much more than that; little is told about the daily lives of the people, which is what really interests me about any period in history. In addition, I found that the book focuses a bit too much on the mythology, which, let's face it, sounds strange to modern American children, reinforcing the notion that Africans are primitive. The book also does not give enough pictures of what anything or anyone from the kingdoms looked like, forcing the reader to imagine the visuals, which are bound to look more like modern cartoon depictions of Africa than the actual kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay.

That being said, if you have children who are interested in learning a little bit about African history, this book is a good start. It gives bits of information that you don't get in your history classes, even those that teach world history. I learned about these kingdoms way back in the 7th grade, but even then I did not learn that there were Europeans who went to African universities in the Middle Ages, which is quite a switch from today's world. That little fact is powerful, because it forces the question of what happened to Africa that resulted in the widespread poverty, disease, malnutrition, and war we hear about so much in the news today.

Since I am not African-American and do not know many people who are, I am unable to judge with any certainty whether the book is good for enhancing the self-esteem of African-American children (which seems to be one of the purposes of this book). However, I can say that the book is a good introduction to West African history for anyone, regardless of race or age.

If you're after a balanced, scholarly history of these fascinating kingdoms, regrettably this is not it.

This authors intent appears principally to raise the esteem and consciousness of pubescent Afro-Americans

Despite falling well outside the scope indicated by the title, the book includes sections on the European Atlantic slave trade as well as wild speculation that fleets of explorers from Mali may have been in contact with Meso-America.

The book is nearly saved from total uselessness by the inclusion of a bibliography, though Time-Life picture book publications feature heavily, so even this fails to do much other than disappoint.

OK I am sick and tired of europeans thinking Africans never had a rich culture of their own. The mali dynasty was a great one that grew out of trade with saharan tribes and over the course of history grew into a sucessful and prosperous kingdom. When Europe was in the dark ages scholars like Ahmed baba was writting books,in fact over 3500 of them. I dsiagree with the contact of the meso american cultures,but there is proof in arabic manuscrips that africans was able to sail to the new word. The evidence shows that their is a genous of plantains that grow in brazil called musa x. The name of a king in Mali was musa,and ibn battua an norther african scholar traveled all around the islamic worls and told about the wealth of the african people here. By the way my friend from australia have you been to mali i have I am also white by the way

Kwame Nkrumah, whose shadow looms over all of Africa in terms of his importance for de-colonization and African nationalism is one of the most important leaders of the 20th century in this respect. He symbolized much of Africa. Educated in England he used what he learned from his colonial masters to bring down colonialism. He also refused to leave power and was ejected in a coup. He was not exactly a model democrat. This book devles into these issues and is a nice concise biography of this all important statesman.

Seth J. Frantzman

I was expecting a little bit more from this book. In fact I am kind of disappointed. It gives an overview of Kwame Nkrumah's life, but does not go in much detail.

This book is excellent! It provided a wonderful insight into an icon's hopes, dreams and aspirations for his country.

This is a good book on one of Africa's greatest sons who had a clear vision of the direction that the continent should follow. Nkrumah led Ghana to its independence but as far as he was concerned, Ghana could not be fully independent until the whole continent was free. He also believed in economic emancipation of the African continent as well as African unity.

Nkrumah's pan-African credentials are second to none. His ideas were too far ahead of most other African leaders who were taking advantage of their newly found status to amass wealth for themselses and not to be interested on ideas about African unity or economic well being for their people. His ideas put him on collision course with the strong and developed Western powers. His doom was, therefore, sealed as he was ultimately overthrown in a military coup.

However, Nkrumah's ideas have lived on. The African continent is now completely decolonised. However, the dream of African unity is still to be realised as well as the need to see economic empowerment of the African people. Nkrumah's vision will continue to inspire people towards the realisation of unity and prosperity for the continent and its people.

Just because something is different, outside one's normal experience or way of thinking, does not mean it is not of value. Reading this poetic novel was a hugely uncomfortable experience for me. Being a westerner some of the truths and opinions Aidoo expressed came from an unexpected angle, forcing me to look at my values and beliefs afresh. This makes the book less enjoyable perhaps, the truth can hurt as can opinions, but not any the less clever or well constructed. I guess it attacks political systems rather than individual people. The concept that many white people regard their black African friends as trophies (and I can think of some examples around me), made me examine my relationships with some of my African friends. Some of Aidoo's views do seem really extreme to me, however. As an immigrant myself, I don't relate to the concept that it is an abandonement of one's true identity and homeland in favour of selfish pursuits to emigrate. Maybe I would have liked to have seen more of a recognition that being part of this world is a global experience, I don't know. An extremely valuable read, I learnt lots.

This is a must read for anyone interested in post-colonial politics. A multi-genre "novel" Aidoo's genius shines throught on each page. I couldn't put it down.

It took me a while to understand the structure of this book, but after I did, it made the themes and Aidoo's narration that much more powerful. The story is told from a young female student's p.o.v.--Sissie is chosen to "represent" Ghana and travels to Europe. In Germany, she befriends a local woman named Marija. During her travels, she grapples with issues regarding colonialism, race, love and nationality.

The novel jumps between prose and poetry, from unbiased narration to the jumbled thoughts running through Sissie's head. There are little treasures that could go un-noticed: the use of "Sissie" as the name, the plums, the story of Kunle's death. This is a story rich with meaning, and a very quick read. I highly recommend it.

Aidoo gives new meaning to the term "female whiner". Her brief "novel"(about 132 pages) is a trying exercise in whining about being a woman, and being an African. She may have cause to whine, but please spare us the long poems that break up the text. If I wanted to read poetry, I'd buy a poetry book. I hate it when authors insert poems in midstream. It breaks up the text, and detracts from the action. Anyway, Sissie is a Ghanaian who visits Germany, makes cute with a German woman, and reflects on how bad colonization and Africans can be. Not recommended except for insommiacs.

Don't Leave an Elephant to Go and Chase a Bird is a wonderfully crafted kind-hearted tale. The author quickly moves you through the adventures of Anancy the spiderman. Anancy goes from one person to the next exchanging items. His trip and the transition and exchange from one person to the next is so rhythmical, that I can almost hear drums and music as Anancy travels along. I enjoyed this book from cover to cover with such a light story and illustrations, which are influenced by traditional African art themes. Although crafted for a child, this story, a Ghanaian folk tale has a rich heritage.

The author has produced a good cursory overview of several centuries of history along the coast of Ghana. Although his bibliography is impressive, there is too little detail here for the academic, and for the novice, there is not enough background. A chapter summarizing the history and culture of the local tribes would have made an excellent introduction. For example, several references were made to the "stool" and "destooling" of the Asantihene, but only toward the end of the book was the explanation that the "Golden Stool" embodies the spirit of the Ashanti nation, and that the Asantihene does not actually sit upon it.

The line drawings of several buildings, some showing changes made over the centuries, were helpful but unclear as to the cardinal directions referred to -- often direction could be determined only by careful study of clues in the text. A few schematics or floor plans would have clarified the descriptions.

The author also frequently refers to "the French," "the English," "the Dutch" and so forth as the instigators of policies and developments, without mentioning the specific individuals responsible. When individuals are mentioned, virtually no background is given. Contemporary European history, with an analysis of trends and the source of the impetus for European policy in West Africa, is barely touched upon. The most important thing missing here is an overarching theme for the book, a unifying theory as to why these events took place and why they are significant. Lacking this, it is more a summary or a report, rather than a historical study.

I purchased this book after visiting some of the sites mentioned. Incomplete and scanty though it is, it's one of the only accessible treatments of this topic available. The author has clearly done his legwork, and has utilized original sources, many highly obscure. It's unfortunate that all of this labor was not put in the service of a definitive analytical work, or at least an entertaining manual for tourists.

Easily readable large-scale map of Ghana. One side depicts the southern half of the country, the other side the north. I can't vouch for the entire map, but the areas I've visited appear to be accurately depicted. It could be improved on two points: First the ancient historic mosques (e.g.; the famous one in Larabanga) are not marked, either as historic sites or as mosques. Furthermore, this the first map I've ever seen that lacks any mileage information, either using a scale of miles, or by noting distances between points. But since it's marked as 1:500000 scale, the math works out to 1cm = 5km. Handy to know that.