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Chasing the Elephant Into the Bush: The Politics of Complacency
Chasing the Elephant Into the Bush: The Politics of Complacency is an insider’s account of how the governing New Patriotic Party lost power in the closest elections in Africa’s history. The writer believes that providing an accurate account will begin the process of correcting the rumours, lies and myths that are out there about the 2008 elections in Ghana.
Throughout, the book is liberally sprinkled with quotes and historical references that makes it very informative and interesting. He begins with the state of the nation and the governing party as Ghana approached 2008.
He then takes the reader through the NPP primary and his own experiences as a losing candidate. There is candid discussion of the rivalries in the campaign that undermined its effectiveness. He takes the reader inside meetings and quotes some of the key players at key moments in the campaign.
There is candid discussion of the roles of the media, the security forces and civil society. The identification of issues and their use in the campaign is discussed thoroughly. While his sympathies are never in doubt, he is very objective and acknowledges the mistakes made by the campaign, the government and the party. He credits the NDC Campaign for doing certain things well. Amongst these are the deployment of President Mills and former President Rawlings as well as Vice-President John Mahama.
He reveals the roles of key people, including the President, the Presidential candidate and powerful groups, like the “Kyebi Mafia”. He offers candid assessments of all the key players. He suggests reasons for the NPP defeat and the way to recapture power.
This will be a very significant first cut and reference point for an account of the 2008 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Ghana.
₵320.00 -
Beyond the Political Spider: Critical Issues in African Humanities (African Humanities Series)
Beyond the Political Spider: Critical Issues in African Humanities by Kwesi Yankah is the first title in the newly established African Humanities Association (AHA) publication series.
By integrating his own biography into a critique of the global politics of knowledge production, Yankah, through a collection of essays, interrogates critical issues confronting the Humanities that spawn intellectual hegemonies and muffle African voices. Using the example of Ghana, he brings under scrutiny, amongst others, endemic issues of academic freedom, gender inequities, the unequal global academic order, and linguistic imperialism in language policies in governance.
In the face of these challenges, the author deftly navigates the complex terrain of indigenous knowledge and language in the context of democratic politics, demonstrating that agency can be liberatory when emphasising indigenous knowledge, especially expressed through the idiom of local languages and symbols, including Ananse, the protean spider, folk hero in Ghana and most parts of the pan-African world.
“Fascinating snapshots from an engaged scholarly life in Africa, valuable as an archival resource for the understanding of this period of higher education in Africa.” – John Higgins, Arderne Chair in Literature, Department of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town
“This book is unique and gives a powerful rendition of the state of the Humanities in Africa (with Ghana as a case in point). It grapples with some of the pertinent issues dogging the Humanities in Africa. It comments on the Humanities scholarship in Africa, and subtly throws a challenge for future scholarship. It draws on African traditions, communal heritage, and governance in discussing the role and place of the Humanities in Africa. It also brings into the analysis the ever-changing imperatives and modernity in re-configuring African Humanities.” – Mark Benge Okot, Head of Department, Literature, Makerere University, Uganda
“Beyond the Political Spider’ effectively draws, in a unique fashion, from literature, history, linguistics and other cognate disciplines in the African Humanities.” – Sati Umaru Fwatshak, Department of History, University of Jos, Nigeria
₵340.00 -
Kwame Nkrumah: Contributions to the African Revolution
Drawing on the published works, correspondence and speeches of Kwame Nkrumah, as well as on contemporary press reportage during Nkrumah’s final months in Ghana, Doreatha Mbalia offers a view of the theory and practice of the visionary proponent of a united African continent.
This work traces the development Mbalia sees in Nkrumah’s theory and practice, from the early formation of his unique ideology that emphasises the crucial role of socialism in the progress towards a united African continent, to the coup that ended his Presidency of Ghana and his subsequent belief that the people of Africa must, when diplomatic and political means had failed, raise arms against neo-colonialism. Mbalia urges that Nkrumah’s vision still points the way to Pan-African unity.
₵400.00 -
The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (Pre-Order)
Getting to grips with Russia’s 21st century Tsar.
Vladimir V. Putin has confounded world leaders and defied their assumptions as they tried to figure him out, only to misjudge him time and again. The Putin Mystique takes the reader on a journey through the Russia of Vladimir Putin, named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as the most powerful man in the world. It is a neo-feudal world where iPads, WTO membership, and Brioni business suits conceal a power structure straight out of the Middle Ages, where the Sovereign is perceived as both divine and demonic, where a man’s riches are determined by his proximity to the Kremlin, and where large swathes of the populace live in precarious complacency interrupted by bouts of revolt.
Where does that kind of power come from? The answer lies not in the leader, but in the people: from the impoverished worker who appeals directly to Putin for aid, to the businessmen, security officers and officials in Putin’s often dysfunctional government who look to their leader for instruction and protection.
In her writing career, Anna Arutunyan has travelled throughout Russia to report on modern Russian politics. She has interviewed oligarchs and policemen, bishops and politicians, and many ordinary Russians. Her book is a vivid and revealing exploration of the way in which myth, power, and even religion interact to produce the love-hate relationship between the Russian people and Vladimir Putin.
₵536.00 -
The Mkapa Years: Collected Speeches (3-Volume Box Set, Hardcover)
This collection of speeches, in three volumes, by the third President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Benjamin William Mkapa (1995–2005), will serve primarily as reference documents to the vision of what he attempted to achieve in his ten years of leadership. His tenure as a leader came at a time when Tanzania’s economy was in dire condition. The legacy of the command economy, which had been in place for much of the 1970s and 1980s, was still felt. There was resistance to change to adopt a market economy, evident in the political tensions and debates about privatisation, an approach following Structural Adjustment Programmes, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that had led to stagnation of the economy, high inflation, deteriorating health, education, communication, and transport sector services, as well as general gloom in the country especially among the poor. The bold steps he took during the first half of his administration did not immediately endear him to the public. However, in the ensuing years, slowly but steadily, positive results were achieved, and the social cost of change that the people had endured was appreciated. Relations with development partners and the multilateral agencies that before he took office had sunk to the lowest ebb were restored, and Tanzania, which was no longer unfit to borrow, received the largest debt relief ever and henceforth. Tanzania was on its way to new growth potentials and a vibrant private sector-led economy.
These collected speeches tell this story and tell it well, in great prose laced with wit and quotations from world political and literary sources, which is an evidence of his erudition as a literature student and journalist.
₵850.00 -
Southern African Liberation Struggles 1960-1994 (Contemporaneous Documents, 9 Volumes)
These 9 volumes are the most comprehensive historical record of the liberation struggles in southern Africa. Comprising 2.4 million words in 5,394 pages, they record interviews with liberation fighters and supporters in the Frontline states and the extraordinary sacrifices they made so that Africa could at last be free. With the fall of the South African apartheid regime, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) identified the need to record the experiences of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, from 1960 until that final liberation in 1994. To that end, SADC launched the Hashim Mbita Project – named after the last Executive Secretary of the OAU Liberation Committee.
The research covered liberation movements in the countries which engaged in liberation wars, the Frontline states and Extension countries; and the Research Project team comprised members from the SADC mainland states of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Swaziland. The support received from other regions is documented: Anglophone West Africa, Francophone Africa, North Africa, East Asia, Canada and the United States, Cuba and the Caribbean, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Nordic Countries, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Non-Aligned Movement: India, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Sri lanka; Organisation of African Unity and United Nations.
₵3,000.00