• Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

    In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson analyzes the dynamics of Ghana’s capital city through a focus on Oxford Street, part of Accra’s most vibrant and globalized commercial district. He traces the city’s evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. He combines his impressions of the sights, sounds, interactions, and distribution of space with broader dynamics, including the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism evident in Accra’s salsa scene, gym culture, and commercial billboards.

    Quayson finds that the various planning systems that have shaped the city—and had their stratifying effects intensified by the IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s—prepared the way for the early-1990s transformation of a largely residential neighborhood into a kinetic shopping district. With an intense commercialism overlying, or coexisting with, stark economic inequalities, Oxford Street is a microcosm of historical and urban processes that have made Accra the variegated and contradictory metropolis that it is today.

    “Oxford Street, Accra offers a fresh portrait of a rising African metropolis by one of the most original and skilled critics of the African condition. Deeply researched and packed with detail and bold in scope and analysis, Oxford Street, Accra is a unique addition to the growing body of work on contemporary African Urbanism. This extraordinary book shows the extent to which the future of urban theory might well lie in the global South.” – Achille Mbembe, author of Critique de la raison négre.

    KEY SELLING POINTS:

    • Oxford Street, Accra is a must-buy as an invaluable companion and compass for both newcomers and returning visitors to Accra.
    • Oxford Street, Accra was chosen as one of the ‘UK Guardian’s 10 Best City Books of the World in 2014.’
    • Oxford Street, Accra was also the Co-Winner of ‘The Urban History Association’s Top Award in the International Category For Books Published About World Cities in 2013 – 2014.’
    • Oxford Street, Accra contains an encyclopedic knowledge of the City of Accra, tracing the city’s evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day.
    • The book offers a microcosm of historical and urban knowledge of the making of the city that have transformed Accra into the sophisticated metropolis that is it today.
  • Taming Toxicity

    Learn how to spot the signs, protect yourself and create a healthier work environment.

    Taming Toxicity

    150.00
  • Waltzing With the Devil

    In the pages of this book, the author recounts the harrowing experience of going through an abusive relationship; falling in love with and being at the mercy of a man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with.

  • Hello Opportunity! A Tap On Your Shoulder

    This book will help you to know who you are, how to identify an opportunity and how to create your own opportunities. Chamming Pollock once said “Opportunity rarely knocks until you are ready”. And few people have ever been ready without receiving opportunity’s call.
    With everyone so busy, many are grateful for self-help books as this, that will allow them to pick up intelligent points in grabbing opportunities.
    So, I have put this together for grabs and easy reading. Some of the most inspiring thoughts I have come across are gathered through personal research and paying attention to the things and opportunities presented me, which are shared in this book. Seizing opportunities is you

  • When the Person Who is Called COVID Came

    For two years and beyond, the 21st century world experienced a near-apocalypse through the COVID-19 Pandemic.

    Millions of innocent people have died at the hands of an invisible, merciless plague of a killer.

    How have those of us, who have been left behind, coped? How do we even have the space to grieve? How did we adjust to the clichéd ‘New Normal’? How did our lives change? – Our love lives, our family lives, our work lives, our social lives, our faith, our health, our philosophies… How have we changed? How have Ghanaians changed?

    By experiencing this encapsulating Poetry Chapbook, you too can relate to the phenomena of COVID and the [Ghanaian] Woman, The COVID News of Emotions that we Haven’t Reported and The Universal Human COVID Experience, all through Apiorkor’s razor-sharp Verse Journalism and poetic spirit, in over twenty pieces of poignant poetry.

  • Contemporary Issues in Ageing in Ghana: A Multidisciplinary Approach

    The rise in population of the aged (also known as elderly, older persons, old adults, senior citizens) across the universe has become a global concern given the associated demographic, social and economic implications for the well-being of the aged. This increase has implications for future generations as well as the social and economic development of the country.

    This book, being the first from the Centre for Ageing Studies at the University of Ghana advocates for the study of ageing in many facets from health, science, and socioeconomic perspectives.

    It is our hope that the book provokes dialogue and serves as the beginning of many more avenues for academic discourse to embrace diverse views and science as the way forward. At the very least, this should motivate others to focus on ageing issues than ever before.

    Given the numerous challenges associated with ageing and the neglect of the welfare of the aged in Ghana, it is imperative that we pay attention to the plight of the elderly in our African societies. There is an argument to extend ageing issues to the larger population. It is hoped that Ghana would once again be the beacon of hope for research in ageing in sub–Saharan Africa with the Centre for Ageing Studies at the University of Ghana leading the way.

  • Check The FATS: Eliminate Chronic Diseases

    The world is in a global obesity epidemic and this is associated with thousands of chronic diseases. At the root cause of excess body weight or obesity is diet high in caloric content, ultra-processed foods padded with sugars, salt, and fat as well as sedentary lifestyle. Our goal then is to consume healthy nutritious foods and avoid excess caloric intake in the first place. Yet, many dietary approaches as well as exercise regime only provide short-term solutions and conventional treatment of chronic diseases at best can only manage these conditions. The challenge with modern dietary intervention and physical activity clearly indicates that the current obesity epidemic defies simple solutions.

    In Check the Fats: Eliminate Chronic Diseases, Dr. Bernard Kwabi-Addo discusses how the human body has designed complex and integrated metabolic process that involves several factors such as hormones, gut microbiome, circadian rhythm/sleep pattern, genetic traits, and exposures to the current obesogenic environment in regulating energy intake from diet and energy expenditure as well as energy storage in the form of fat. Thus, disruption in any of these processes can and do contribute to obesity and chronic diseases. Check the Fats then discusses lessons from our ancestors who did not have chronic diseases and presents the scientific evidence in support of the role of poor dietary components and sedentary lifestyle and their association with chronic diseases whereas healthy dietary interventions can reverse and even eliminate chronic diseases.

  • Serving Ghana: 70+ Everyday Ghanaian Indigenous Recipes for Hospitality with Step-by-Step Instructions (Hardcover)

    Full Colour Inside!

    Serving Ghana: 70+ Everyday Ghanaian Indigenous Recipes for Hospitality with Step-by-step Instructions is a Ghanaian standard recipe book. The book is written in everyday language but takes care of a number of professional à la carte food production concerns of the professional chef.

    With data collected through focus group discussions from thirteen ethnic groups as its basis, the book in addition to some nutritional information documents the recipes of popular indigenous soups, gravy, sauces and stews, grills and fries, one-pot dishes and carbohydrate accompaniments.

    The book will facilitate the teaching and learning of younger generations to appreciate and cook Ghanaian local cuisine.

  • Tickling the Ghanaian: Encounters with Contemporary Culture

    A book on contemporary Ghanaian culture and heritage.

    In this book, Kofi Akpabli seeks to unravel what at all tickles the Ghanaian. Is it Sunday afternoon’s after church Omo Tuo and beer, or when Ghana is ‘beating’ its arch-rivals in sports, Nigeria?

    Articles in this book include the two that won him the CNN/Multichoice Journalist Award for Arts and Culture back to back in 2010 and 2011, becoming the first journalist, in the award’s history, to have won one category back to back: The Serious Business of Soup in Ghana and What is Right with Akpeteshie.

    Following his usual humorous style of writing, Tickling the Ghanaian promises to be funny and educating. Kofi takes a different view of what we have perceived as always to be archaic. Kofi has eyes of details and tells his story the best way it could possibly be told.

  • Bookset: Courtesy & Manners Guidebooks for Boys and Girls (5 books)

    Age Range: 7 years and above

    Most of us were trained with Courtesy for Boys & Girls as a guidebook. Fundamental rules of courtesy for young people, rules on behaviour; much more needed today! Now, you can have four other books in this series as a bookset.

    These books are adapted from up-to-date fundamental rules of courtesy as they apply to young people of today and list for the guidance of parents and teachers rules on a gracious refinement of behaviour. They teach young readers how to be courteous in their everyday lives and how effective it can be, how to be polite and have good manners, and how to get along with others.

    A great set of books to use to engage young people on matters of manners.

  • Psst…Just Saying: Musings of an Exasperated Woman

    In Psst…Just Saying, Obafunke draws readers out of their comfort zone into her orbit without apologising for her viewpoint. Her central argument is that cultural norms evolve and exist for reasons that ensure their survival in the Zeitgeist.

    These deeply personal and emotional poignant essays present the writer’s concerns about modernism, culture, respect and life. They make for a read that is in turns deadly serious, outrageously funny and profoundly honest.

  • The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

    Fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza lives in Kontagora, Nigeria, where his days are spent about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, grappling with his fantasies about white girls–especially blondes–and wondering who his father is. When he’s not in church, at school or attempting to form ‘Africa’s first superheroes’, he obsesses over mathematical theorems, ideas of black power and HXVX: the Curse of Africa.

    Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed ‘Andy Africa’ soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and the gathering of an anti-Christian mob is headed for the church—both set to shake the foundations of everything Andy knows and loves.

    The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzling, distinctive, new literary voice. Profound, exhilarating and highly original, this tragicomic novel is a stunning exploration of the contemporary African ‘condition’, the relentless infiltration of Western culture and, most of all, the ordinary but impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.

    The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa won second prize in the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award while still in manuscript form.

  • Prince of Monkeys

    Growing up in middle-class Lagos, Nigeria during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ihechi forms a band of close friends in his neighbourhood. They discover Lagos together as teenagers whose differing ideologies come to the fore over everything from film to football, Fela Kuti to God, sex to politics. They remain close-knit until Ihechi’s girlfriend, is killed in an anti-government riot.

    Exiled by his concerned mother, Ihechi moves in with his uncle’s family, where he struggles to find himself outside his former circle of friends. Ihechi eventually finds success by leveraging his connection with a notorious prostitution linchpin and political heavyweight, and earning favour among the ruling elite.

    But just as Ihechi is about to make his final ascent into the elite political class, he encounters his childhood friends and experiences a crisis of conscience that forces him to question his motives and who he wants to be. Nnamdi Ehirim’s debut novel, Prince of Monkeys is a lyrical, reflective glimpse into Nigerian life, religion, and politics at the end of the twentieth century.

  • My Home, My Hell: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

    Within three weeks of the 2020 UK pandemic lockdown, an unprecedented number of women – sixteen – were reported to have died. This figure does not take into account unreported deaths across the globe. Domestic violence is a global crisis which cannot be ignored. My Home My Hell is an insightful read for anyone about to get into a relationship, in a relationship, in a position to influence couples and not only the victims of domestic violence and abuse.

    Nana explores relationships in her straightforward writing style and catalogues the kinds of abuse that can manifest within these circumstances. She highlights the warning signs of abusive relationships and marriages and through the lens of real examples, she encourages the reader to reflect on their own lived experiences. By offering practical advice on how to safely exit a toxic relationship, she hopes that readers within such situations will be motivated to make informed choices and avoid becoming a statistic.

  • From Dar es Salaam to Bongoland: Urban Mutations in Tanzania

    The name Dar es Salaam comes from the Arabic phrase meaning house of peace. A popular but erroneous translation is ‘haven of peace’ resulting from a mix-up of the Arabic words “dar” (house) and “bandar” (harbour). Named in 1867 by the Sultan of Zanzibar, the town has for a long time benefitted from a reputation of being a place of tranquility. The tropical drowsiness is a comfort to the socialist poverty and under-equipment that causes an unending anxiety to reign over the town. Today, for the Tanzanian, the town has become Bongoland, that is, a place where survival is a matter of cunning and intelligence (bongo means ‘brain’ in Kiswahili). Far from being an anecdote, this slide into toponomy records the mutations that affect the links that Tanzanians maintain with their principal city and the manner in which it represents them.

    This book takes into account the changes by departing from the hypothesis that they reveal a process of territorialisation. What are the processes – envisaged as spatial investments – which, by producing exclusivity, demarcations and exclusions, fragment the urban space and its social fabric? Do the practices and discussions of the urban dwellers construct limited spaces, appropriated, identified and managed by communities (in other words, territories)? Dar es Salaam is often described as a diversified, relatively homogenous and integrating place. However, is it not more appropriate to describe it as fragmented?

    As territorialisation can only occur through frequenting, management and localised investment, it is therefore through certain places – first shelter and residential area, then the school, daladala station, the fire hydrant and the quays – that the town is observed. This led to broach the question in the geographical sense of urban policy carried out since German colonisation to date. At the same time, the analysis of these developments allows for an evaluation of the role of the urban crisis and the responses it brings.

    In sum, the aim of this approach is to measure the impact of the uniqueness of the place on the current changes. On one hand, this is linked to its long-term insertion in the Swahili civilisation, and on the other, to its colonisation by Germany and later Britain and finally, to the singularity of the post-colonial path. This latter is marked by an alternation of Ujamaa with Structural Adjustment Plans applied since 1987. How does this remarkable political culture take part in the emerging city today?

    This book is a translation of De Dar es Salaam à Bongoland: Mutations urbaines en Tanzanie, published by Karthala, Paris in 2006.

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