• Chipo and the Bird on the Hill – A Tale of Ancient Zimbabwe

    Age Range: 7 – 12 years

    Two children, Chipo and Dambudzo set out in search of a big stone bird at Great Zimbabwe after Sekuru tells them the story of how this bird guided their ancestors to a hill. All the mysteries of the ancient ruins come alive as the children slip away from their duties to climb the hill in search of the bird. The story is set in the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ of 700 years ago. Great Zimbabwe was built by Shona-speaking people who lived there and was where the most powerful rulers of the south-eastern interior of Africa lived. It was an organised and prosperous state. The story and illustrations are the author’s impressions of how life in Great Zimbabwe might have been when it was full of huts, footpaths, cooking fires, people laughing and chatting and cock-crowing.
  • Animal Village (Hardcover)

    Age Range: 7 – 12 years

    Animal Village is an authentic folk tale from the Zarma culture of West Africa about a tortoise who saves her village from the ravages of drought with wisdom passed down from an “old story.” Nelda LaTeef’s colorful and strikingly brilliant montage of illustrations, in acrylic and collage, captures the richness and vibrancy of the sub-Saharan culture from which the story springs.

    The story is especially relevant to sub-Saharan Africa as it focuses on the devastation of drought and the importance of received knowledge. With its dual themes of wisdom and grit, the book happily entertains while it teaches the importance of hard work and persistence as keys to success.
  • Mama’s Amazing Cover Cloth (Hardcover)

    Age Range: 7 – 12 years

    1st Prize, Children’s Storybook, Ghana Association of Writers Awards 2019
    Do you know that the African woman’s cover cloth has many uses? In this delightful book that young children will enjoy, a little girl shares the many uses of her mother’s amazing cover cloth.
  • Kwajo and the Brassman’s Secret – A Tale of Old Ashanti Wisdom and Gold

    Age Range: 7 – 12 years

    Kwajo’s father makes traditional small figures. One day, he makes him a little brass drummer who comes alive and transforms Kwajo into a land of proverbs and riddles. It is a land where the figures represent money, and the people are citizens in a powerful kingdom. Kwajo is tempted by riches but must first decode a series of riddles and symbols. He falls at the last test, but nonetheless learns an important lesson.

    The Brassman’s Secret won The Noma Award for Publishing in Africa 1982. It has become one of the most important children’s books in Africa, and has been translated into several foreign languages. This is a new edition appearing for the first time with full colour-illustrations.

    30.0055.00
  • The Phone Call (Hardcover)

    Age Range: 7 – 12 years

    God is perhaps just a phone call away! Before the invention of the telephone, talking to people in faraway places was difficult. Now, we can talk to our friends and family from wherever we are. What would you do if you received a phone call from God? That’s the situation the child in this story finds her/himself in one day. The idea of God being just a phone call away is what makes this story so exciting.

    Kofi Anyidoho uses the magic of the telephone to give us a story about a child’s curious but lively chatter with God. And the beautiful illustrations by Sela Adjei help to make the story delightful and unforgettable. This book is perhaps most suitable for 7-9 year-olds, but older children and even teenagers and adults will also enjoy reading it because the story reminds us of unanswered questions of our childhood some of which remain with us for the rest of our life. Anyidoho himself once reminded us that “There is a Child in Every Adult and an Adult in Every Child”. With The Phone Call, Kofi Anyidoho, the well-known poet and author of Akpokplo (a play for children written in Ewe and in English), has made a significant contribution to literature for children in Ghana and Africa.

  • Fly, Eagle Fly!

    Age Range: 7 – 12 years

    Fly, Eagle, Fly! is a charming and innovative adaptation of a Ghanaian tale attributed to Dr. James Kwegyir Aggrey – also known as Aggrey of Africa. With a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

    After a stormy night, a farmer searching for his lost calf finds a baby eagle that has been blown out of its nest. He takes it home and raises it with his chickens. But when his friend comes to visit one day, he tells the farmer that an eagle should be flying high in the sky, not scrabbling on the ground for grain. A powerful and uplifting African tale of fulfilment and freedom brought to life by stunning illustrations.

    Fly, Eagle Fly!

    48.00
  • Abla Poku – La Reine Baoulé (Hardcover, French)

    Age Range: 7 – 10 years

    Ce livre illustré d’enfants illustre l’histoire d’Abena Poku. Il était une fois, un royaume puissant dans la partie centrale de l’ancien Ghana connu sous le nom de Royaume d’Asante. Il avait un roi puissant connu sous le nom Otumfuo Osei Tutu I, l’Asantehene. Osei Tutu J’ai eu une nièce appelée Abena Poku. Après quelques troubles Abena Poku et son peuple s’installèrent dans la région entre les rivières Comoe et Bandama dans la partie orientale de la Côte d’Ivoire et fondèrent un royaume avec Abena Poku comme première reine. Son royaume est devenu le royaume de Baoulé. Abena Poku a ainsi fondé une dynastie qui a survécu à ce jour.

  • Abla Poku – The Baoulé Queen (Hardcover)

    Age Range: 7 – 10 years

    This colour illustrated children’s book tells the story of Abena Poku. Once upon a time, there was a mighty kingdom in the central part of ancient Ghana known as the Asante Kingdom. It had a powerful king known as Otumfuo Osei Tutu I, the Asantehene. Osei Tutu I had a niece called Abena Poku.

    After some unrest Abena Poku and her people settled in the area between the Comoe and Bandama rivers in the eastern part of the Ivory Coast and founded a kingdom of their own with Abena Poku as the first queen. Her kingdom became known as the Baoulé Kingdom. Abena Poku thus founded a dynasty which has survived to date.

  • The Ewe People: A Study of the Ewe People in German Togo

    The Ewe of Ghana, Togo and Benin have been one of the most documented ethnic groups in West Africa, given their encounters with the German, French and British colonial administrations. In 1906, Jakob Spieth, a German Bremen Missionary, published Die Ewe-Stamme. Die Ewe-Stamme is one of the most comprehensive treatises on the history, religion, economic life, traditional social structure, and, indeed, the entire spectrum of everyday life of the Ewe. Published over 100 years ago the book had limited circulation and became increasingly rare to the extent that it almost became a deified piece of work and source of classified knowledge. Additionally, Die Ewe-Stamme was published in German and old non-standard and colloquial Ewe languages. It is hoped this translation of Die Ewe-Stamme into English and contemporary Ewe might create a revival of interest amongst researchers, enhance the understanding for the traditional Ewe culture and become reading material in schools and universities.

  • Voices Made Night (African Writers Series)

    In this collection of stories, the Mozambican poet, Mia Couto, expresses, through striking poetic metaphors, the emptiness and absurdity of lives bound by poverty and subject to arbitrary incursions of extreme violence. The frustrated longing of the lipless snake catcher who surrounds his lady’s house with snakes; or the man who fears his wife is a witch and scalds her with boiling water, are caught in dual tension. In Voices Made Night, an African cosmology portrays a surreal world defined by its contradictions, set against a background of political instability.
  • When Rain Clouds Gather (African Writers Series, AWS247)

    In the heart of rural Botswana, the poverty stricken village of Golema Mmidi is a haven to exiles from far and wide. A South African political refugee and an Englishman join forces to revolutionise the villagers traditional farming methods, but their task is fraught with hazards as the pressures of tradition, opposition from the local chief and the unrelenting climate threaten to divide and devastate the fragile community.
  • Harvest of Thorns (African Writers Series)

    The revolution that ended white minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) is seen here chiefly through the eyes of Benjamin Tichafa, a young guerrilla. He is the son of a devoutly religious couple, his father a government messenger completely subservient to his white superiors. Enraged by the treatment of blacks, a teenage Benjamin turns from his parents’ apolitical religion. After being arrested in a demonstration, he joins the revolution.

    The novel is enriched by the viewpoints of black Rhodesians who, out of fear or for economic reasons, do not fully support the struggle. The slaying of a dictatorial white farm owner dismays his foreman, whose livelihood is now threatened. The fatal beating of a woman who reluctantly informed on the guerrillas raises misgivings in Benjamin’s outfit. Though ultimately portraying the victory as worthwhile, Chinodya also shows the price paid in lives, tattered families and lost traditions. The result is a humane and penetrating look at a brutal government and a bloody revolution.

    Harvest of Thorns is a novel of great significance which will give all those who read it a greater understanding of the road along which Zimbabwe has travelled, as well as indicate many of the directions ahead.

  • Equiano’s Travels (African Writers Series, AWS10)

    Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in a village east of the Niger River in what is now Nigeria. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African was published in London in 1789. This is his own account of a remarkable life.

    At the age of ten he was captured by slave traders and taken to the southern states of America. He was sold to a planter in the West Indies and worked there and abroad slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England. At the age of twenty-one he had saved enough money to buy his freedom. He visited the Mediterranean, took part in Phipps’ expedition to the Arctic in 1773 and crossed the Atlantic several times. He was an ardent member of the Movement for the Abolition of Slavery and was appointed Commissary for Stores when the freed slaves were settled in Sierra Leone.

    This abridged edition has a new introduction by Professor Ogude of the University of Benin, together with explanatory notes on the text.

  • A Question of Power (African Writers Series, AWS149)

    “Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native.”

    It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal’s cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights at night. In the darkness of this country where people turn and look at her with vague curiosity as an outsider she establishes an entirely abnormal relationship with two men. A mind-bending book which takes the reader in and out of sanity.

  • Kenkey For Ewes And Other Very Short Stories

    Like a basket full of coloured beads, like a kente strip of many colours, like a xylophone that produces a thousand vibrant sounds, this collection is made up of stories as varied as the diversity represented in Ghana, from Hohoe to Hamle.

    These stories represent the budding creative spirit of the current generation of young Ghanaian writers. These new voices have become the refreshing perspective from which to consider the Ghanaian narrative in a thousand words. Or less.

    This is an anthology of hope. Never have so many young people captured the stories of our time the way this army of writers have immortalised. But beyond the greatness in the stories, Kenkey for Ewes guarantees one thrilling fact: it is a great time to be a global citizen.

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