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Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World (Paperback)
**Available in 3 weeks after order
‘Fabulously entertaining’ Daily Telegraph
‘This astonishing book reveals some of the most important global events of the twentieth century’ Afua Hirsch
‘Perfect for fans of Frank Abignale Jr.’s Catch Me If You Can‘ Publishers Weekly
The astounding, never-before-told story of how an ingenious Ghanaian con artist ran one of the 20th century’s longest and most audacious frauds.When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn’t already stripped. The military ousted the new nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country’s gold and hiding it overseas.
Into this story stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah – a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece, if only you would help him rescue it – with a small investment. Over the 1970s and ’80s, he grew his scam to epic proportions, amassing hundreds of millions of pounds from thousands of marks all over the world. He baffled Henry Kissinger, scandalised Shirley Temple-Black, and had Nixon’s former attorney-general at his beck and call. Many tried to stop him, but Blay-Miezah continued to live in luxury, protected by ex-SAS soldiers while he deceived lawyers, businessmen and investigators around the globe.
In Anansi’s Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases the ever-wilder trail of Blay-Miezah – and unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements and African dreams – revealing the untold story of the grifter who beat the West at its own thieving game.
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Politics in Ghana: From the Earliest Times to the Eve of the Fourth Republic
Politics in Ghana: From the Earliest Times to the Eve of the Fourth Republic has been introduced to equip political science students and avid readers interested in the subject as well as both budding and seasoned politicians with effective tools that give them a firm understanding of Ghana’s political development.
The book provides a bird’s eyes view and a penetrating insight into controversial issues that shaped events and developments of the country from the pre-colonial times through the struggle for independence to the post-independence era.
In an accessible and engaging writing style, the book effectively analyses the nexus between the geographical features of the country, particularly the ethnic and regional distributions of the people and how they impacted on the political development during the period under review. It also traverses the constitutional development and other factors that triggered political action from the late 1800s to the eve of the Fourth Republic. Ghana witnessed three republics each of which was truncated by military juntas that provided interim administration to fill the hiatuses before the eventual transition to democratic rule for the fourth time. Factors that occasioned the interruptions and the subsequent return to constitutional rule together with the performances of the various regimes and their ramifications are incisively analysed.
Politics in Ghana: From the Earliest Times to the Eve of the Fourth Republic is an authentic reference document for any person who is thirsty for a better understanding of political events that preceded the final return to constitutional rule in 1993.
₵100.00 -
The Emancipation of Women: An African Perspective
Ever since International Women’s Year in 1975 highlighted the issue of the equality of men and women, various studies have shown that, to a large extent, women the world over suffer similar types of discrimination within the family structure, in employment, in education and access to professional training etc. However, given the differences in the societal, educational and especially, the cultural background of women in different parts of the world, it is inevitable that there will be differences in women’s perception of what emancipation means to them.
In this book, Professor Florence Abena Dolphyne of the Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana, Legon, and a former Chairman of the Ghana National Council on Women and Development, explains, from her experience in Ghana and in different parts of Africa during the UN Decade for Women, what she believes women’s emancipation means to women in Africa. It certainly involves more fundamental issues than the question of who cooks the dinner or changes the baby. Professor Dolphyne discusses a number of pertinent issues such as traditional beliefs and practices that still keep women under subjugation, specific women in development activities that help to achieve appreciable levels of emancipation and the role of governmental, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations in the process of women’s emancipation in Africa.
Written in a very simple and lucid language, the book will certainly be useful for those who are interested in issues that affect women, especially Third World women. Indeed, it is a book for everybody, both men and women.
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The Boneshaker Politician
The Boneshaker Politician is an autobiography of A.K. Opoku. He narrates how he gave his life to Christ in a dramatic way while travelling in a boneshaker, a wooden truck. He recounts how the Lord used him by way of evangelism and church building and his involvement in an uncompromising undercover politics in the church. Meanwhile he had nursed a childhood ambition of being an active politician.
With all his “boneshaker” experience, he entered into politics and discovers that it was a different world altogether and bemoans the high moral and the financial entry requirements required of a Christian to engage in active politics. He raises question as to whether exhortations to get Christians involved in active politics is enough. He concludes with his family life and marvels at the art of God where four children of the same parentage and breed have four different characters and ambitions.
₵50.00The Boneshaker Politician
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History of Ashanti by Otumfuo, Nana Osei Agyeman Prempeh II (Hardcover)
History of Ashanti is unusual, perhaps unique, in that it provides a long historical account of the great West African forest kingdom of Asante by a ruler of that society. Thus, it is African history written by an African king and his assistants. This is, without a doubt, a very important document for historians of Africa. It has too a much wider resonance at the present time: here the Asante ‘voice’ is speaking directly to all those across the globe who claim ancestral links to the African continent, and who are still engaged in the struggle to define, to strengthen and to assert their identities in a world that long discounted the value, or even the existence, of their historical experience.
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Book Set: Red Oak Heroes Series (6 Books)
*Available from 15 August 2023
Age Range: 10 – 14 years
This is a bookset of all six titles in the Red Oak Heroes Series:
- Theodosia Okoh
- The Big Six
- Abedi Ayew Pele
- John Agyekum Kufour
- Kofi Annan
- Dr. J. B. Danquah
Introduce your children and adolescents to these Ghanaian Heroes.₵185.00₵210.00Book Set: Red Oak Heroes Series (6 Books)
₵185.00₵210.00 -
Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (African Writers Series)
This anthology introduces the African literature of incarceration to the general reader, the scholar, the activist and the student. The visions and prison cries of the few African nationalists imprisoned by colonialists, who later became leaders of their independent dictatorships and in turn imprisoned their own writers and other radicals, are brought into sharper focus, thereby critically exposing the ironies of varied generations of the efforts of freedom fighters.
Extracts of prose, poetry and plays are grouped into themes such as arrest, interrogation, torture, survival, release and truth and reconciliation.
Contributors include: Kunle Ajibade, Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Nawal El Saadawi, M J Kariuki, Kenneth Kaunda, Caesarina Kona Makhoere, Nelson Mandela, Emma Mashinini, Felix Mnthali, Augustino Nato, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, Abe Sachs, Ken Saro Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, and Koigi wa Wamwere.
Although an often harrowing indictment of the history, culture and politics of the African continent and the societies from which this literature comes, the anthology presents excellent prose, poetry and drama, which stands up in its own right as serious literature to be cherished, read and studied.
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The Lady in Boots: Memoirs of Ghana’s First Female Major General
Available from 11th September, 2023
The book is Major General Constance Edjeani-Afenu’s remarkable memoir. It chronicles her 43-year extraordinary journey in the Ghana Armed Forces.
She was the first female Commanding Officer, and the first female Major General. Her story is a testimony to dedication, leadership, and resilience.₵100.00 -
The Valley of Memories (Hardcover)
October 10th 1963, a Dutch teenage girl is sent away to Ghana by her resentful mother to marry a man she has met only once and who is more than twice her age. Arriving at the airport in Accra, a whole new world unfolds for this young girl. At first, she is shocked and disappointed by the things she sees in this new country she is to call her home. To her Ghana is hot, humid and dirty but then she meets the warm and welcoming people of Ghana and starts to open up to the country, culture and its people.
Her new husbands job takes her to some of the most remote areas in Ghana from Accra to the Northern, Upper East and Volta Regions where she repeatedly has to build a home with the meagre resources her husband and herself have available. Whilst building her homes and family, she encounters the most fascinating, emotional, funny, unbelievable and sometimes scary experiences.
This is a story about a young girl coming of age and finding love and happiness under the most unusual circumstances. The story will take the reader on a very vivid and colourful tour of life in post-colonial Ghana and gives the reader a history lesson about one of the most interesting periods Ghana has gone through after gaining independence from Britain and trying to build a strong and independent nation.
₵200.00 -
Baffour Osei Akoto: A Royal Patriot and the Making of Ghana (Hardcover)
Foreword by President John Agyekum Kufuor
This book is primarily composed of speeches presented at the 16th edition of the annual Re-Akoto Memorial Lectures held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. The Re Akoto Memorial Lectures, instituted by His Majesty Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, life patron of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) of the Ghana School of Law, seeks, amongst other things, to promote research, study and educate the citizenry on the development of Ghana’s constitutional democracy and human rights. Over the years, it has been presented by a good number of eminent Ghanaians and through which they have illuminated various spheres of life, especially issues regarding law and fundamental human rights, which are the key components that form the genesis of the famous Re-Akoto Case.
The presenters included Kwame Pianim, one of Ghana’s eminent economists; Maxwell Opoku-Agyemang, then-acting Director of the Ghana School of Law; Chief Justice Kwasi Anim Yeboah and Attorney-General Godfred Dame. Prof Mike Aaron Oquaye, a veritable political scientist and accomplished politician, knitted the strains together to discuss how Baffour’s strides and successes reaffirmed the liberal democratic political philosophy of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). He indicated that human beings have a dignity that must be protected and that dictatorial tendencies must not be accepted. Finally, provided a historical trajectory of Ghana’s stint with an authoritarian regime focusing on the country’s post-independence one-party political system.
“Baffour excelled in this career as an Asante diplomat, a valuable repository of Asante and Ghanaian social, cultural and political history, and a defender of the power of traditional leadership in the face of the onslaught of modern post-colonial politics in Ghana.” – His Majesty Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, Asantehene
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The Fear of Failure: An Autobiography
From Agomanya in the Eastern Region of Ghana, a 65 year old J. P. Adjimani narrates his life and how his fear of failure spurred him on instead of derailing him. In his autobiography, the biochemist unravels why he was never promoted to be a professor despite having a 28-year admirable career in Ghana’s premier university, University of Ghana.
₵80.00 -
Revolutionary Path
This book was compiled during the last two years of the author’s life. It was begun in response to many requests for a single volume which would contain key documents, some of them previously unpublished, which would illustrate landmarks in his career as a leading theorist and activist of the world socialist revolutionary struggle.
Among the documents included in Parts One and Two are Editorials from the Accra Evening News, What I Mean by Positive Action, The Motion of Destiny, The Dawn Broadcast, and the full text of other important speeches and broadcasts. Introductory sections to each document provide further insight into the political thinking of this great revolutionary Pan Africanist.
₵850.00Revolutionary Path
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In Attendance: On and Off Campus – A Personal Diary
In Attendance is the third in a series of autobiographical reflections by Ebow Daniel, who spent a 34-year career at the University of Ghana, the last ten of which saw him as Registrar – a role which, its prominence notwithstanding, he self-deprecatingly describes as bureaucrat, rather than academic; in academia, but not of it; also present at the Academic Board, but does not count for quorum; to be seen, but not heard, neither Present’ nor ‘Absent,’ in the minutes, only ‘In Attendance.’ Forewords generously contributed to In Attendance by H. E. Mrs Agnes Y. Aggrey-Orleans (Retired Diplomat), Kojo Yankah, founder, African University College of Communications (AUCC) and Ivan Addae-Mensah, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, provide compelling reason to read this book.
Following Mr. Registrar, published in 1999 and A Tale of Cape Coast published in 2004, In Attendance is a book of many parts. Beyond the autobiographical insights it provides in its vignettes, it recounts, within well-researched contextual accounts of colonial and post-colonial educational policy, the foundational stories of Adisadel College and the University of Ghana, both alma maters of the author. In Attendance also presents, with liberal doses of the author’s characteristic humour, the author’s educational and professional journey – and people encountered, some in wistful detail – from early days in Sekondi through to his professional life in Legon and to his post retirement life in Kigali, Rwanda; in the Office of President J. A. Kuffuor at the Osu Castle and Jubilee House; and, to final retirement at Another Den, his home in Tema. The author’s reflections on higher education in Ghana, on the political experiment that Ghana is, on religion, on Freemasonry, and on the role of the latter in his life, all presented in a unique style of writing, make for fascinating reading. Foreshadowing his demise in 2019, the titles of final parts of In Attendance – At the Confessional, Homestretch, In Memoriam, Nothing now Remains, Curtain, End of Story and – Final Call belie his humorous depiction of life’s lessons.
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A Legacy of Service to Humanity- Brig. Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah
In the book “A Legacy of Service to Humanity” author Korletey Jorbua Obuadey reveals to the reader the humanitarian activities of Brigadier General Joseph Nunoo-Mensah. The book inspires all especially the youth of Africa to service to our fellow country men and women and to our nation.
₵50.00 -
Red Oak Heroes Series: Kofi Annan
*Available from 15 August 2023
Age Range: 10 – 14 years
From the day Awo, a seven-year-old primary two girl, first hears about Mr. Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General, she becomes so fascinated by his great achievements that she vows to become like him.
With the help of everyone she comes across, her Uncle, Mr. Thompson especially, Awo learns as much as she can about her role model. Her curious questions often jog the memories of those who answer them, causing them to remember even the least things they know about the first black African to occupy the United Nation Secretary-General position. Having secured her mother’s promise to take her along to visit Mr. Annan the next time he is in the country, Awo’s only prayer is for that day to come quickly. But will Awo’s dream ever come to pass?₵35.00