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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.
₵712.00 -
‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself’ and Other Writings
The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself is a key text for understanding the history of the great West African kingdom of Asante (now in Ghana). It is also an early–and perhaps the earliest–example of history writing in English by an African ruler and his amanuenses. It was begun in 1907 in the Seychelles on the instructions of the Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I, who had been in British captivity with his family since 1896, during which time he had acquired proficiency in English.
The chief source of information was his mother the Asantehemaa Yaa Kyaa, who possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the oral history of her own lineage, which was also the royal dynasty of Asante. The result is an indispensably detailed document that charts the history of the Asante monarchy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Context is provided by the inclusion of other writings by or about Agyeman Prempeh, together with four introductory essays by the world’s leading scholars of Asante history.
This fascinating volume evokes the rich historical experience of a renowned kingdom, and is of compelling interest to all concerned with the production of indigenous historical knowledge in Africa.
₵300.00 -
The Fall of The Asante Empire: The Hundred -Year War for Africa’s Gold Coast
In 1817, the first British envoy to meet the king of the Asante of West Africa was dazzled by his reception. A group of 5,000 Asante soldiers, many wearing immense caps topped with three foot eagle feathers and gold ram’s horns, engulfed him with a “zeal bordering on phrensy,” shooting muskets into the air. The envoy was escorted, as no fewer than 100 bands played, to the Asante king’s palace and greeted by a tremendous throng of 30,000 noblemen and soldiers, bedecked with so much gold that his party had to avert their eyes to avoid the blinding glare. Some Asante elders wore gold ornaments so massive they had to be supported by attendants. But a criminal being lead to his execution – hands tied, ears severed, knives thrust through his cheeks and shoulder blades – was also paraded before them as a warning of what would befall malefactors. This first encounter set the stage for one of the longest and fiercest wars in all the European conquest of Africa. At its height, the Asante empire, on the Gold Coast of Africa in present-day Ghana, comprised three million people and had its own highly sophisticated social, political, and military institutions. Armed with European firearms, the tenacious and disciplined Asante army inflicted heavy casualties on advancing British troops, in some cases defeating them. They won the respect and admiration of British commanders, and displayed a unique willingness to adapt their traditional military tactics to counter superior British technology. Even well after a British fort had been established in Kumase, the Asante capital, the indigenous culture stubbornly resisted Europeanization, as long as the “golden stool,” the sacred repository of royal power, remained in Asante hands. It was only after an entire century of fighting that resistance ultimately ceased.
₵300.00 -
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
₵350.00 -
My Footprints in Ghana’s Black Gold
This memoir — part historical and part autobiographical — traces the author’s involvement with the final phase of petroleum exploration in Ghana, a journey that took over a century, beginning with the first onshore well in 1896. It has been a most interesting journey, with many twists and turns.
In the early days of the existence of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, there were various myths and half-truths about the presence or absence of commercial quantities of oil and gas in the basins of the Ghana.
- Nigeria was draining Ghana’s oil and that all that was required was for Ghana to buy powerful machines and begin to pump and drain her own
- Ghana would never find oil until the gods of Nzemaland and the Volta Region had been pacified
- The GNPC Model Production Sharing Agreement was too stringent on contractors
A major seismic interpretation of the Cape Three Points sub-basin of the Western Region, in 1992, would turn out to be the watershed of this new brave phase of exploration in Ghana.
The book was finally launched in Ghana in April 2022.
Hopefully, going to the heart of the matter should help future generations of ordinary Ghanaians, politicians and explorationists understand what it took to make Ghana a petroleum producing country, just in case the country was afflicted by the “Dutch disease.”
₵120.00 -
The Experience of Politics: A Manual for Ghanaian and African Politicians
P.K.K. Quaidoo was educated at St. Augustine’s College, Cape Coast, Achimota College and the University of Bristol where he graduated in Mathematics, Philosophy and Latin, Magna cum laude. He was later elected to Parliament (1954-56; 1957-61) where he established himself as a debater with outstanding courage, thus earning the nickname ‘Asem Yi Di Ka’ (say it and be damned!).
He held several portfolios as a Cabinet Minister: Trade and Labour (1957-58), Communications (1958) and Social Welfare (1960-61). He travelled widely: to Europe, the USA, Canada and the Far East and within Africa. He was decorated by the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia as a Knight Companion of the Lion of Juda.
Mr. Quaidoo often contributed articles to the Catholic Standard. He got married and had two sons and four daughters.
Contents
- Preliminary requirements
- Field discipleship and apprenticship
- Strategies of reform and maintenance
- Some puzzling questions about Ghanaian society
- They also serve who only stand and wait
- Building the support base
- Inside the political arena
- Global vision and horizon
- The field of labour at a glance
- Relics of the past
- Priorities, programmes and the timetables.
₵40.00 -
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 -
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 -
…Power to the People: Reflections on Retrogressive Politics
Published in 1984…Power to the People is a doctor’s medicine for Ghana’s ills. The pill is occasionally bitter, but is coated with a generous layer of therapeutic laughter, to help its message slide gently into the appropriate organs of the national digestive system.
Presented in the form of prose, poetry and cartoons, the first part of the book, subtitled The Past, covers the Nkrumah, Kotoka, Afrifa & Ankrah, Busia, Acheampong & Akuffo, Rawlings 1979 and Limann eras. The second part, subtitled The Present, covers the first three years of the second coming of Rawlings.
In a satirical treatment of our history over almost 30 years, this book sheds a great light onto the paths that Ghana traversed in those heady years, in a form that is easy to read, reflect on and learn.
In the author’s own words, “in recording these…my hope is that others would be induced to ponder over and question loudly some of those short-comings, lapses and omissions in our national character and situation which are stifling our growth and retarding the country’s progress. If our questions get loud and irritating enough to cause discomfiture in our policy makers, then the reader wouldn’t have been bored for nothing.”
₵65.00 -
Inside Out: Autobiographical Memoirs
The author recounts a journey that starts in a small town in Ghana, through an academic and professional career in finance in Canada and the United States, culminating at the Ministry of Finance in Ghana where he served as Technical Advisor to three different Ministers of Finance from different political parties.
The memoirs depict the complexities of decision-making that combine technical know-how with political reality using several instances of policymaking and financial transactions that he led at the Ministry. For the technical reader, the author recounts a 25-year history of his involvement in many key initiatives of financial market development in Ghana.
The sweetener in Inside Out is an interesting case study of how to navigate political transitions and maintain relevance as a senior advisor to Ministers in a “winner-takes-all” political environment.
₵150.00 -
Swimming Upstream: The Story of Southern Cross
Kwame Donkoh Fordwor’s dream was realized due to the precision planning which was utilized to develop Southern Cross Mining Limited (SCML), as the company established itself as the first active gold mining operation to be brought to Ghana Since 1937. This came to pass by way of chance associations and the joint efforts of collaborators who possessed different backgrounds and motivations.
Even with the assistance of numerous people along the way, the inception of Southern Cross was not easy. It required aggressive action and time to fend or larger corporations and fight government officials for the rights and freedoms they felt they deserved.
Fordwor titles this book Swimming Upstream: The Story of Southern Cross because of the comparisons he draws between himself and the struggles of salmon attempting to reach their spawning grounds. Much like a salmon battling currents, fishermen, and other predators to reach its final destination, Fordwor had to struggle to make his own path and place in history, using keen instincts and good fortune to maintain the competitiveness and success of SCML.
Swimming Upstream vividly details the rich history of Southern Cross and other gold mining venturers who strived to achieve historical recognition. It is an illuminating work-powerfully written and inspirational to all who are still seeking to make a lifetime dream come true.₵380.00 -
Perseverance Conquers All: The Autobiography of Kantinka Kwame Donkor Fordwor
As a very poor boy, Kantinka sustained himself in school by selling firewood. He walked four miles every day from village, Breman, to Kumasi to attend school. He recounts how by dint of hard work, he sailed through elementary and secondary school to the Graduate School of Wharton even though fate had prevented him from doing sixth form studies. He recollects how at St. Augustine’s College, Cape Coast, he was cured of a strange disease by a traditional priest. His beloved wife had to discontinue her studies to help him complete his. Kantinka thus passed through a darkness of life which continued in his working life.
His decision to provide a house for the Executive Chairman of the Capital Investments Board, in order to save the Board huge sums of money in rent payments, was so maliciously interpreted that he was editorially castigated and lambasted. His ingenious polices that eventually helped to raise the capital of the African Development Bank from US $200 million to US $100 billion was rewarded with his dismissal as the President of the Bank.
He incurred the ire of his enemies for the appreciation he received from three Kings of Asante Kingdom.
Perseverance Conquers All portrays these midnight sides of Kantinka’s life to let his sun shine brightly. His wife gave him six children any father could wish for, whom he educated as a very responsible father. Providence made him help Ghana in its financial difficulties when he became the virtual Minister of Finance during the reign of Colonel Acheampong. His input to the progress of the Catholic Church has even been more monumental as explained beautifully in the book. Kantinka is indeed the sun at midnight.
Reliance on God, patriotism, philanthropy, hard work, good family life, good parenthood, honesty, and magnanimity is what this life story portrays. This is a book that all must have and read: the student as well as the teacher; the Christian, husband and patriot.
₵90.00 -
The Danquah-Busia Tradition in the Politics of Ghana: The Origins, Mission and Achievements of the New Patriotic Party
The book traces the nation’s political history from its status as a model British African Colony, the Gold Coast, to its attainment of political independence as the modern state of Ghana in 1957, under the leadership of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. The author gives full recognition to the overwhelming debt that Ghana in particular and Africa in general owe to Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s vision as one of the giants of Pan-African Emancipation.
The book systematically documents the contribution of Dr. Joseph Boakye Danquah and Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia in the freedom struggle. The courageous and impressive role of Professor Adu Boahen in the breaking of the so called “culture of silence” in 1988 at the height of the PNDC regime under Flt. Lt. J. J. Rawlings is acknowledged.
In the concluding Chapter 13 all the leaders of the tradition are assessed – Dr. Joseph Boakye Danquah passes the litmus test as a doyen of Ghana politics, with impeccable democratic credentials for human rights and the rule of law. The deviation from the ideals of the Danquah-Busia Tradition by Dr. Busia during his two and half years as Head of Government is commented on. Dr. K.A. Busia challenged the rule of law in its response to the ruling of the Supreme Court in the infamous case of Sallah vs. The Republic.
Other serious deviations from the principles of the Danquah-Busia Tradition were the way in which Dr. Busia implemented the Aliens Compliance Act in 1969. Then also the throwing overboard the belief in meritocracy and the shortcomings of the “zero tolerance of corruption” by President J.A. Kuffour led administration of the Patriotic Party are discussed.
However, the important and positive achievements of the NPP Government under President Kuffour such as the successes in establishing the Ghanaian economy, upholding the rule of law, enhancing good governance, improving the education and health copulation and thus lifting the flag of Ghana high in Africa and in the international community are not ignored.
Some of the criticisms may be harsh but the author is a committed member of the Tradition and he justifies his criticism of the Kuffour government with its own commitment to “ensure that the high ideas and objectives which have guided the Tradition through good and bad times should not at any time and under any circumstance be sacrificed for narrow partisan interest or worse still for personal gain”.
The form and force of the impact of these criticisms must be left to individual assessment and experience. The author has succeeded in intellectually stimulating and provoking democrats and non-democrats of whatever affiliation to digest the contents of this book and make their own judgment. He has opened the door for a fresh appraisal of the noble ideals of the Danquah-Busia Tradition.
In the Way Forward, the author makes some reflections on the future direction of the NPP.
Politicians, opinion leaders, the media, social observers and social critics as well as students of history and political science will find this book invaluable.
₵80.00 -
Too Much and Never Enough How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Hardcover)
In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.
Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, New York, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.
A firsthand witness to countless holiday meals and interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for regifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.
Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.
₵205.00 -
Are You Not A Nigerian? Thoughts on a Nation at Crossroads
*Available from 15th September 2019.
Are You Not A Nigerian? chronicles a country’s fourth attempt at democratic governance after many years of military dictatorship. Through his personal experiences and observations, Báyọ̀ Olúpohùndà captures the reality of Nigeria’s socio-political environment at the turn of the millennium, the collapse of dignity in service, and the ubiquitous “Nigerian factor” that creates entitlement.
Are You Not A Nigerian? examines the lost opportunities, the disappointment of successive administrations, and the dilemma of a nation at a crossroads.
₵60.00