• 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.
  • Remnants of a Haunted Past: Forts and Castles of Ghana (Photo Book, Hardcover)

    Yaw Pare is a celebrated Ghanaian photographer. This ground-breaking book richly illustrates the history and legacies of Ghana’s forts and castles through photography. In the same way that the forts and castles themselves bear witness to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, so too do these photographs provide compelling material and visual testimonies, offering possibilities for understanding that words do not.

    In this book, the photographer’s camera captures a reality that many choose to remember but just as many choose to forget. Ultimately, Remnants of a Haunted Past: Forts and Castles of Ghana constitutes an attempt to document the past so that it is never forgotten in the present.

    1,250.001,450.00
  • History of the Gold Coast and Asante

    First published in 1889, this history became an out-of-print classic, and is now brought back into print. The work has been used as an authority in the Law Courts of Ghana, where customs and their usages are relevant to interpretation of the law. The author (1834-1917) stated his purpose as the need for such a history by a Ghanaian, conscious of the customs and tradition of the people. He himself, a distinguished medical practitioner, was a key actor in some of the pre-colonial wars.

    Twenty-nine chapters are arranged chronologically. Chapter 1 covers a short description of the Gold Coast; the Kingdom of Guinea; expeditions sent by Pharaoh Necho and the Carthiginians; F. Romber’s reference to the Kingdom of Benin; traditional accounts of emigration to the coast; tribes assumed to have been the aboriginal races on the coast, and their conquest. The period covers BC600-750 and AD1400-1700.

    Chapter 29 covers 1851-1856: administration of justice according to English law & its effects; imposition & collection methods of a poll tax, and conspiracy to refuse payment; bombardment of Christiansborg, Labadi and Teshi; peace and the rebuilding of Christiansborg.

  • Steps for the Progress of the Black Race: Guides for Black Man’s Redemption (Hardcover)

    The book talks about Black history and traces it to when Blacks were successful. The author shows how the current difficult condition of Blacks in the world is surmountable if they will do the right thing. That right thing is Blacks changing their behaviour for the better. The author believes that everybody’s condition in which he/she finds himself or herself can be changed if the necessary conduct is applied. The book encourages Blacks not to give up in the quest to make their conditions better.

    The narrative concludes with the biographies, inventions and achievements of some prominent Blacks across the ages and across the world.

  • 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

  • A Panorama of Ghana’s Heritage: Una mirada al patrimonio de Ghana – in English & Spanish (Photo Book, Hardcover)

    Ghana, with Forts and Castles inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, is the African country with the oldest and greatest number of slave Castles dotted along the whole length of its coastline from which slaves were shipped. The capture and forced transfer, over the centuries, of millions of Africans to other parts of the world, along with their cultural traditions, skills, ideas and general heritage, not only had a profound impact on the African continent, but ultimately left a major mark in the formation and shape of cultures and civilizations of the world.

    Ghana, con fuertes y castillos inscritos en la Lista del Patrimonio Mundial de la UNESCO, es el país africano con los más antiguos y númerosos fuertes situados a lo largo de la costa, desde donde los esclavos eran embarcados. La captura y el traslado forzoso, a lo largo de los siglos, de millones de africanos a otras partes del mundo, junto con sus tradiciones culturales, habilidades, ideas y herencia en general, no sólo tuvo un impacto profundo en el continente africano, sino que dejó en última instancia una huella profunda en la génesis y forma de las culturas y civilizaciones del mundo.

    Includes bibliographical references (pages 105-106) and index.

    English and Spanish.

  • Philosophy, Culture and Vision: African Perspectives

    Believing that the intellectual enterprise called philosophy is essentially a part of the cultural as well as historical experience of a people, that the concepts and problems that occupy the attention of philosophers placed in different cultural spaces or historical times generally derive directly from those spaces and times, and that philosophy, in turn, has been most relevant to the development of human cultures, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye gives reflective attention in this book to some of the concepts and problems that in his view feature most prominently in the contemporary African cultural, social, political, and moral experience. Such concepts and problems include the following: political legitimacy, development, culture and the pursuit of science and technology, political corruption, democracy, representation and the politics of inclusion, the status of cultural values in national orientation, understanding globalization, and others. It is these topics that are covered in the essays collected in this book.

    The unrelenting pursuit of the speculative activity by the philosopher in most cases eventuates in normative proposals; these normative proposals often embody a vision-a vision of an ideal human society in terms of its values, politics, and culture. Vision, understood here, has human-not supernatural or divine-origination and involvement and requires action by human beings in order for it to come into reality. A vision may derive from sustained critical evaluation of a culture or some elements of it. Gyekye attempts an articulation of the visions of the essays contained in the book.

    Even though philosophical ideas and concerns are originally inspired by and worked out in a cultural milieu, it does not necessarily follow, Gyekye strongly believes, that the relevance of those ideas and insights is to be tetheed to the cultures that produced them. For, more often than not, the relevance of those ideas, or at least some of them, transcends the confines of their own times and cultures and can be appreciated by other societies, or cultures, or generational epochs. This trans-cultural or trans-epochal or meta-contextual appeal or attraction of philosophical ideas and insights spawned by a particular culture or cluster of cultures or in specific historical times is to be put down to our common human nature-including our basic human desires and aspirations. Thus, most of the essays published here should be of interest to the global community-i.e., to cultures and societies beyond the African.

  • Molecular Biology of the Gene: International Edition, 6th Edition

    The classic textbook in molecular biology, updated with new chapters, new information, and new media.

    Completely up-to-date with the latest research advances, the Sixth Edition of James D. Watson’s classic text, Molecular Biology of the Gene retains the distinctive character of earlier editions that has made it the most widely used book in molecular biology. Twenty-two concise chapters, co-authored by six highly respected biologists, provide current, authoritative coverage of an exciting, fast-changing discipline.

    Two new chapters discuss the emerging research fields of Regulatory RNAs (Chapter 18) and Genomics and Systems Biology (Chapter 20), and give particular focus on RNAi, microRNAs, the opportunities offered by the new generation of genome technologies, and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks.

    Every chapter includes thorough content updates, and where relevant, the inclusion of medical insights that have emerged from our understanding of basic molecular biology, and references that direct students to explore the expanded companion website.

  • Waning Strength of Government: Essays on Nigerian Governance

    In Waning Strength of Government, Obaze draws on twenty-three of his various speeches, policy briefs, lectures and op-eds, to render exploratory essays that dissect some common patterns and trajectories that point anthetically to factors and conducts, which ought to constitute the strength of government, but don’t.  In so doing, he unmasks the prevailing weaknesses and waning strength of government – the attendant consequences, and their prevalence and implications for Nigeria.

    Such developments, with the attendant reversals, some nondescript and some dramatic, but replete with absence of resilience, leads the author to assert that democracy, “once characterized as probably the greatest expansion of freedom,” has come under assault from within its ranks, as shifts in geopolitics combine with ascendancy of non-state actors to undercut democracy.  Cognizant of the suggestion that the democratic system as conceptualized, has not just worked as expected, but is rather dysfunctional, the author asserts that nowhere is this consideration more evident and concrete than in Africa, Nigeria included.

    Waning Strength of Government piggybacks on the assertion that Nigeria’s “democracy is in reverse gear” and “the story is that of regrets and missteps.” Obaze employs an inquiry and excursion model using the flipside of McGeorge Bundy’s 1968 seminal book, The Strength of Government, to analyze leadership, political and governance challenges that continue to dog Nigeria’s nascent democracy.  The essays in this volume, which are clustered into four groupings; democratic imperatives; domestic development challenges; foreign policy dimensions and leadership and governance, explore some Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT), as well as general challenges and uncertain aspects of Nigeria’s affected democracy.

    In this very important work on Nigerian contemporary politics, leadership and dilemmas confronting the nation, the point is made severally, and vehemently too, that the strength of government is not about military capacity or use of force; but about the upholding the rule of law, consolidating democratic institutions and entrenching the social contract between the government and the governed.

  • Not My Time to Die

    “Reading Yolande Mukagasana’s book in French at the age of 15 changed my life.”- Gaël Faye

    Originally published as La mort ne veut pas de moi in 1997, this book was the first survivor testimony to be published about the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

    In 1994 Yolande was an unconventional nurse and mother of three who enjoyed wearing jeans and designer glasses. She ran her own clinic in Nyamirambo and was planning a party for her wedding anniversary. But when genocide started everything changed. Targeted because she was a successful Tutsi woman, she was separated from her family and had to flee for her life.

    Mukagasana’s gripping memoir describes the betrayal of friends and help that came from surprising places. Quick-witted and courageous, Yolande never lost hope she would find her children alive.

    Translated from the French by Zoe Norridge.

  • OCR: Victory History for Primary Schools Learner’s Book 5

    History is an important subject that helps people to learn about their past. This helps to understand the factors that have shaped our lives. History helps people to know their past, their culture and the values that society needs for development.

    The general aim of the History Curriculum is to help learners become literate and very good problem solvers. This will help them to think creatively and be able to grow and contribute to the development of the nation.

    This textbook has been designed to help learners develop the right skills and attitudes to lead Ghana into a developed nation.

    The textbook is based on the new History curriculum issued by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) of Ministry of Education, 2019.

    It covers the following areas:

    STRAND 1: History as a Subject

    STRAND 2: My Country Ghana

    STRAND 3: Europeans in Ghana

    STRAND 6: Independent Ghana

     

    The textbook uses a lot of pictures, illustrations and activities that make learning interesting and easy.

    It is our hope that both learners and teachers will find this book useful in teaching and learning the subject.

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