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Gocking provides a historical overview of Ghana from the emergence of precolonial states through increasing contact with Europeans that led to the establishment of formal colonial rule by Great Britian at the end of the 19th century. Colonial rule transformed what was known as the Gold Coast economically, socially, and politically, but it contained the seeds of its own demise. After World War II an increasingly more effective nationalist movement challenged British rule, and in 1957 Ghana became independent. Independence brought its own challenges the most important of which was the inability to maintain political stability. Within the space of 24 years there were four military coups and the collapse of three republics. Ghana's Fourth Republic, established in 1993, has dealt with the legacy of instability inherited from the past as it moves towards a more stable future.

A timeline, photographs, maps, and an appendix of biographies of notable figures in the history of Ghana are included. Students and adults alike will find this book to be highly effective in describing the often turbulent and tumultuous history of this country.

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Boundary studies in Ghana have focused primarily on the evolution and impact of the international boundaries, to the complete neglect of internal administrative divides. Filling the gap, this comprehensive study reconstructs the originating circumstances of the administrative regions of Ghana: the Gold Coast Colony, the Colony of Ashanti and the Protectorate of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. It analyses the evolution and impact of the internal colonial and regional boundaries as barriers to the movement of people, goods, ideas and capital, and particularly the effects on the border populations. The five parts cover evolution and problems of the internal colonial boundaries 1874-1951; evolution and problems of the internal colonial boundaries 1951-1997; internal colonial boundaries and amalgamation; regionalism, federalism and the emergence of the Unitary State; and the problem of unity and the creation of regions. ... Read more

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Here is Ghana. Past, present—and future. The author himself was an eye-witness to the stirring events of Independence Day which he so vividly recounts. This is the exciting account of the birth of Ghana, newest member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. It is the story of a bid for freedom crowned with success. It is the story too of Ghana's dynamic leader, Kwame Nkrumah—the greatest living African. ... Read more

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Academic research and publication on indigenous slavery in Ghana and in Africa more widely have not received attention commensurate with the importance of the phenomenon: the history of indigenous slavery, which existed long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, has been a marginal topic in documented historical studies on Ghana. Yet its weighty historical, and contemporary relevance inside and outside Africa is undisputed. This book begins to redress this neglect. Drawing on sources including oral data from so-called slave descendants, cultural sites and trade routes, court records and colonial government reports, it presents historical and cultural analysis which aims to enhance historical knowledge and understanding of indigenous slavery. The author further intends to provide a holistic view of the indigenous institution of slavery as a formative factor in the social, political and economic development of pre- colonial Ghana. ... Read more

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Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa changes dominant ideas about Africa's relations with modernity and the global history of nationalism by recovering, and bringing fresh interpretations to, a modern genealogy of African nationalist theory. Author Kwaku Larbi Korang examines the writing of intellectuals from preindependence Ghana from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, writers who operated self-consciously in a Pan-African ideological framework. By confronting the concept of "the African Nation" under the colonial order, Korang contends that these writer-intellectuals were also confronting modernity in ways that would be important to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through its affiliation with recent revisionary works that have demonstrated the conceptual and existential validity of "alternative modernities," the volume shifts our understanding of the modern from a securely and exclusively Western mode of being to the modern as relational and inclusively intercultural. It mobilizes this relational and intercultural conception to locate and outline "African modernity." Additionally,Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa demonstrates why and how projections of, and debates about, "African modernity" have been more than a continental affair. Korang comprehensively relates the thought of African Americans (Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright), and West Indians (George Padmore, C.L.R. James), to that of seminal anglophone West African thinkers like E. W. Blyden, Africanus Horton, J. E. Casely Hayford, and Kwame Nkrumah. Kwaku Larbi Korang is associate professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Ohio State University. ... Read more

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The author is one of Africa's most distinguished historians, and was head of the Department of History at the University of Ghana, Legon, for many years. These three collected lectures are republished in response to demand, and remain centrally relevant to social, economic and political problems facing Ghana. The sphinx of the title lecture refers to the Greek myth and the riddle posted by the monster. Ghana's riddle is why a country so generously endowed has failed to develop and progress. The other lectures are 'The Era of Men on Horseback' - the 1972 coup to the June 4 uprising; 'The Era of the Culture of Silence' - from the Third Republic to the second phase of the PNDC. ... Read more

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Winner of The Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. The jury cited the book as "...no ordinary history book. It is a fascinating story, elegantly told by a meticulous historian in a beautifully produced volume. The author, a major historian and political figure, skilfully presents the story of the making of modern Ghana through the life history of one school." The author illuminates how western education has refined and changed the destiny of Ghanaian families from the school, and the contribution of the school to nation building through the excellence of the products of the school. The history of the school is set against the background of the history of Ghana in general; and a completely new light is thrown on a turning point in Ghana's history - the 1948 riots and their aftermath. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Splendid piece of work
The book speaks for itself when read;no wonder the Professor won anaward for it. Kwabotwe's "Dwin Hwe Kan" lives on even after the period the book covers. It is a must read for all and MOBAs especially. ... Read more

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In the eighteenth century part of modern day Ghana consisted of the three Akyem states, yet in almost all historical works on Ghana the Akyem are presented as a single homogeneous people. The author, Senior Lecturer of History at the University of Cape Coast examines the three groups and analyses their vital role in the history of Ghana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Covering the period of 1699-1875, the study relies primarily - though not exclusively - on documentary evidence. ... Read more

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Adu Boahen, the dean of Ghana's history and letters, has been a leading figure in the writing of African history since the 1950s. His loud insistence that African history should be written from an African perspective has borne considerable fruits. He pioneered the production of successful textbooks on West Africa and monographs on colonial rule in Africa. His leadership in the training of many scholars in the postcolonial era is also one of his touchstones.

A public intellectual who has shaped West African history in dramatic and enduring ways, Adu Boahen became famous for his struggles against military regimes and for the establishment of democratic institutions in Africa. He was so committed to the inauguration of a new political system that he ran for the presidency of his country in 1992. Despite his loss in the election and his failing health, Boahen continues to participate actively in the politics of Ghana and the production of new knowledge relevant to Africa’s future.

The essays in this volume reveal the wide range of Adu Boahen's scholarship, namely, a commitment to studying precolonial history, indigenous belief systems, inter-group relations, colonialism, and the challenges facing postcolonial Africa. In this collection, Ghana becomes the window to peer into Africanist scholarship and the world thus envisioned. The contributors are drawn from the students, peers, colleagues and successors of Adu Boahen; as they celebrate his scholarship, they lead us into the New Africa for which Boahen and the pioneers tirelessly worked. ... Read more

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This fascinating book recounts a pivotal event in West African history that provides important insights into law and politics in the colonial Gold Coast, and the clash between traditional and modern values, and the nature of African monarchy in the colonial period. This book tells the story of ritual murder in a kingdom of Ghana, of the trials and appeals of those accused of the crime, and of the radicalization of the black lawyers who confronted the colonial justice system and later began a struggle for self-government that led to Ghanian independence from Britain in 1957. ... Read more

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Presents an annotated guide to the Dutch archives on Ghana and West Africa in the Nationaal Archief offering an overview of available sources. ... Read more

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Attoh founded "The Gold Coast Leader" in 1896 and was considered to be the most influential newspaper of its day. Many Gold Coast Nationalists used it as a platform and these selections, first published in 1911, went on to influence an entire generation of Ghanians. ... Read more

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Entries include information on the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial institutional and political history. Individuals who have made significant contributions in the history of the country are identified either in the context of institutions in which they played roles, or they are isolated and written on. The chronology section is detail, and the bibliography section is substantial. Students and researches on Ghana will find this work as the first source of significance. ... Read more

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The political conflict that has taken the most violent form and proved costliest in human lives in Ghana in the last half century has been a chieftaincy dispute in the northern kingdom of Dagomba, known as the Yendi skin dispute. The major loss of life took puce in 1969 but the dispute has continued to trouble Ghanaian politics and has affected the careers of national leaders under both civilian and military regimes. It is one of the most complex, explosive and intractable disputes in a country noted for conflicts over chieftaincy. Mr Staniland examines the political history of Dagomba, one of the most important pre-colonial states in what is now Ghana, from its partition between the British and the Germans in 1899. He analyses the attitudes and policies of successive governments towards chieftaincy and `traditionalism', and the effects which outside control has had on dynastic politics. ... Read more

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PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK:

"Highly educative! Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana brings early post-colonial Ghanaian politics full circle, the way it ought to be. Indeed, it is most appropriate that the Doyen of the Ghanaian independence movement should get this treatment at a time when the Danquah-Busia tradition is on the ascendancy in Ghana."
—Roger Gocking, historian, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, author of The History of Ghana and Facing Two Ways: Ghana's Coastal Communities Under Colonial Rule.

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This is the text of an inaugural lecture at University of Cape Coast. The Professor of History focuses on the first twenty-five years in the history of Ghana, 1957-1982, as it is symptomatic of the problems of coming of age which were experienced by the newly independent states. He examines the thesis that given the circumstances in which the newly emergent nations found themselves, they could not have performed much better than they did. ... Read more