The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbell, editors

Covering 500 years of Ghana’s history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast’s importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana’s brief period under British colonial rule, or the emergence of its modern democracy, the volume’s eighty selections emphasize Ghana’s enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations. They also demonstrate that the path to fully understanding Ghana requires acknowledging its ethnic and cultural diversity and listening to its population’s varied voices. Readers will encounter selections written by everyone from farmers, traders, and the clergy to intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers. With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, The Ghana Reader conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of Ghana’s development as a nation, its key contribution to the formation of the African diaspora, and its increasingly important role in the economy and politics of the twenty-first century.

Kwasi Konadu is Professor of History at the City University of New York and the author of The Akan Diaspora in the Americas and Transatlantic Africa: 1440–1888.

Clifford C. Campbell received his Ph.D. from the University of Ghana, Legon, and writes about African and African diaspora history.

The World Readers

January 2016

496 pages, 53 illustrations (including 12 in color)

978-0-8223-5992-0, paper, $27.95

978-0-8223-5984-5, library cloth edition, $99.95

Read the introduction: