Ivor Agyeman-Duah

Ivor Agyeman-Duah is a development specialist who has written on economics, international development cooperation and literary histories. He served as an advisor to Ghana’s former President, John Agyekum Kufuor and the King of Ashanti, Osei Tutu II (on his historic visit to Seychelles) of which he produced two television documentaries - Yaa Asantewaa, the Heroism of An African Queen and The Return of a King to Seychelles. He was part of the BBC and PBS production team, Wonders of the African World presented by Henry Louis Gates, Jnr.

His published works include, Crucible of the Ages: Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80 and with Lucy Newlyn of Oxford, May Their Shadows Never Shrink- Wole Soyinka and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry.

He has also edited three well-received anthologies of contemporary fiction - All the Good Things Around Us, The Gods Who Send Us Gifts and Between the Generations.

Agyeman-Duah was a research scholar at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard (1998-1999) and at the Exeter College of Oxford (2006-2007). He studied at the London School of Economics, the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and the University of Wales.

The fifty-six stories come from fifteen African countries and elsewhere; Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and East of the continent, Uganda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Great Lakes region, Ethiopia and Tanzania (in setting). They bring in other voices in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, St. Maarten, United States and Britain. The themes are amok and definitely so in a vein of free expression. There are stories of love (of even a man who finds one whilst visiting a dying cancer-patient wife at the hospital in Lagos) or of a husband wrongfully imprisoned in Malawi who upon escape from jail confronts a wife about to wed again, a story very reminiscent of the main character in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s, Weep Not, Child.

There is hate and there is poverty - one from Kenya which reads like the Zimbabwean novelist, Dambudzo Marechera’s 1978 classic, The House of Hunger. Issues of mental health, corpse donation for scientific research and Coronavirus-19 are addressed alongside Pentecostal redemption, fake prophets and the havoc they exert on societies as do their counterparts in Islam.