Falola Toyin, ed. Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2002. 800 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Illustrations. Appendixes. Bibliographies. Index. Notes. $99.95. Cloth. $39.95. Paper.

Toyin Falola, ed. Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2002. 800 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Illustrations. Appendixes. Bibliographies. Index. Notes. $99.95. Cloth. $39.95. Paper. The thirty-six essays contained in this Festschrift honoring the noted Ghanaian historian and politician Adu Boahen range widely over a number of themes central to the honoree's life's work and interests. They are divided into eight sections, entitled "Tributes to Adu Boahen," "Knowledge and Historical Interpretations," "Kingdoms and Ethnicity," "Old and New Religions," "Precolonial and Colonial Economy and Society," "Modern Economies," "Modern Politics and Conflicts," and "Regionalism and PanAfricanism." The authors are a veritable who's who of Asante, Ghanaian, and West African (and beyond) scholarship. The introduction by the volume editor, Toyin Falola, recaps Boahen's role in the belated emergence, in the Western academic tradition, of the fields of African history and African studies in the 1960s. Many of the contributors' personal and professional ties to Adu Boahen date to this period. Their essays convey the sense of intellectual excitement, even exhilaration (as well as just plain fun), which attended the blossoming of these fields-thus Ivor Wilks's "Off to Northern Ghana in the Morning," which describes an early research trip undertaken by the author and Boahen, among others, following the 1961 founding of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Boahen's writings played a critical part in the development of African history by emphasizing African agency and perspectives, topics hitherto discredited, discarded, or denied. Many of the essays echo and expand upon the themes. For example, Ogbu U. Kalu's chapter gives a superb history over the longue duree of evangelicalism in Africa which privileges African rather than missionary initiatives, experiences, and viewpoints. In the same vein, G. N. Uzoigwe's contribution makes the interesting point that the Africanizing of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-ironically threatened today, he asserts, by African evangelical Christians-parallels an earlier but not always acknowledged Europeanizing of Christianity that occurred as the religion spread from its Asian and African origins to Rome and the rest of Europe. Also reflected in this collection are Boahen's interests in precolonial history and in establishing the legitimacy of oral traditions as important sources of information for reconstructing that past. T. C. McCaskie, for example, utilizes oral histories of lakeshore villages in his exploration of the geology of Lake Bosomtwe (a place he first visited with Adu Boahen thirty years ago), which is situated in a crater formed by a long-ago meteorite impact. Similarly, in an exploration of the political history of Wasa in what is today southern Ghana, Larry W. Yarak argues for the ability to understand eighteenth-century southern Akan history more fully by making comprehensive use of documentary sources which "contain much untapped evidence from oral traditions" (143). Emmanuel Akyeampong looks environmental activism related to coastal erosion along today's southeastern coast of Ghana. He ascribes the activists' success in persuading the government to intervene and attempt to stabilize or even extend their eroding shoreline in part to their centuries-old "environmental folk wisdom" and oral traditions which "gave confidence... that a permanent solution to coastal erosion could be found" (216). Adu Boahen has had a strong interest, too, in the condition of contemporary Africa, from the dual perspectives of a historian exploring the roots of the present state of the continent and of a politician who ran for president of Ghana in 1992-hence Y. …