Coordinated by the West African Organisation for Research on Eweland, this publication constitutes a first and much needed English language survey of the history and cultures of the Ewe peoples in the former French colonies, Benin and Togo.

Ewe dance-drumming has been extensively studied throughout the history of ethnomusicology, but up to now there has not been a single study that addresses Ewe female musicians. James Burns redresses this deficiency through a detailed ethnography of a group of female musicians from the Dzigbordi community dance-drumming club from the rural town of Dzodze, located in South-Eastern Ghana. Dzigbordi was specifically chosen because of the author's long association with the group members, and because it is part of a genre known as adekede, or female songs of redress, where women musicians critique gender relations in society. Burns uses audio and video interviews, recordings of rehearsals and performances and detailed collaborative analyses of song texts, dance routines and performance practice to address important methodological shifts in ethnomusicology that outline a more humanistic perspective of music cultures. This perspective encompasses the inter-linkages between history, social processes and individual creative artists. The voices of Dzigbordi women provide us not only with a more complete picture of Ewe music-making, they further allow us to better understand the relationship between culture, social life and individual creativity. The book will therefore appeal to those interested in African Studies, Gender Studies and Oral Literature, as well as ethnomusicology. Includes a DVD documentary.

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

Chinua Achebe ("The art of fiction”) famously observed that until lions have their own historians “the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” In this volume chronicling the complex imperial and colonial entanglements of the Kpando region in eastern Ghana over recent centuries, the lions have found their proverbial historian. Drawing on an array of sources—archaeological, oral historical and documentary—Wazi Apoh brings locally nuanced perspective to the complex social political economic entanglements among Akpini, German and British actors. His illumination of previously silenced histories provides a rich platform from which to provoke us to imagine and act on the possibilities for restorative repatriation in the present. Its novel combination of historical study with analysis of ongoing dialogues over repatriation is a unique contribution to African studies.