Accra reads more than its bookshop count suggests. Most of the reading happens outside bookshops: on a pavement outside a lorry station, through a car window in traffic, from a photocopied pamphlet, on a phone.
Understanding that is most of understanding how to buy books here.
Why an imported book costs what it does
A new paperback shipped in runs roughly ₵180 to ₵450. That is not a shop being greedy. It is freight, duty, a thin retail market that cannot order in bulk, and a currency that moves against the price the publisher set.
A book printed and published in Ghana runs about ₵60 to ₵150, and it is the same object.
That gap is the single most useful fact in this guide. It is why the reading habit that works in Accra is buy Ghanaian authors from Ghanaian publishers here, and bring the imported ones with you.
— Ghanaian authors worth reading — Importing and customs
The kinds of bookshop
Academic and textbook sellers. The largest part of the trade by revenue, because school and university books are the part of the market that is not optional. EPP Books Services is the best-known name, with branches including one at Legon. — School and university books
General trade bookshops, which sell novels, biography and business titles alongside stationery. Vidya Bookstore on the Ring Road has been the reference point for this for many years. Mall bookshops fill the same role at Accra Mall, West Hills and Achimota.
Mission book depots. The Methodist Book Depot, the Presbyterian Book Depot and Challenge Bookshop are among the oldest continuously trading booksellers in the country. Christian publishing is their core, but they carry general and educational stock too, and they have outlasted most of the competition.
Publisher shopfronts. Several Ghanaian publishers sell directly, which is usually the cheapest way to buy a Ghanaian title.
Gallery and museum shops, which is where art, photography and design books live. The Nubuke Foundation and the museum shops carry things no bookshop does.
Check before you travel across town
Bookshops in Accra open, move and close without announcing it, and a shop that was on a corner for a decade can be a phone accessories stall now. Call first, and treat any address written down more than a year ago as a lead rather than a fact — this page included.
The pavement and the traffic
This is where most books in Accra actually change hands.
Pavement booksellers lay out stock on tarpaulin near Kwame Nkrumah Circle, around Makola, at lorry stations and outside university campuses. The stock arrives in bales of donated and remaindered books from Europe and North America, which is why the selection is strange and wonderful: three copies of a 2009 management title, a Booker winner, a nursing textbook, a Danielle Steel.
Expect ₵10 to ₵60 before haggling.
Hawkers in traffic sell books at the big junctions alongside plantain chips and phone chargers — usually motivational titles, business books, Bibles and children’s workbooks. It is a real distribution channel, not a curiosity, and for a great many Ghanaian readers it is where the last book came from.
How to buy well from either:
- Check the binding and the spine. Bale books have travelled.
- Check for missing pages, especially in the middle of a textbook.
- Haggle. Expected, and not aggressive.
- Go back to the same seller. They remember what you read and will hold things for you, which is a better recommendation engine than any website.
- Be careful with editions if it is a textbook. A cheap old edition of a set text is a false economy when the questions are numbered differently.
What is worth buying here
Buy here:
- Ghanaian fiction, poetry and history, which is cheaper here than anywhere and in some cases not sold anywhere else at all
- Ghanaian cookery and language books — Twi and Ga courses barely exist abroad
- School textbooks and revision series, which are locally published
- Children’s books by Ghanaian authors and publishers, which are excellent and inexpensive
- Anything secondhand, on the pavement
Bring, or buy as an e-book:
- Recent international releases
- Technical and professional books
- Anything you need a specific edition of
Children’s books
A genuine strength, and the thing visitors are most surprised by. Ghanaian children’s publishing is long-established, cheap and good, and it is worth seeking out for reasons beyond price: a Ghanaian child’s picture book is one of the few places a child in Accra reliably sees their own street.
Look for Ghanaian publishers by name rather than for imported series.
Libraries
- Public libraries run by the Ghana Library Authority, including the central library in Accra. Membership is cheap. They have been steadily refurbished, and the children’s sections are the best-used part.
- The George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs, for African history and politics, and a reference collection rather than a lending one.
- The W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre in Cantonments, which holds Du Bois’s own library and his grave.
- The Balme Library at the University of Ghana, Legon — the major academic library in the country. Access as a non-member is limited; ask.
- Cultural institutes. The Goethe-Institut, Alliance Française and the British Council have run libraries and media collections in Accra, and put on readings and film nights alongside them.
Reading in Twi and Ga
Ghanaian-language publishing is real but small, and mostly educational, religious or aimed at schools. If you want to read in Twi or Ga, start with the school readers and the Bible, which are the two things reliably in print.
Selling and giving away books
Leaving Accra with fewer books than you arrived with is easy. Schools, children’s homes and the public libraries all take donations, and a pavement seller will buy a decent box outright. Do not put books in the bin; there is always somebody who wants them.