Friday 2 September 2011

Anokye's Children's book of Rhymes to be published by SMARTLINE publishing


Our aim in writing the book of rhymes is to make the Anokye history accessible to al ages. We believe that being playful and allowing our imagination to guide our exploration of our history is the key to unlocking the creativity in the African child. For too long the African child never sees themselves during his or her formative years and this is wrong. The African child can only grow up to achieve his or her full potential if the heroes they are exposed to is just like them and the iconic stories told are reworked to be relevant for their generation.
For me as a parent I believe that there is nothing more important than instilling a love of nature, a love of freedom, a love of unity and a drive to dream big in the coming generations.

Anokye Book of rhymes came about as game between Louise Lynas (assistant producer) and my 9 year old son Seren. Both have a talent for rhymes. One day they started to rhyme the Anokye story and I was gripped. Louise agreed to start  writing the book and Seren has remained a keen critic and continues to write raps about food and the environment.

How we worked on the book


I wrote the treatment of a fictionalized mythic adventure about Okomfo Anokye 2 years ago. Louise then took that and began writing the rhymes in our sitting room in Accra. She then returned to the UK with a book that needed some editing. It was not long before she managed to rope in Emma Grant, a keen filmmaker, artist, illustrator and animator.

Emma kindly agreed to illustrate the book for us. I love Emma’s work and was really happy with what I saw when I got the first bit of artwork from her. I was even more bowled over when I saw the little animation that she had done to go with the book.

The final phases of editing took a while as Louise was working hard in the UK, but she finally got there in the end. Then I got an email from a lovely girl in America asking to help out / shadow / internish with me for a short while. Emelia came to Ghana and her first task was to find us a publisher for the book.

Emelia called me one day and said that she had sent the transcript to SMARTLINE publishing. I went with her to a meeting and met the lovely Elliot, the CEO.
He said that they loved the transcript, couldn’t believe that no one had done it and would love to publish it!

We have all been in cloud 9 since we got the news. It’s funny working on this as we are disparate groups of people working on different aspects in 3 countries. UK, South Africa and Ghana. Maybe even USA and or India or Canada will be part of this story soon. I thank I quite like the way that no one person knows everyone. What links and unites us is our belief in the story and that is great! 




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