Pop culture with popcorn

Welcome to a new phenomenon in Ghana - the rise of public reading as an activity as entertaining and popular as pop music. And meet the Ghanaian duo who have made this possible, Damoah and his reading partner Kofi Akpabli, a media consultant and travel writer.

Damoah describes how the partnership came about. Akpabli lives in a village near Accra and he moved to Lagos, Nigeria, in 2012 to work as a technical manager there. They were in the same primary school, though Akpabli was two grades ahead and they did not really connect. But in 2010 Akpabli became a celebrity after winning a CNN African journalism award and the two met at a party in Accra, where they found they had much in common.

It was also the year when Damoah gave his first book reading at a literary event supported by the Goethe Institut-ghana and he was wondering how to continue the public readings.

A year later, when the two had their first collaboration in the form of a joint book signing in an Accra bookshop, emboldened by the 11 books they had published between them, they decided to collaborate on the reading as well.

The first joint reading, from their own books, was held in January 2015 under the aegis of the Writers Project of Ghana, an NGO promoting literary culture. “We called it a reading marathon,” Damoah said. “We