Professor Maxwell Owusu a Visiting Professor of political science at the University of Ghana, Legon in 1980-1981 academic year, taught a course on Comparative Politics, and team taught (with Professor K.A Ninsin (now retired)) another course on Politics in Ghana., Professor Maxwell Owusu was educated at the London school of Economics and Political Science (University of London), Harvard University, and the University of Chicago in the U.S.A.

Professor Owusu was a consulting member of the Constitutional Experts Committee chaired by the distinguished academic Dr S.K.B Asante that drafted proposals for the 1992 Constitution of the Fourth Republic of Ghana.

A recipient of many prestigious pre-doctoral and post-doctoral research awards including a United States Institute of Peace Grant, Professor Owusu is the author of numerous scholarly publications on African societies and cultures, democratization and development including the ground-breaking and widely-acclaimed book Uses and Abuses of Political Power A Case-Study of Continuity and Change in the Politics of Ghana

The Funds for the shipment of the books and journals from the U.S to Ghana which was donated to the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon was facilitated through a generous grant from the School of Literature Science and  Arts (L.S.A) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to the Department of Anthropology at the request of Professor Kelly Askew, a respected colleague and friend of Professor Owusu, the current Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, herself a distinguished Africanist and former Director of University of Michigan’s, renowned Institute of International Studies.

In a short ceremony to hand over the books to the Institute Prof. Owusu stated that ‘I hope that this unprecedented personal gift to the Institute of African Studies, and the University of Ghana’s bibliographical resources helps improve the local and often unavailable wide-ranging academic publications sorely needed for students and faculty study, research and publication often missing on our campuses’.

Prof.Emeritus Owusu (left) donating a few copies from the collection to Mr. Twum at the Institute of African Studies Library. Looking on is Professor Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu, Director of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

Receiving the books, the Director of the Institute of African Studies, Professor Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu thanked Professor Owusu and all those who bore the cost of shipment. Prof. Ntewusu indicated that ‘For a country whose education system was at independence in 1957 and generations after considered the best in tropical Africa, academic resources such as those donated by Professor Owusu’s play a very critical role. The timely, extraordinary, unprecedented, generous and thoughtful academic book and journal donation is precisely the needed resources that the Institute and the University of Ghana’. Both Professor Owusu and Professor Ntewusu were of the view that books had the potential of impacting Ghana’s higher education system’.