Top 10 books about roots Nadia Owusu When I was a child, my father told me stories about his childhood in Ghana’s Ashanti region. And, because he knew that I wouldn’t learn much about Africa in my primary schools in Europe, he was determined to instruct me about Ghanaian culture, customs and history. Our history, he emphasised, did not begin with colonisation. My mother left when I was two, but my father wanted me to feel connected to her Armenian culture. Vividly, I remember a conversation in which he spoke to the trauma her grandparents experienced, fleeing genocide in what was then the Ottoman empire.