Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade - Softcover

Herbstein, Manu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9988233051 ISBN 13: 9789988233051

Publisher: Manu Herbstein, 2016

Synopsis

“I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman.”

During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived.

This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories. It is a story, just one of a possible 12 million or more.

Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name, in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in the early chapters of Homegoing.

Ama occupies center stage throughout this novel. As the story opens, she is sixteen. Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather. Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother.

It is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of the Dagomba kingdom dispatches a mounted raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama.

That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders’ camp. The rescue bid fails. Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho’s mangled corpse. For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need.

In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother. When the adolescent monarch, Osei Kwame, conceives a passion for her, the regents dispatch her to the coast for sale to the Dutch at Elmina Castle.

There the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects here as his concubine, dressing her in the elegant clothes of his late Dutch wife and instructing the obese chaplain to teach her to read and write. De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe. He makes a last trip to the Dutch coastal outstations and returns infected with yellow fever. On his death, his successor rapes Ama and sends her back to the female dungeon.

She comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, The Love of Liberty. Before the ship leaves the coast of Africa, Ama instigates a slave rebellion. It fails and a brutal whipping leaves her blind in one eye.

The ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm cripples it and drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil.

Ama finds herself working in the fields and the mill on a sugar estate. She is absorbed into slave society and begins to adapt, learning the língua franca, Portuguese.

Years pass. Ama has lost the sight of her good eye and is now totally blind. Clutching the cloth which is her only material link with Africa, she reminisces, dozes, falls asleep.

A short epilogue brings the story up to date. The consequences of the slave trade and slavery are still with us. Brazilians of African descent remain entrenched in the lower reaches of society, enmeshed in poverty.

“This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Simões da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatises the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization.”

About this title

From the Publisher

COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE 2002 ANNOUNCES REGIONAL WINNERS

Atonement by Ian McEwan and The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer are among the books shortlisted for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Four international judging panels met to award the Best Book and Best First Book for their region - covering Africa, the Caribbean & Canada, Eurasia, and South East Asia & the South Pacific. These eight books are now shortlisted for the overall Best Book and Best First Book prizes. A distinguished pan-Commonwealth panel of judges will meet in Edinburgh in April to select the final winners for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Regional winners for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize include:

BEST FIRST BOOK

Africa: Manu Herbstein - Ama A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (South African)(e-reads, USA)

The Commonwealth Writers Prize, established in 1987, is sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation and administered by Booktrust.

The final pan-Commonwealth judging panel will be made up of the Chairpersons of each regional jury and chaired by The Rt. Rev. Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh and current Chairman of Scottish Book Trust. The panel will meet in Edinburgh as part of a five-day programme hosted by Scottish Book Trust and the Commonwealth Foundation. The overall winners of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize will be announced on 24 April 2002.

From the Author

It has many primary and secondary texts dealing with the history of the times, peoples and societies (Konkomba, Dagomba, Asante, Fanti, Dutch, English, Portuguese), the Middle Passage, Capitalism and Slavery, Brazil in the late eighteenth century, African culture and religion in the Americas and resistance to slavery.

The site also considers contemporary issues which arise out of the experience of the Slave Trade, such as Racism and Reparations, the teaching of the Slave Trade in American schools and the debate over the extent of African participation in the Slave Trade.

The Web site should be a useful resource for readers who wish to test the authenticity of Ama’s story.

About this edition

• Publisher: Manu Herbstein
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 9988233051
• ISBN 13: 9789988233051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 398