AMA: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade - Softcover

Herbstein, Manu

4.18

196 ratings by Goodreads

9781770100039: AMA: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770100032 ISBN 13: 9781770100039

Publisher: Picador Africa, 2006

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“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 l�ngua 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 Sim�es 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.”

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Review:

A monumental work, epic in scope and design . . .a panoramic story, with vividly realised characters and heroic action. -- Africa Book Centre, London

Ama is a story of struggle, resistance and inner strength. . . the descriptions are atmospheric and sensual. Rayda Jacobs -- Rapport June 29, 2002 (In Afrikaans)

An engrossing and powerful story of a woman of courage, intelligence, and strength. India Edghill -- HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW, May 2002

From the Author:

GLASGOW HERALD April 25th, 2002
E-book debut wins writer top prize
LYNNE ROBERTSON
AN e-book, the debut work of a retired civil and structural engineer, charting the life of an eighteenth-century African slave, last night scooped a prestigious literary prize at an awards ceremony in Edinburgh. Manu Herbstein, 66, took 10 years to complete the novel, the first internet-only work to be recognised by a major book award. Mr Herbstein opted for early retirement to allow him to pursue his literary dream of a historical work graphically capturing the plight of an African slave. The father of two was born in South Africa and has worked all over the world, including Scotland, but now lives in Ghana, where his wife runs a furniture factory. He was presented with the �3000 best first book prize at the Commonwealth Writers' Awards ceremony at the Palace of Holyroodhouse last night. The Princess Royal presented the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a �10,000 cash award to Richard Flanagan, an Australian novelist, for his work Gould's Book of Fish. It was singled out by a panel of judges chaired by the Rt Rev Richard Holloway, former bishop of Edinburgh, for the prize that was last year scooped by Zadie Smith for White Teeth.

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