Life Altering,
June 16, 2004NEWS & REVIEWS
Life Altering,
June 16, 2004
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Reviewer: Chris Pierson from Elgin, IL United States |
I read Herbstein's novel just prior to departing the US for Ghana. The novel is so well written that I actually felt as if I'd been at Elmina castle and travelled the dark African night with Nandizi. Upon entering the castle at Elmina, strangely, I knew my way around. Everything was exactly as pictured in my mind's eye. I connected with the novel's protagonist and had a re-new-ed pride in the spirit of my ancestors. It is well worth struggling through the unfamiliar names to discover the familiar in the human spirit that spans the ages.
A must read for
everyone!!!!, December 17, 2005
Reviewer:
JaJa (U.S.) -
For a review by Kristel Nana-Mvogo (in French) see www.afriquechos.ch/article.php3?id_article=88
("Avec l‘histoire d‘Ama, toute l‘expérience des Africains du XVIIIè siècle (esclaves ou non) est ainsi personnifiée d‘une manière réaliste est inoubliable. Ce roman explique également très bien les causes et les origines de l‘esclavage, ainsi que les conséquences du commerce triangulaire, qui furent désastreuses pour la population africaine. Je n‘ai trouvé Ama qu‘en version anglaise. Mais le style littéraire est relativement simple ; des lycéens peuvent donc lire ce roman sans grande difficulté, je pense. C‘est en effet un bon complément aux cours d‘histoire.")
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While reading this book and long
afterwards, the wonderful description, definition and characteristic of
a special person predominates, anchoring this poignant narration of
people’s inhumanity to their fellows.
Her name is Ama. Her original name is
Nandzi. Her other name is Pamela. Both her second and third names were
given to her by her first and second owners.
She is a slave. Her bittersweet life
story - that ends in a triumph - is a stark depiction of the inhumanity
of the Atlantic slave trade.
While slavery is seen as an evil
perpetrated by whites, Ama’s eventful journey shows the side of
slavery that is initiated, implemented and propagated by blacks, selling
off their fellow Africans, carelessly and without remorse.
It is hard to count the number of times
Ama has been raped. But it is easy to remember the circumstances before,
during and after she was raped. All of them are horrific. All such
incidents are degrading to women. This intention of the author is
deliberate. The perpetrators are of different societal rank.
But each dominated poor Ama and many
other women in similar situations. All of them were as dehumanised as
the men, including being forced to sleep amid refuse, urine, faeces and
in the humid, tepid air of dungeons in castles, in compounds and in the
holds of ships. From one captor to another, and on and on.
It is also easy to recall the one
instance in which Ama enjoyed sex with a strange man. She enjoyed the
act because she was in charge and because the man was vulnerable. But
for this pleasure, Ama was punished with banishment.
Twice, Ama becomes a concubine. Once, it
was on her own terms. These pages of the book show the great strength
women possess, particularly when survival is paramount. They show it is
possible when willpower and one’s wits are matched with bottomless
courage.
Ama possesses all these qualities. She
is portrayed by the Ghana-based South African author, Manu Herbstein, as
a living symbol of all the harrowing tales of slavery man’s inhumanity
to man, exploitation of hapless victims and how Africa was raped during
the slavery era.
To summarise, Ama or Nandzi, the secret
lover of Itsho and prospective wife of a much older man on account of an
arranged marriage, is captured by a rival tribe. Nandzi is renamed Ama
when she joins the slaves of an Asante royal household. She seduces the
heir apparent
As punishment, she is sent packing to a
white slave trader who renames her Pamela and makes her his concubine.
After his death, Ama lands in the hands, and the bed, of another white
slaver, but this time on her own terms.
After a mishap at sea that leaves the
slave ship badly damaged, she is sold off - together with hundreds of
others - to a sugar cane farmer in Brazil.
Throughout her tumultuous journey, Ama
loses an eye, gains foresight and strengthened hindsight, questions
religion and customary beliefs and gains a strong resolve to live. In
the end, she finds her true love, a fierce freedom-loving fighter called
Tomba.
Ultimately, the love story has a moral:
No matter how much a human being is oppressed and exploited what is
paramount is how much you love one another, your freedom, your
happiness, your dignity and your pride that will sustain you.
Ama has the potential to be a highly educational bestseller for its honesty, overwhelming boldness and understanding of how memory can be an unceasing weapon.
Victor
Kgomoeswana reviews Ama at the Book Launch held at Xarra Books,
Johannesburg. http://www.xarrabooks.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=27
Just when you thought you knew enough about slaves and
nothing on the topic could shock you more…along comes a graphic
account of the painful shame that Africans had to endure; and continue
to experience. How one human being can be flayed by rape, humiliation,
isolation, distortion of identity, desperate loneliness and rejection at
the hands of other human beings remains inscrutable. Be warned: this is
one the journey you are not meant to enjoy. From West Africa, across the
Atlantic through to Brazil, come aboard if you dare.
Ama, Pamela or “One-eye” first wrestles her curiosity
as a child questioning her rural African customs. She wants more answers
than anyone can offer. She suffers one misfortune after another; being
captured by slave traders from her homestead, sold over and over again
till she lands on another continent. Starting out as Nandzi, Ama manages
to fit in wherever life takes her, succumbing to unwanted sexual
attention from her captors and masters along the way. She battles the
improbable infatuation of young chiefs and fellow slaves, settles for
the most unlikely romantic arrangement with some over-the-hill governor
and repeatedly resorts to expedient transactional sex – while longing
for the true love she will never have. Survival is the only apparent
reason for everything Ama does, and she always ends up paying the price.
She learns several languages, dabbles in some foreign religious
practices to get by, imbibing as much knowledge as she gives. Ama gets
bruised by her lifelong struggle to break the chains of slavery,
plotting an escape after another – getting many people into trouble
each time with her essential stunts – mostly herself. In time, you
learn that her cause is noble.
You will love Ama for her beauty and strong character, pray
for her in her constant bid to break free, admire her persistence,
courage and inner strength in the face of hostility and danger.
Sometimes, you will even scold her idealism and childlike day-dreaming.
One thing is certain, you will be with her, and every breath she takes.
This is your story too – black or white. Patently well researched,
told in living colour and with little pretension, Manu Herbstein’s
novel made my very rare foray into the world of fiction a positively
grueling one.
As a South African, one can only appreciate the fighting
spirit of Ama; the age-old seed that grew into the proverbial triumph of
good over evil. We are held aloft as a nation for our ‘miraculous’
political transition. Reading this ball-by-ball commentary on the life
of a slave, a woman at that, is a cruel reminder that we did not achieve
anything miraculous. Rather, we are merely the privileged descendants of
ancestors like Ama, Tomba, Olukoya, Esi, Itsho and many other martyrs
you will encounter on this epic ride. They spared nothing in their quest
for an ideal of a free and democratic world order. You have to meet
these giants of African history. I am still undecided as which is more
difficult: being Ama or being with her through the pages of this
masterpiece. Get ready for a massive thumping. A very emotionally
demanding must read for students of economic history, political
economics, religion, science, and most of all, for the students of life.
As for slavery, you can only shudder at how the love for money and material wealth is the root of all savagery. To think that it still is a booming business today, centuries after it was supposedly outlawed!
A map of slavery across the
Atlantic: Tony Simões da Silva
reviews Ama at the African Review of Books, www.africanreviewofbooks.com (a web-site well worth a visit.)
Anyone who tackles as the topic of his first novel one
of the most traumatic events in recent world history reveals a
considerable degree of guts and artistic ambition. As a theme, slavery
has been explored by some of the greatest names in contemporary writing
in English: Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), Abdulrazak Gurnah in
Paradise (1994) and Ayi Kwei Armah in Two Thousand Seasons
(1974), for instance. All have sought to examine slavery in a way that
makes it a human, rather than simply a historical experience. However,
it is the eighteenth-century African writer Olaudah Equiano whom Manu
Herbstein might be said to have in mind here, as it were. In his Life
of Olaudah Equiano (1989), Equiano set out in vivid detail the long
process that took him away from his parents’ village, through a number
of African owners, and eventually to Barbados, in the Caribbean.
In Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
(2001), Manu Herbstein sets himself the challenging task of
fictionalising the kind of experiences Equiano spoke of from a personal
viewpoint, and as I turned the novel’s 456th page, it is one I felt he
had met fully. Indeed, insofar as he adopts as his main character a
female slave, Herbstein clearly invites the juxtaposition of his novel
to Equiano’s text. Ama maps slavery from the moment of capture
in Africa to the arrival in America, in this instance in Brazil.
Substantial chunks of the work are devoted to the dealings in human
beings conducted by Europeans and to the long Middle Passage. South
African born, but a resident of Ghana since 1970, Herbstein brings to
his work the passionate curiosity of the outsider and the objective bias
of someone whom Elmina Castle, with its explicit links to slavery,
"never fails to move", in the author’s own words. Most of
all, though, in Ama Herbstein creates a work of literature that
celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the
inscrutable nature of their cruelty. Like that other great moment of
horror in the history of humanity, the Holocaust, the slave trade exists
at once as reality and myth, a kind of ‘unconscious’ of contemporary
civilisation.
This is story telling on a grand scale, literally and
metaphorically. The novel spans a geographical frame that reaches from
Africa to America, depicting in closely observed detail also the horrors
of the Middle Passage. An epic of the slave trade, Ama offers a
carefully imagined examination of the failings of humanity when
possessed by greed and a desire for power and influence. Herbstein is
especially good at evoking the mood of the time, the mind frame of
slaves and slavers, and the political and economic conditions that made
slavery possible. 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 civilisation. The blood of Africa, the Antiguan writer, Jamaica
Kincaid reminds us, soaks the streets of Bristol, of London, of New
York. The foundations of capitalism, the sociologist and historian Paul
Gilroy asserts, rest on the sediment of the slave trade. Thus, although Ama
does not obscure or excuse Africa’s own collusion in the slave trade,
European nations such as Britain, Holland and Portugal come in for
considerable flak. But Herbstein seems less interested in apportioning
blame than he is in understanding the mechanics of the slave trade. This
is a painstakingly researched work of imagination, but one in which the
fictional draws for its sustenance on a wealth of knowledge gained from
anthropology, history and other cultural sources. As the note ‘About
the Author’ states, in Ama Herbstein has tried "to
understand not only the victims but also the beneficiaries of the evil
trade in human beings" (n.p.n.). Thus, at the beginning of Part
III, "The Love of Liberty", we read:
African
slaves were sold in Lisbon as early as 1441. The European discovery and
colonisation of the Americas set the scene for the trans-Atlantic slave
trade, which lasted from early in the sixteenth century until the second
half of the nineteenth. The slaves were all African. So too were many of
those who sold them. The buyers ans shippers were almost all Europeans.
In the course of three hundred years, upward of ten million black men,
women and children arrived in the Americas as unwilling migrants.
Millions more died on the journey to the Atlantic coast, and at sea.
(245).
Ama tells story of Nandzi, a young Bekpokpam girl in West Africa
who is captured by a rival ethnic group at a very young age and then
repeatedly sold, given away and exchanged indiscriminately by a number
of men to many other men; first in Africa, subsequently on board the
ship to Barbados, and eventually in Brazil, where the ironically named
The Love of Liberty has to put to land after a particularly bad storm.
In her life time Nandzi will be named Ama, then Pamela, then Ama again,
‘One-Eyed’, Ana das Minas and, as the novel concludes, Ama. Raped
variously but with brutal regularity initially by Asante warriors,
members of a rival ethnic group, then by English and Dutch seamen, by
assorted members of the ship taking her away from Africa, eventually by
her Brazilian owner and his manager, Ama’s body becomes a graphic and
disturbing emblem of the destruction of Africa – literally, of the
rape of Africa. Not surprisingly, the novel concludes with the
reflection that "[T]he end of this story is yet to be written"
(456).
Indeed, there is a sense in which Ama’s character is
Africa itself; like the continent, Ama is explored, exploited, lied to,
and abandoned. Like Africa, Ama is strong but often much too naïve;
deeply moral but unsure about how to deal with the deceit of those who
surround her; finally, Ama and Africa share in common an enormous
capacity to adapt, to survive, to forgive, if not to forget. Speaking to
some of the many slaves she meets on the way out of Africa, she remarks
at one stage: "Oh, Edinas and Fantis and Asantes, we are all the
same family" (161). Like Ama, Africa has been desired, sexualised
and turned into a commodity. It has also at times been complicit in its
own destiny. At one stage in the novel, Ama considers her own
involvement in the slave trade in ways that resonate with a broader cri
de coeur that has since characterised the work of many African
intellectuals and artists. But the symbolism carries throughout the
novel in different ways: when, during the long voyage out to the
Americas we read that "Ama came out on deck, starved, dehydrated,
filthy" (343), it is not Ama whom we watch but every slave who has
ever undertaken the Middle Passage. Ama’s suffering, and its imprint
on her body and face become visible reminders of the hidden trauma of
slavery. After initially meeting her in Africa, during the time she was
his uncle’s partner, the slave trader Williams, "William
Williams, the nephew….was shocked at her appearance. During his year
at Anomabu he had learned to distinguish one black face from another. He
rather fancied himself as a connoisseur of African beauty. This girl had
been quite pretty. Now her appearance was grotesque" (334). By
focusing on the brutalisation of Ama’s beautiful body, and on the
psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatises the
collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African
woman.
The novel is divided in four main parts, entitled
"Africa", "Europeans", "The Love of
Liberty" and "America". Structurally, the symbolism here
too is reasonably obvious: Ama is, before anything else, an epic of the
African Diaspora. Part 1, "Africa", describes the daily lives
of the sort of people whom we will later meet on board "The Love of
Liberty", on their way out of Africa. It depicts a world of complex
and sophisticated cultural rituals, and heated political conflicts.
Hersbtein is judicious but unsparing in his portrait of 15th century
Africa; we are presented with a continent as rich in blessings as it is
afflicted by internal disputes. This is at once an idyllic world and one
constantly threatened by the risks brought about by change in its
broader sense. Ama begins in a small village in a remote part of Africa.
It is here that we are introduced to the young girl left behind when her
family and the people in her village attend a burial elsewhere. Ama, the
narrator informs us, and "[l]ike all Bekpokpam girls, has been
betrothed at birth" (2) to a man 20 years her senior. Soon we will
learn about other customs and traditions, since one of the most salient
aspects of the novel is an overt emphasis on the recreation of an Africa
that stands up as a direct challenge to the colonial historical
inscriptions of the continent as an empty place.
This section is followed by another, entitled
"Europeans", in which Nandzi, now known as Ama first comes in
contact with European slave traders. Her treatment at their hands is at
once brutal and perplexing, for while raping her and generally abusing
her, some of the men she meets here will be instrumental in helping her
fulfil her intellectual potential. Some European men are nasty and
uncaring, but others adopt towards Ama a more humane attitude, in some
cases actually falling in love with her. They are seduced by her
physical beauty and mesmerised by her intelligence. It is here that she
becomes known as Pamela, a name bestowed on her by a Dutchman in love
with the classics of English literature. Ama’s endless interactions
with Europeans are never one-sided, and in that way Herbstein seems to
reflect also on Africa’s encounter with Europe. Often the relationship
is cruel, dangerous, brutal and destructive; but almost just as
frequently it is a dense and rewarding one. Its characteristics are
typical of European colonialism’s contact with Africa, a mixture of
benevolence and wrongdoing, kindness and pillaging.
In the third part of the novel Herbstein attempts to
bring to life the experience of the Middle Passage, a particularly
daunting prospect. To imagine Africa prior to the arrival of the white
man is a task well supported by a wealth of historical evidence;
likewise, the encounter between Africa and Europe has been well
documented, if at times such coverage is quite unreliable. The Middle
Passage, however, is different; its horror, like that of the Holocaust,
almost insists that witness be borne only by those who suffered the
trauma of transportation to America, and in smaller numbers also to
Europe and elsewhere. Yet Herbstein is particularly successful at
conceiving and fleshing out the essence of the journey in which so many
Africans perished. By having Ama ‘stand in’ for the many millions
who left Africa in the cargo holds of countless ships, the novel is able
to put a human face to a phenomenon known primarily through cold
statistics and historical narratives.
Finally, in its concluding part Ama tells the
story of Ama’s arrival in Brazil, in the ironically named Salvador da
Bahia [the Bay of the Saviour, or more literally the Bay’s Saviour],
the cradle of cultural hybridity if ever there was one. I realise that
my reading of Ama as the same as Africa becomes somewhat less plausible
in this section. For if Ama symbolises all slaves, giving the many the
face of the one, then her survival and disembarkation in Brazil risks
underestimating the sheer horror of the numbers of those who never made
it there, the hundreds of thousands, or millions thrown overboard into
the deep Atlantic Ocean. It is important, then, that we acknowledge this
aspect; perhaps equally useful here it is to note that the Ama who comes
ashore in Brazil is a very different woman from the young, beautiful
girl who left Africa.
This Ama is now half blind, and as ‘One-Eyed’, the
name she is given by her new Portuguese owner, she embodies in full the
duality of each African’s experience of the Middle Passage. Ama
arrives in Salvador alive, but a part of her died in the journey. The
loss of one eye, combined with an increasingly scarred and spectral body
stand as apt signs of this experience. In Brazil Ama soon begins to do
what she does best, deftly adapting to place and people, learning the
ways and the language, translating the world around for those who
accompanied her, translating herself into the New World. At the
conclusion of the novel as at its opening, Ama functions as a bridge
between worlds real and imaginary, a link between the culturally
familiar and foreign. In the course of Herbstein’s dense and
unpredictable narrative, Ama becomes the epitome of the outsider as
insider, of the migrant as a work in (of) translation.
Told partly through the perspective of an omniscient
narrator, the story often relies on Ama’s own interpretation of her
experiences and those of the people with whom she interacts. Ama’s
narrative voice is central to the storytelling, and it constitutes at
once one of the novel’s most successful aspects and one of its less
stable narrative devices. In part, I am conscious that my occasional
discomfort with Ama as a narrator stems from the fact that the views she
expresses much too often seem to betray those of the narrator (author?).
Ama, one might suggest, if somewhat unkindly, is invested with far too
much meaning for any one single person, much more for a simple village
woman to carry. As noted earlier, Herbstein seems to ‘intend’ Ama as
a celebration of the heroism of all the millions who made the crossing,
and the many more who did not.
It is understandable in this context that Ama should
be such an extraordinary woman. She is possessed of enormous
intelligence, insatiable curiosity, a courage without limits and the
most generous and selfless personality. She learns languages with the
ease of the born polyglot, masters chess in a couple of hours, and has a
grasp of the machiavellian world of colonial politics that would the
envy of many a United Nations diplomat. Yet, half of these achievements
would still have made her a fascinating character and an outstanding
individual. For my money, this is the one glaring flaw in a novel that
otherwise combines a good yarn, an intricate and seductive plot and a
writing style that holds the reader in thrall until the end. Herbstein
has attempted to create in his novel what might be read as a ‘partner
voice’ to Equiano’s, and once we get over the difficulties that a
‘gendering’ of his narrative raises, this is an extremely engaging
work of fiction. Long, perhaps a little too long; a less keen emphasis
on the anthropological recreation of Africa in the first part of the
work, and a more sparse account of the Middle Passage would only have
strengthened this very accomplished piece of writing. But then Manu
Herbstein is in august company here, as anyone who’s read A.S. Byatt’s
Possession (1991) or Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without
Wings (2004) will attest. Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave
Trade deserves a wide readership, and I hope that it will succeed in
gaining it.
Tony
Simoes da Silva teaches at the University of Exeter
BOOK REVIEWS 165
Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. By Manu Herbstein. First E-Reads publication, 2001 [self‑published; available through Amazon.com], Pp. 456. $21.95 paper.
Ama is a sweeping story of Africans caught up in the Atlantic slave trade. Crafted by Manu Herbstein, a native South African who has been a long‑time resident of Ghana, the book is more carefully researched than some more widely acclaimed novels dealing with Africans in the Diaspora. Set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book tells the story of Ama. a girl from what is now northern Ghana who is kidnapped by a Dagomba raiding party and taken to the Asante capital of Kumasi, then to Elmina Castle on the coast and, eventually, to a slave plantation in Brazil. In her travels she is taken as a lover by a young Asantehene and, later by the Dutch director general of Elmina Castle. During the middle passage, Ama's story intersects with that of Tomba, whose adopted father was a great general of the Jalonke in the Futa Jalon who was defeated in battle and consequently fled to live his life as a hermit in the forest. Living a solitary existence, Tomba raids slave caravans for food and weapons. In time he gathers a group of escaped slaves around him and establishes his own settlement. A threat to the local Africans who thrived on the slave trade and to the European traders, he is captured and enslaved.
This book is fast- paced and moving from Ghana and the Futa Jalon to the European coastal forts and the plantations of the Americas, it captures both the horror and complexity of slave trade, which uprooted Africans from many cultures and diverse backgrounds. There are occasional inaccuracies: The figurative weights used by gold traders were actually not made until the late nineteenth century. Similarly, some details are drawn from late nineteenth or twentieth century ethnographies and they may not reflect earlier periods. Yet, on the whole, these particulars add rather than detract from the story's telling. However, the story is, at times, too fast-paced. This is especially true of the chapters dealing with Tomba and his life before his capture. This is a tale that could easily have been made into a separate novel. Ama's own adventures, the violence she experiences (she is raped several times). and her motivations are sometimes glossed over, becoming almost trite. For this reason, some readers will find the Ama's story unsatisfactory.
CHRISTOPHER R. DECORSE
Syracuse University
Review of Ama by Shereen Essof, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa
first published at The Voice of the Turtle, www.voiceoftheturtle.org November, 2003.
Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade is Herbstein's first novel. In it, he transforms himself from civil engineer to griot, charged with reciting history and weaving tales. Herbstein's historical "faction" successfully blends extensive and meticulous research with abundant imagination to transport the reader into the violent world of the Atlantic Slave Trade. It tells the herstory of a young woman who is enslaved and who, through the twists and turns of her life, learns to "adopt various strategies in her struggle against bondage striking a balance between escape and resistance and, accommodating the realities of the power of her oppressors".
By casting a female protagonist, Herbstein invites the reader to 'see' the particular nature of women's oppression. Ama's experience shows that gender, race and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in isolation from each other. Rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other as overlapping discourses and interlocking systems that determine the degree to which male domination and privilege can be asserted. In this configuration, women's bodies often become the discursive terrains on which these discourses play out and, in this grid of oppression, women's sexuality is seen as currency, its vigorous trade often directing the plot.
Ama is heard through four narrative frames. We begin in eighteenth century Africa where we witness the capture and rape of Nandzi by a band of Dagomba slave raiders assembling the annual slave tribute due to the Asante confederacy. It is a world of opulence and greed, where the ruling elite maintaining their power ruthlessly. Nandzi is in the service of the Queen mother and is given an Asante name - Ama. But when the adolescent king falls in love with her, the love poses a "threat to the sovereignty of the state" and Ama is made to disappear.
Transported to Europe, ironically set in Elmina on the Gold Coast, Ama's beauty is a disruption. She is signalled out and becomes the concubine to Mijn Heer, the Dutch governor of Elmina. She is renamed Pamela and recast into an image of a 'lady' - a straight satiation of white male fantasy. Pamela's "good behaviour" is rewarded with the promise of freedom, but her position as mistress or slave is tenuous for it rests on the fulcrum of patronage. The Love of Liberty, the name of the ill-fated slave ship lends its name to the third section of the novel, recounts the horrors of the middle passage. The ship transports us to the Americas, where Ama now known as "one-eye", must make a new life for herself on a sugar cane plantation. Here, women: slaves, agricultural workers, house servants, mothers, have to negotiate not only the imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the violent array of hierarchical rules, restrictions and liberties that structure their new relations with their new masters in the "casa grande". Ama finds love in the form of a rebellious warrior whose spirit matches her own in the desire to be free, a man who reacts violently to her rape by the plantation manager, forcing them to flee.
Ama is as much about the violence of colonialism, patriarchy, female sexuality or gendered reproduction, economic production and the site of imperial contest, racial difference, as it is about resistance. Ama's journey allows us to read the complexities and contradictions of the time, where all classes, free and slave, women and men, black, white and mulatto are in some way interrelated in a dynamic that results from relations of power. These power networks form a dense web. They pass through official institutions, the machinery of economic production and familial relations without being localised in any one of these sites. This means that there is both complicity with the dominant systems as well as diverse points of resistance.
Ama becomes proficient at reading the maps of power in order to manipulate them. But she is not alone in this. Itsho, Damba, Suba, Esi, Minjendo, Tomba, Olukoya, Herbstein suggests embody the spirit of countless thousands who resisted; through care and laughter, song, dance, the invocation of ancestral spirits, planned insurrection and countless acts of subterfuge. Ultimately this resistance testifies, successfully, to the indomitable will of the human spirit, beaconed by Ama's strength and determination in the quest for freedom and dignity. "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."
Herbstein, in the tradition of Hailie Gerimas' Sankofa, (re) claims and (re) surfaces a version of the past and this too is an act of resistance, a struggle for the politicisation of memory that serves to illuminate and transform the present. Elmina, the slave fort on the Cape Coast, has become a site of pilgrimage for Ghanaians, Africans, and others still from around the world. Converging in the space of the fort are the contested memories of the significance of the place, different perspectives on which histories should be most emphasized, and which group lays claim to them. In other words, the site becomes an important battleground for representation of the past.
We remain with multifarious forms of oppression deriving from the same motivations that underpinned the slave trade of the 18th century: Capitalist free trade. Like Ama, we know that we are not being served by "the master" who is intent on grinding futures into dust for the sake of capital. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against women, black people, gays and lesbians, the poor, Muslims, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the dominant systems at work.
The novel and its supporting website go a long way in sparking reflection and debate. The dynamics of "knowledge production" do not always support such activity. Ama was refused publication by numerous publishers, forcing Herbstein to self publish through ereads.com It is an ironic twist that after being published by e-reads, Herbstein went on the win the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book. An irony well deserved.
The supporting web-site http://www.ama.africatoday.com/ has many primary and secondary texts covering the time and geographical spread of the novel and both compliments the novel and serves as a valuable teaching resource.
NB: The symbol at the top of this page is the Asante Adinkra symbol Nkyinkyin, signifying toughness, adaptability, determination and service to others. The corresponding Akan proverb, Obra, kwan ye nkyinkyin yimiie, means the path of life is full of twists and turns.
This website wins South African Broadcasting Corporation's Award for innovative use of new media at 2003 Highway Africa conference
New_media_awards
by Kimala Naidoo
9/9/2003
The
gold at the ritzy SABC Innovative Awards 2003 went to an online book
about the Atlantic slave trade, an Arab newspaper, and a science
website.
Manu
Herbstein's www.ama.africatoday.com, which has published the book
Ama, A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, was announced winner of
the individual category at the awards ceremony at the Settler's
Monument in Grahamstown last night. In 2002 the book won the
Commonwealth Writers Prize. The website receives 200 visitors a day.
Megan
Knight, convener of the judging panel, said she was impressed that
Herbstein had taken the traditional medium of a novel and published
it on the Internet.
"He
is bypassing restrictions of the one medium and making the most of
another," she said.
Herbstein
beat off tough competition from other finalists, including Herman
Manson's Media Toolbo, and Nandiphotos.com, a photo gallery of
ordinary people in Uganda, developed by Vincent Mugaba.
Al-Ahram
Online (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg), the online version of the Arab
newspaper Al-Ahram, won the corporate category for its focus on
science, technology and ICTs, and its independent coverage of the
Middle East, especially the recent US-Iraq war. Al-Ahram beat
competitors like eLink Publications and The African Journalist.
Janice
Limson's Science in Africa (www.scienceinafrica.co.za), which won in
the non-profit category, addresses scientific research in Africa.
"It
started off as a hobby to communicate science understandably,"
said Limson, a Biotechnology lecturer at Rhodes University.
"Now it reaches 50 countries."
Roland
Stanbridge, a journalism lecturer at the University of Stockholm in
Sweden, who was also a judge, said scientific research is a big
problem in Africa, "because the information resides in
expensive databases that the Third World cannot access".
For
those hoping to join the competition next year, Stanbridge had a
word of advice: "These awards are not just for sites that look
good, but for those that address the needs of the continent."
9/9/2003
http://www.highwayafrica.org.za/hac/textstory.asp?id=91&storyid=84
The
Awards-Nominations
By
Asanda Saule 9/8/2003 9:46:36 AM
There
were 40 entries for the 2003 award, from which nine nominees were
picked for the three different categories. The awards recognise
individuals, non-profit organisations and corporate organisations.
The nine nominees will be competing for state-of-the-art cellular
phones sponsored by Siemens and MTN.
Individual
category
In the
Individual category the nominees are Manu Herbstein, Herman Manson
and Vincent Mugaba.
Herbstein
came to the judge's attention because at the age of 60 he published
a novel on the Internet. The novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic
Slave Trade, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First
Book. This is the first time in 15 years that the prize has gone to
an African writer. Herbstein has compiled a database of potential
readers and set up a website as a hook. "Books are published
all the time. What is interesting about Herbstein is that on failing
to catch the interests of publishers he took the initiative and
published the story himself," says Knight.
Full
story: http://www.highwayafrica.org.za/hac/textstory.asp?id=39&storyid=37
See
also: African Web sites win for innovative use of new media
2003-09-09
23:17:38
The
Online Journalism Review - OnlineJournalism.com
Online
book, newspaper, science website awarded
Thursday,
September 11, 2003 .
From
David Mbulumi, Grahamstown, SA
The
gold at the ritzy South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)'s
innovative use of new media awards at Highway Africa conference
yesterday went to an online book about the Atlantic slave trade, an
Egyptian newspaper and a science website.
SABC
is one of the sponsors of Africa's biggest annual conference on
media and journalism organised by Rhodes University.
Part
of the conference's programme every year is to award Africa's best
Internet use innovators.
There
were 40 entries for the 2003 award, from which nine nominees were
picked for the three different categories. The awards recognise
individuals, non-profit organisations and corporate organisations.
The
nine nominees competed for awards that included state-of-the-art
cellular phones sponsored by Siemens and South Africa's MTN.
The
winner in the individual category was Manu Herbstein. Herbstein came
to the judge's attention because at the age of 60 he published a
novel on the Internet.
The
novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, have also won the
Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book---the first time
in 15 years that the prize went to an African writer.
Herbstein
has compiled a database of potential readers and set up a website as
a book. "Books are published all the time. What is interesting
about Herbstein is that on failing to catch the interests of
publishers he took the initiative and published the story
himself," said Megan Knight, one of the judges.
Full
story: http://www.ippmedia.com/guardian/2003/09/11/guardian9.asp
Award for
the Innovative use of New Media in Africa
A
unique honour for the continent, the awards for Innovative Use of
New Media in Africa, will be issued at the conference for the fourth
year running. This award is given annually at the Highway Africa
conference to recognise the creative, innovative and appropriate use
of new media technology in Africa. Judges are looking for innovative
applications of new media in African journalism.
Awards
are given in three categories: individual/student, non-profit and
corporate.
In the
individual and NG categories: recognition will be given to
communications, which find ways to overcome the limitations of the
existing African infrastructure. For example, previous winners in
the individual category include: Omololu Falobi from Nigeria, who
created an email distribution list to deliver a very successful
newsletter on Aids to his wider community and Africa almanac.com,
which focuses on the history, achievements, economic developments,
news, arts and culture of Africa.
In the
corporate category: judges will be looking for creative adaptation
of global technologies in an African media context. Previous winners
include SABC's news research service NewsNet and Kiswahili online
news service, Afrikaleo.com.
Other
broad criteria: which apply to both categories, are the use of new
media to benefit press freedom in Africa and encourage social
empowerment in African communities. Ultimately the award aims to
highlight innovations that result in African media benefiting from
new ideas and developments in communications technology.
Potential
applicants are invited to nominate themselves or their own projects.
To
nominate an organisation or individual for the award, please send
the following:
* The
name of the organisation/individual you wish to nominate
* A
brief (300 words) description of the organisation/individual and why
you believe it should win the Highway Africa Award for Innovative
use of New Media. Please include urls for any websites, or examples
of any media or outcomes that you think may be relevant to the
judging.
*
Contact information for the organisation, preferably the name of one
person responsible, email address and phone numbers.
Deadline
August 11th.
Email
nominations to highwayafrica@ru.ac.za
For further clarification on the awards, contact Megan Knight
Ghana and the Slave Trade
This
is an edited transcription of two one-hour editions of Radio Univers’s
Read-A-Book-A-Week programme. Radio Univers is the FM Station of the
University of Ghana, Legon, Accra. The programmes were broadcast on May
21 and 28, 2003. The book under discussion was Manu Herbstein’s Ama:
A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade[i]. The participants were
Kwadzo Senanu, a former Professor of English Literature at the
University of Ghana; Dr. Akosua Perbi*, Head of the Department of
History at the University of Ghana; Helen Yitah, Department of English,
University of Ghana; Alhaji Abubakr Siddique Ahmed, Director of Radio
Univers; and Manu Herbstein.
*Dr. Perbi's long-awaited A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century (ISBN 9988-550-32-4) was published in 2004 by Sub-Saharan Publishers, P O Box 358, Accra.
PART
1, May 21, 2003
Siddique:
We have the author of the book present to help us go through what he has
been able to write. We are always privileged to have such an
opportunity. Secondly, we are also privileged to have an historian to
help us appreciate what the novelist has put on paper. I want to believe
that this program is going to be a very important one, unique, as
against what we have been able to do in the past. I am Abubakr Siddique Ahmed, your
regular host of this particular program, Read-A-Book-A-Week.
Now ladies and gentlemen you are welcome. Manu Herbstein, A Story of
Atlantic Slave Trade. I want to go to Helen Yitah to give us an
introduction to the book and then I can turn to the writer himself.
Yitah: Ama,
A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade is Manu Herbstein’s first novel. It
was published in the year 2000[ii]
and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Africa region in 2002[iii].
The story has it that while at home with her little brother Nowu, Nandzi,
a young girl from the land of the Konkomba is raped and then captured by
Dagomba slave raiders led by Abdulai. Her tortuous journey from her
homeland to Kumasi where she serves as a domestic slave in the household
of the queen mother; and Elmina Castle where she plays mistress to the
head of the Dutch West India Company before she is shipped off to South
America, is vividly portrayed. As she goes through various changes in
name and identity, as she alternates between hesitation and resolution,
between despair and hope, Ama, the writer seems to suggest, re-enacts
the story of Africa in the throes of slavery and the slave trade.
Siddique:
Thank you for the introduction. Dr. Akosua Perbi of the History Department
of the University of Ghana is with us and Professor Senanu, the first Ghanaian professor of English literature. We are
indeed very privileged to have you. Prof. Senanu has been Pro-Vice
Chancellor of the University of Ghana and Chairman of the Council of the
University of Cape Coast; so a very powerful personality, indeed.
Now to our writer Manu Herbstein. Who are you?
Herbstein:
I am a South African. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. I studied at
the University of Cape Town, left South Africa in 1959 and didn’t go
back until 1993. I first came to Ghana in 1961. During the 60s I was in
and out of the country but I’ve been living here permanently since
1970. By profession, unusually, perhaps, for a writer of fiction, I’m
a civil engineer. My wife is a Ghanaian and my two sons are also
Ghanaians. What else can I say?
Siddique:
You’ve told us a lot. I certainly now understand why precision, one
could say, is the hallmark of your book. Coming as I do from the North
of Ghana, I’m cognizant of some of the settings of the story. Your
vivid descriptions draw all sorts of pictures in my mind.
Now
Prof. Senanu, what is
unique about this book?
Senanu:
Well, it is an imaginative recreation of the history of the slave trade
and it has been done very carefully; because as the historian on my
right is going to confirm, a lot of the events narrated in the novel are
linked to historical facts. The fact, for instance, that the Dagomba
warriors, having been defeated in battle were at some stage under the
control of Asante and had to pay tribute by giving captured slaves; the
fact that Africans themselves were as much responsible for the slave
trade as Europeans; the fact that the slaves, in their longing for
liberty, struggled to free themselves at various stages of the journey
into slavery. These are the facts that historians know. In fact, this
novel could be called The Love of Liberty. As we read, it becomes
clearer and clearer that one of the most ironical things about this
novel is that the ship which took Ama across the Atlantic to America is
named The Love of Liberty; as it were, Ama seems to embody the
yearning for liberty right from the day of her capture in Dagbon,
through all the experience at the Asante court, to the experience on the
boat and finally on the plantation in Bahia in Brazil. These are the
things that struck me about the novel: the fact that the novelist has so
imaginatively gotten together the probable historical facts of the slave
trade as Africans experienced it.
Siddique: Thank you very much.
Now to Prof. Akosua Perbi. As an historian, you’ve also read the book. I understand
you’ve done some studies of slavery in ancient and contemporary times.
Now as you read the book would you say it differs in a way from the true
history of slavery or that it is so close to the facts, that you can
just take it for the truth?
Perbi: I
think the story is very well told. As an historian involved in slavery
as my speciality, I could identify with so many things in the book. I
can see how he researched the historical accounts. I would say that it’s
good because he starts with the beginning, from the stage of capture,
which was just one of the several means of enslavement, and then follows
the experience of what slave captives went through. One other thing
which fascinated me was the fact that he chose as his central character
a girl, a young girl and not a young boy, a man or even an elderly
woman. The history of the slave trade tells us that a cross section of
people was enslaved: young, old, boys, girls. The writer chose a girl, .
a teenager, about to marry. That is significant in these days when we
are emphasizing the gender issue. I think the story is vividly
portrayed.
Siddique:
I think that’s an important point that the story is well told. And I
agree with that. Now Manu Herbstein, how did you tell this story?
Herbstein:
For a long time I had wanted to do some creative writing. I felt that
having lived most of my adult life in Ghana, both as an insider but on
the other hand, inevitably, as an outsider, seeing Ghanaian society both
from the inside and from the outside, I thought I should have a story to
tell. I was still searching for a theme when, in the early 1990s, there
was news of the events in the North which came to be known as the Guinea
Fowl War. That disturbed me. I felt guilty that having lived in Ghana
for such a long time, I couldn’t understand what was going on up
there. When I asked Ghanaian family and friends I received no
enlightenment. So I went to a library and I found there a work of
anthropology written by an Englishman called David Tait, who after the
Second World War was a mature student at one of the British universities
and afterwards came to Ghana and went and lived amongst the Konkomba and
did his research; and then tragically died in a car accident. Professor
Jack Goody took his notes and put them together in a book called The
Konkombas of Northern Ghana[iv]. There I discovered, I
thought, the roots of the problem in the North, in a history that goes
back hundreds of years. I read the story of the conquest of Dagbon by
Asante in the early 1770s and the imposition of the tribute. I asked
myself what it would have been like to have been a victim of events
which had their origin thousands of miles away, in a different
continent, with the ripples extending right up into the West African
savannah. That was the beginning of the book.
Siddique: How
did you pick your characters?
Herbstein: The
first chapter that I wrote was one in the middle of the book. I did that
because I could write it without doing any research. When I first came
to Ghana in 1961 I lived in Cape Coast. At that time, Elmina Castle was
being used as a police training college. I had a friend there who was
one of the officers. So I had a chance to visit Elmina Castle before it
was opened to the public. I have visited it many times since. I go back
regularly. The tour guides tell a story (which may or may not be true)
of the governor of the Castle selecting one of the slaves for his sexual
pleasure. Recalling this story, I placed the central character in this
situation. I wasn’t confident of my ability to write creative fiction
so I sent this sample chapter off to a cousin of mine who is a writer by
profession. He said, ‘You can write. Go ahead. Make a book of it.’
Much research followed, a good deal of it in the Africana
section of the Balme Library. I found several of the characters in the
work of the historians whose books I read there.
Yitah: I
would like to ask Prof Senanu: this book won the Commonwealth Prize for the Africa Region.[v]
What do you consider to be some of the features that would merit such an
award?
Senanu:
That’s a big question.
First of all the coherent structure, the very
carefully put together structure. The first section starting from
Africa, the next dealing with the Europeans, the third dealing with the
experience of being transported on the boat with all its horrendous
suffering (and yet that boat is called The Love of Liberty); and
finally the settlement in Bahia on the sugar plantation where you
experience what it is to be a slave, or slavedom. So I say the
structure, the carefully put together structure, from the beginning of
capture right up almost to the end of Ama’s life.
Secondly, although he chooses Ama as a central
character, he places over and against her somebody else, a man, Tomba,
who is as devoted to liberty as Ama is. You will recall that towards the
end, Ama and Tomba get married. I think it is appropriate that Tomba, as
a male character with all his impulsiveness, is the one who forcefully
resists the degradation of raping that Ama had been through; and because
he isn’t prepared to let it go unpunished, he gets hanged at the end
of the novel.
The third aspect of the novel I want to talk about is
the careful details and the realism with which he invokes the
localities. There are so many parts in this book where you suddenly
begin to realize how very carefully this man has observed: for example
the description of the horses on the farm in Bahia.
These are some of the elements which emphasize the
imaginative creativeness that we find in the novel.
Siddique:
I suggest that we focus our discussion today on the first part, set in
Africa. Yendi, Kafaba, crossing the Volta: if you travel to the area you
get to know exactly what the writer wants to put across. My question is:
we as a people ‘benefited’ from slavery, in other words, our chiefs
benefited from slavery. The tribes, or clans and other entities
suffered. Madam Akosua, what kind of social structures did we have at
the time that made it possible for these powerful chiefs to engage in
such raids on their own citizenry? Could they just go into an area and
invade? What sort of structure did we have? And that takes us back to
Manu Herbstein’s concern,
the root causes of the conflict in the North. Have your studies revealed
any answers to these questions?
Perbi: I wish
there were a sociologist with us to answer that question. In the kind of
political setup we had, the social structure links up with the
political. When you look at pre-colonial Ghana you have the kings or the
chiefs in centralized societies or centralized states. It was much
easier for those centralized societies to capture and invade, than if
they were not centralized; because there wasn’t that cohesiveness in
the non-centralized. It was all over Ghana; if you look at North,
Southern Ghana, Volta; if you look at all the ten regions in Ghana you
find this picture. Also, I think we should remember we are dealing with
two aspects of slavery. We are dealing with a traditional system, an
indigenous system, where there was a domestic demand for labour; and
then we are dealing with an external system where there was also an
Atlantic demand. These two systems were at play in Ghana and in many
parts of Africa during this period.
When the Atlantic trade becomes most important, from
the second half of the 16th century, we find that there is
increased demand on the Coast and so there is a lot of slave raiding. In
Manu’s book, he takes one aspect of the sources. You have warfare, you
have raiding, you have kidnapping, you have market supply and so on; but
he selects one; and that helps us to understand the picture.
Siddique:
How do you see the relationship between Asante and Dagbon?
Perbi: We
need to recognize the role of Asante in state building. Asante was the
last of all the Akan states. Others had been established from as early
as the 13th century. Asante was the last, early in the 17th
century. And yet, being the last, it was the most aggressive. It
expanded North, South, East and West. Prof Adu Boahen tells us that at
the height of Asante’s power it covered almost the boundaries of
modern Ghana. It included Bonduku, Burkina, part of Ivory Coast and part
of Togo. It covered not only modern Ghana but extended beyond its
borders. It was not only in the North that Asante demanded tribute. It
demanded tribute from all the states that it defeated. So small, poor
groups in the Volta, for example, might have to send only 12 captives.
Every group had to send a certain number of captives to Asante.
Siddique:
It reminds me of Esi[vi] in the courtyard of the
Asante kingdom.
Yitah: I
would like to ask Mr. Herbstein to read something for us that might capture the soul - if
there is one - of the book.
Herbstein:
Before I do that, I would like to pick up some of the points that have
been made. One thing I want to make clear: this is a novel, a piece of
fiction. I didn’t set out to compete with historians. On the contrary,
I am heavily indebted to their work. I found the germs of the incidents,
of insights into character, in the publications of historians.
Regarding the question of structure, the name of the
book is Ama: a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The most
important word there is the article “a.” It’s a
story, just one of countless untold stories.
The accepted figure of the number of slaves who were
taken across the Atlantic in the 400-year period of the Atlantic slave
trade is about 12 million (though there is still some controversy about
that.) Most of these people left no record of their personal stories.
What I set out to do was to recreate what might have been just one of
those stories.
The stories are not even remembered here in Ghana.
Once some unfortunate, a mother or a daughter or a brother, had been
taken, within a generation the memories must surely have dimmed and
within two generations perhaps that family story will have been
forgotten.
The French historian Claude Meillassoux[vii]
says it like this:
“While the slave trade devastated the peasantry,
who saw their children, and especially their daughters, taken away by
brigands or armed bands to be sold to dealers, it enriched the
cabessaires (appointed by local kings to negotiate with traders) and the
agents and traders in the towns as well as the nobility, the
battle-hardened soldiers and the sycophants attached to the royal
courts. By a perversion of memory, the sumptuousness of the
plundering kings and their cabessaires has left its mark on the area in
its remembrance of the flourishing slave trade and the glories of the
past, while the memory of their peasant victims has been effaced by
their poverty.”
Now let me take up Helen’s offer to do a reading.
Because time is limited, I’ve done some compression. I’m going to
read an episode which takes place in a town called Kafaba. If you look
at a map of present day Ghana you will see a small village of that name
on the north bank of the Volta Lake. The original town[viii],
I believe, was submerged by the construction of the Volta Dam. Old
Kafaba was an important slave market long before the establishment of
the better known entrepôt at Salaga, 30km to the east. We know of its
existence; however, as far as I know, no detailed descriptions of the
town have come down in history. I used descriptions of Salaga,
written100 years later. I’m lucky here: the historians will find it
difficult to attack my description of Kafaba because they don’t have
the evidence.
Before I read the extract, I should explain that as
the level of the Volta rose and fell during the year, areas were flooded
and then exposed as the water level dropped. These were used for keeping
slaves and livestock or for agriculture. One road was left clear, from
the town, set at a higher elevation, down to the riverside.
Page
54-55
River Road was lined with small market stalls. In the
morning Gonja women cooked and sold thick, sour, red-brown millet
porridge; at noon and in the evening it might be grilled bream or
catfish or succulent prawns in groundnut soup, served with rice, boiled
yams or maize bread. Others offered spicy fried cakes of boiled beans,
millet or rice. Young girls, daughters of the caterers, roamed the Lower
Town with head trays of roasted groundnuts or foaming pots of honey
beer.
After dark, River Road took on a different aspect.
The porters[ix], exhausted from the day's
work, lay asleep wherever they could find a place to lie; but the food
sellers were still there, their flickering oil lamps defining the edges
of the road. Wealthy merchants from the Upper Town came out to stroll
down to the river and to display, in the moonlight, their newest outfits
and their youngest and prettiest wives. The men, meeting friends and
associates, would bow deeply, shake hands and exchange infinitely
protracted greetings and courtesies. A young wife, bathed and perfumed
and dressed to show her husband's pride, her eyes expertly made up with
lustrous silvery blue-white antimony, would shyly drop her left knee and
touch the ground with her left hand. Then she would stand quietly by,
waiting patiently for the end of the men's palaver, demurely aware of
the admiration which the intricate embroidery on her wrapper and blouse
and the style and color of her head tie were attracting in the
moonlight. And she would finger her gold earrings and neck chain, her
bangles and her rings.
Page 55-56
Nandzi trudged up the hill behind Akwasi Anoma, her feet
bare, her body wrapped in her two cloths, the man’s baggage on her
head. Any stranger could guess their relationship. If the man ahead of
her had been her father, Tigen, she would not have given the matter a
second thought. If it had been Itsho, suddenly returned from the spirit
world, she would have begged him to let her carry his possessions. But
Akwasi Anoma was not her father and he was certainly not her freely
chosen lover, dead or alive. Akwasi Anoma was a stranger to her. He was
not even, so far as she knew, her owner.
When she was together with her fellow slaves, Nandzi
felt hidden in anonymity. But here, as she wound her way through this
great seething crowd of people in Akwasi Anoma's footsteps, it was
obvious that she was the man’s creature. It was obvious; yet it was so
commonplace that nobody noticed. Nandzi and her master might just as
well have been invisible. Of that she soon became aware, and so doing,
turned her attention elsewhere.
The first slave compound they passed at once
impressed itself indelibly on Nandzi’s mind. Many years later, in
another continent, she could still recall every precise detail of the
picture. There must have been as many as three hundred slaves. They were
confined within a fenced area, on one side of River Road, together with
horses and asses, oxen, cows and goats. The livestock wandered freely
within the kraal, seeking pasture in the overcropped bare surface. The
slaves were chained in groups of ten or twenty. Some were young boys and
girls. They squatted morosely, most of them practically naked, exposed
to the pitiless malevolence of the sun. At night, she could see, they
would have to sleep on the bare ground without mats, many without even
the meanest cloth to protect them from the cold and damp. They were
clearly underfed.
Page 56
Near the fence sat an emaciated woman. A chain joined the
manacle on her right ankle to the others in her circle. A child, a thing
of skin and bones, lay on her lap, too ill or listless even to cry.
Flies buzzed at its eyes and nostrils. The mother saw Nandzi looking at
her and caught her eye. Without releasing her gaze, she lifted her flat,
empty breasts. Then she held out both palms. That woman could be me, it
could be my mother, thought Nandzi. She spread her hands in a gesture of
impotence and despair and dragged her gaze away.
Siddique:
Thank you very much.
I want to capture this scenario of the past and the
present. Slavery in those days, the dehumanizing treatment of our own:
how does it reflect in contemporary times? Have we sat down to think
about it, to look at the various angles of it, as a people, to write
about it? If we haven’t, what lessons do we have to take from this
particular book?
Senanu:
Well, it has been approached from various angles. For instance, some
poets have used the physical presence of the castles on the Coast and
seen them as the basis of power. They have used the dungeons that are
still there, that we use as an attraction for tourists, as symbols of
what the slave experience might have been. Our ancestors were
responsible to some extent for this experience. So the experience of
slavery and the anguish of it are being gradually brought into the
consciousness of a number of our writers. Opoku-Agyeman[x], for instance, has written
a collection of poems which uses Cape Coast Castle as a symbol of what
happened to us in the past.
But I must say that no one book has gone into such
elaborate detail to recreate both the process and the experience of
slavery such has been done by Manu. This is why the book is worth
careful study. Of course, now that we also have the Danish record of
Christiansburg Castle and the slave trade centered around that Castle[xi],
there are now documents available to us to begin to appreciate what
happened in the past.
You know, through oral history itself there is no
easy way in which the experience of slavery could have passed down to us
from the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of us do
not feel guilty at all. It is only when it is recreated like this that
we begin to understand what is at the back of our state of being at the
present moment.
Siddique:
But to what extent should we feel guilty?
Senanu:
Well that, I think, is a debatable point. Nevertheless, if you realize
that the historical records indicate that it wasn’t only tribal
warfare, it wasn’t only the fact that there were some centralized
states which were able to control smaller ones and raid them for slaves;
in some cases families even pawned their own children. There are cases
where a man would come and sell his wife. Now I think that if you begin
to come upon this kind of record you will see the need for us to
introspect, well, have a sense of guilt.
Now I have a personal point to make here because an
American anthropologist has made remarks about the fact that Ghanaians
don’t feel responsible for what has happened to African Americans.[xii]
In fact some Ghanaians refer to African Americans as odonko[xiii]
not realizing that their grandfathers were responsible for these people
becoming slaves in America. So this whole issue of guilt is coming up
and I think it is something which we ought to debate.
Siddique:
Interestingly, when the African Americans come here on a visit and they
go to the castles and they have their cameras on them and they
eventually break down and shed tears, I would watch them on television
and look at them and I would ask, What is happening to them? Why is he
or she shedding tears?
It captures your concern. We don’t know, we’ve
never been told.
Senanu: We
ask ourselves, should we feel guilty for what happened in the past? I
suggest that quite often we are not very much aware of how implicated
even ordinary people were, ordinary citizens, families, pawning their
children, husbands selling their wives. It is because we are not aware
of this and have a kind of amnesia, that the more creative writing we
have about this, the more we begin to understand ourselves. Maybe there
are some things which are happening right around here now which reflect
and repeat some of these things we did in the past. I think it’s
important for us to take this writing very seriously.
Siddique:
In our schools there is a sort of a history of Ghana that we are taught.
I doubt if it really captures this scene. Is it a deliberate attempt to
suppress history?
Perbi:
Yes, I think traditionally amongst us Ghanaians there has always been
that issue of you don’t disclose someone’s origin and it’s
always been that idea of not talking about the slave trade and slavery.
In fact, it’s a very sensitive topic and it’s very difficult, if you’re
going to the field, to get people to open up. It takes a while to get
people to know who you are, that you don’t mean any harm, that you’re
really doing something for academic reasons. So I think we really need
to get to the point as Prof said, when we have more writing and we have
more reading. That also helps us. We need to have the information first
and know how to spread it; because that way it can help us to know more.
I was part of the UNESCO Slave Route Project for a couple
of years. In one of our workshops in Paris, we were looking at how the
slave trade is taught in different African countries and I had to
represent Ghana. And in fact there wasn’t much in the primary school,
JSS, secondary only those who were in history and there wasn’t much,
about 2-3 pages in the textbook. We realized there was a lot of work to
be done. Interestingly, it was not only in Ghana; many of the African
countries had the same experience. Apart from the U.S. where it was
being taught seriously, many European countries didn’t either. It is a
problem which the UNESCO project is trying to tackle. So I think Manu
has done very well. It is a brave effort to bring this out and talk
about the details which you don’t want to talk about.
Siddique:
We don’t know our history. At times we get up and point fingers at
people not knowing our own contribution to a problem. We’ve had
situations in this country where someone will say, “Well, where from
you, go back to the North.” But we forget that at a particular point
in our history we went there and brought them to work in the cocoa farms
and the mines and moved them down to the South. You know, if we don’t
know this we cannot have peaceful coexistence. Concerning the case of
Dagbon and the other small tribes, if people don’t know the history
they cannot appreciate its role. The onus lies on all of us, I think, to
tell the story in a way that would not destabilize, not inflict wounds.
It has to be carefully done. What do you say, Manu Herbstein?
Herbstein:
I was aware while writing this book that I had to be very careful about
cultural baggage. I didn’t want to experience the criticism of people
asking, “Who the hell are you, Manu Herbstein, a white South African, coming to lecture us about the
slave trade?” I’m told that that is a reaction that can come very
easily, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic. So I exercised
care in tying to tell the story from the point of view of a central
character who was right down there at the bottom of the heap.