This website wins prestigious award.

The gold at the ritzy South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)'s Innovative Use Of New Media Awards 2003 at the Highway Africa conference went to  . . . Manu Herbstein's www.ama.africatoday.com . . . announced winner of the individual category at the awards ceremony at the Settler's Monument in Grahamstown September 8, 2003. More . . .

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• The background
  • African slaves were sold in Lisbon as early as 1441. The European discovery and colonization of the Americas set the scene for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the course of three hundred years, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, upwards 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.
    
    The slaves were all African. So too were most of those who first sold them. The buyers and shippers were Europeans.
    
    Like you and me, each of those Africans must surely have had a tale to tell. No doubt it would have been a tale of suffering; but often, surely, also a tale of courage and solidarity.
    
    Sadly, few acquired the skills needed to preserve their stories for posterity; and those who did wrote with European quills and European ink on European paper.
    
    What of the vast majority? What of those who never learned to read or write and never accepted the religion of their oppressors?  
    
    Their stories are lost. All but a few of the ten million came from societies in which literature was oral, rather than written. Even when the light of history shines briefly on one of those black faces, it is seldom an African who holds the flickering torch and tells us what he sees. The fragments which have come down to us are shattered images of African society, African beliefs, African relationships, African people.

   

• Ama's story

  • This novel is an attempt to recreate the experience of enslavement and resistance, seen from the point of view of one African slave.  
    
    In 1772, the musketeers of the army of the Asante Confederacy vanquished the archers and cavalry of the Kingdom of Dagomba. The victor exacted from the defeated enemy an annual tribute of five hundred slaves.
    
    Ama, then known by her birth-name, Nandzi, is left alone to care for her baby brother. She is captured, raped and enslaved. Her name is taken from her. She fights back; she is defeated. She escapes; and is recaptured. From the moment when she loses her freedom, her life oscillates between resistance to her successive owners and a reluctant accommodation to their power. The Dagomba give her to the Asante; the Asante sell her to the Dutch. On board an English slave ship, she instigates a rebellion; and suffers a terrible retribution when it fails. In Brazil, where eighteen-hour work shifts send slaves to an early death, she attempts to build a new life. Sustained by ancient beliefs, Ama's spirit never wavers. Enslaved she might have been, but to herself she is never a slave. Read the first chapter on-line at www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook627.htm

   

• This web-site
  • Whether we are aware of it or not,  the holocaust which was the Atlantic slave trade has in some way affected everyone of us who lives on the shores of the Atlantic and beyond. I hope that you will find Ama's story a good read; but beyond that, if it leaves you with a hunger to know more, please click on the links in the panel on the left.
    
    ENHANCEMENTS will take you to a list of the main characters in the novel and a glossary.
    
    TEXTS AND SOURCES leads to references to the work of distinguished scholars, supported by  texts which relate in some way to Ama's story. 
    
    ISSUES includes discussions on the problem of achieving authenticity and plausibility in a historical novel of this nature; on the Middle Passage in Fiction; on African Participation in Slavery and the Slave Trade; on how the Atlantic Slave Trade features in the Curriculum of Schools in the United States; on Racism; and on Reparations.
    
    OTHER INFORMATION includes the UNESCO Slave Route Project, films dealing with Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the world today, African Literature, Conferences and  Museums of slavery and the slave trade.
    
    REACTIONS will lead you to reviews of AMA  and will offer you a place to record your comments on the novel and on this web site.
    

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