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Ama, by Manu Herbstein
Picador Africa, 2005. 374 pages.

To call Manu Herbstein’s Ama ambitious would be to belittle the fact that the author has, in many respects, succeeded in creating a grand narrative of the transatlantic slave trade that spans kingdoms, nations, and continents.

The novel depicts the harrowing story of Ama, a brilliant young Bekpokpam girl from a rural village in Northern Ghana. Raised in an isolated hamlet, her life is shattered when she is abducted by the rival Bedagbam cavalry during a raid. Over the next several years she is swept into the tendrils of the flourishing eighteenth century slave trade. Forced marches take her to the lavish royal court of the Asante kingdom, and on to Elmina castle, the horrific coastal Dutch slave trading port with steps worn bare by three hundred years of trade. She then endures the misery of the transatlantic crossing to Brazil, escaping death only through her beauty, her wits, and lingering memories of her village.

Background: The Transatlantic Slave Trade

An estimated 11 million Africans were transported to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. The institution was sustained by a chillingly profitable ‘triangle’ that benefited merchants on both sides of the Atlantic: (1) African slaves were sent to the Americas to produce sugar cane and other crops; (2) these goods were taken to Europe to produce rum and finished textiles; (3) which in turn were sold in Africa in exchange for slaves, completing the ‘triangle’. There were also numerous side enterprises, such as cod fishing in New England – used to feed the plantation slaves in the West Indies – that further sustained the business.

The Atlantic slave trade cut against the prevalent European conceptions of natural law and against Christian morality, yet it took three centuries to eradicate. National legislation was only enacted when religious and moral arguments against slavery met economic considerations. Bans in England came in 1807, and Northern states in the U.S. halted the trade beginning with Massachusetts. A national American ban was enacted with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. However, Portugal, responsible for the trade to Brazil, did not outlaw slavery until 1888.

The novel thrusts Ama into the thriving Asante kingdom during the height of the ‘triangle’ trade. Repulsed and attracted by the Asante’s gold fineries, menacing executioners, and bizarre circus acts, she must navigate the intrigues of the royal court as a house slave. Slaves in the Asante kingdom are treated differently than the European context, and she is allowed a degree of autonomy. She suffers from the lack of protective kinship ties, but learns that if she is lucky she can marry into the royal family and win her freedom. But Ama is still in bondage. At any moment, her relative independence may be taken away, and when she falls out of favor of royal advisors, it is.

The novel hits its stride in the second half. Ama’s hellish journey on the slave ship Love of Liberty is convincingly done, and her life on a Brazilian plantation is carefully handled. At first the sex scenes seem gratuitous – Ama is raped several times and endures a grisly sodomy at the hand of a Dutch official – but then it must be remembered that slavery, especially as practiced by Europeans, involved the systematic control of the chattel, including procreation. Rape was not an exception to the master-slave relationship but integral to the institution.

Ama is at its best when expressing the visceral horror of slavery. It was a filthy, disease ridden practice, involving the total physical dissolution of human beings, who vomited up the last vestiges of their homeland on the transatlantic voyage. There was the fear of suffocation, of pestilence, of the whip. The physical body was as expendable as livestock – yet suicide was severely punished. Ama’s attempts to revolt and resist her enslavement are punished with such brutality that she is left permanently disfigured. Hope – when it comes – is spiritual. Like her fellow Brazilian slaves, the syncretic religion of candomblé incorporates her own beliefs, enabling her to preserve enough spiritual strength to resist total submission.

These merits aside, Ama is not without its drawbacks. Ama’s first lover Itsho is used as a symbol of her life before slavery, yet his character is underdeveloped. The narrative voice is also unsteady in the first half of the novel. The point of view normally rests with Ama, yet leaps about haphazardly when she encounters new characters. Combined with editing problems – quotes occasionally end or don’t start at all – the novel can be a laborious read.

There is also a more fundamental challenge at work. In this story, there are essentially two protagonists that compete for the attention of the reader: the first is Ama, the second is the institution of slavery itself. At times the balance feels a precarious one. Herbstein shows us the point of view of the boatswain, the Captain, the Governor, and the slave, all drawn into the trade against their will. In so doing he delves into the mindset of perpetrators and victims alike. Yet he tends to overly describe aspects of slavery that slow down the pacing of the text. Ama’s personal tale is intriguing, but so often the institution – the competing protagonist – sidelines her story. The forward movement of a compelling storyline is dominated by the description of slavery.

Comparison: Ama and Roots

It is surprising how few critics have compared Ama to Alex Haley’s Roots (1976). Both novels trace the transatlantic slave trade through a coming-of-age West African protagonist. Haley’s novel follows the abduction of Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka man, from a fictional village in modern Gambia to a Virginia slave plantation in 1767. Each story is steeped in historical and cultural research. Instead of following Roots’s narrative directly to Virginia, however, Ama’s ship gets lost during a storm and ends up in Brazil.

Haley’s work is better written and immediately more engaging than Ama. One reason is that Haley limits the focus of the narrator to Kunta Kinte, rarely taking the risky technique of switching between view points or giving him implausible feats of genius. (Ama seems to learn languages in a matter of days.) Another is that Haley was already a successful journalist at the time he wrote the story, having penned Malcolm X’s autobiography – whose ideology can be felt in Roots‘ black-is-beautiful rants. By contrast, Herbstein is a civil engineer by trade who took on the immense task of writing a novel with a female protagonist. His 30 years in Ghana impart a degree of authenticity to the story – or at least respect for his characters. He also provides a stronger description of the perpetrators of slavery by frequently switching viewpoints, but he in turn loses the literary quality of Haley’s more disciplined tale.

Although lacking at times in literary quality, Ama should still be read. The novel reveals the simple truth that surviving the passage across the Atlantic and preserving one’s will power required extraordinary feats of heroism. These were not weak, inferior men, women, and children who laid the foundations of African, American, and Brazilian societies. Many were in fact the opposite, people enriched by their own cultures who continually affirmed themselves in the face of horrors that made them doubt.

Herbstein’s novel is ultimately instructive. Ama is currently on the reading list of seminars at Stanford and Columbia universities, and students bored by history books will be hard-pressed to fall asleep during Ama’s journey. The book is a moving fictional expression of one of the greatest human rights violations in history. If one of the challenges of writing about human rights atrocities is making them relevant, the author undoubtedly succeeds.

Fictionthatmatters.org Rating: 9|5

About the Author: Manu Herbstein

Manu Herbstein is a South Africa native who embarked upon Ama after having lived in Ghana for thirty years. Trained as a civil engineer, he conducted extensive research into the slave trade in West Africa and Brazil. The novel’s publication by E-Reads in 2002 won him the Commonwealth Prize for best first book. It was later published by Picador Africa in 2005, but has not yet been published in print in the United States.

Would you like to know more?

Slavery was and continues to be not just an African but a global phenomenon. Today, the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights proscribes slavery under international law. Yet there are an estimated 20 million persons today, mostly women and children, living in slavery.

Visit:
Herbstein’s website for fascinating debates about the slave trade.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Antislavery.org, a UK-based non-profit.

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