Manu Herbstein
Ama, A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Central Library, Accra, Ghana

Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

I was born in 1936, in Muizenberg, a seaside suburb 15 miles from Cape Town. My grandparents, immigrants from Lithuania, Latvia and Romania had arrived in South Africa in the 1890s. They, and my parents, were life-long Zionists. It was not until early adulthood that I began to free myself from that doctrine. I studied Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town. In 1957 I worked my passage to England in what was known as an Intermediate Cargo Passenger Vessel (a “tramp”). The Suez Canal was closed, so after discharging cargo in East African ports we turned back and rounded the Cape. I celebrated my 21st birthday in mid-Atlantic. Our crew was paid off in Rotterdam and I headed for London. There I found work in a Consulting Engineers’ office in Victoria Street. In 1958 I spent a week at the Expo in Brussels and then used my savings to fly to Nairobi in Kenya, which was still a British colony. I hitchhiked to Pretoria and took a train to Cape Town, arriving with just one sixpenny coin, which I used to call home from a public phone. I returned to UCT to redo a project which I’d failed the first time round. Then back to London for a year’s postgraduate study at Imperial College. I found a job in Nigeria, arriving a fortnight before Independence. I worked on the construction of a barrage across the Ogun River in Abeokuta. In 1961 my employer sent me to Ghana to run a rural road project. Two years later I was offered a job in Bombay, India. There I designed the superstructure of two bridges, one in Assam, with a 400ft. central span and the other a multi-span bridge across the Indus River in Pakistan. Both are still standing, a little the worse for wear due to poor maintenance and overloading. In 1965 I returned to Ghana to a job with Government. The following year President Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-supported military coup and the IMF imposed harsh rules of Structural Adjustment. Zambia had recently shed colonial rule, and I found a job in Lusaka, which was the forward base of the African National Congress. My Ghanaian wife, Akua, and I married there. We spent our honeymoon at the Victoria Falls. In 1968, Akua joined a post-graduate program at Glasgow University. We lived in a new town called Cumbernauld for two years. In 1970, we returned to Ghana. Since 2006 I have had dual citizenship, Ghanaian and South African.

Tell us a little bit about your winning book.

The Atlantic slave trade lasted some 400 years. The buyers on the West African coast were Europeans and Americans, the sellers, powerful African merchants. Along the coast of what is today Ghana, the Europeans built some 60 trading posts. The largest and best preserved are those at Cape Coast and Elmina. When I first arrived in Ghana in 1961, Elmina Castle was being used as a Police Training College. It wasn’t open to the public, but a friend took me there. I knew nothing of the history, but I guess a seed was planted in my mind. Fast forward. In 1995 there were serious civil disturbances in northern Ghana, in what came to be known as the Guinea Fowl War. A book I borrowed from the British Council library led me to believe that the seeds of the conflict lay in the slave trade of the eighteenth century. That tied in with memories of many visits to Elmina Castle. I tried to imagine the experience of being captured and enslaved and eventually transported across the Atlantic. The works of historians failed to answer my questions, and I couldn’t find a work of historical fiction told from the point of view of the enslaved. So, naively, I set out to fill that gap. The result was Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, first published in 2001. The completed novel has 36 chapters. The first one I wrote turned out to be chapter 13. It is based on a story told by the tourist guides at Elmina. Having created my leading character, Ama, I used research to interrogate her about her back story and what happened to her later. In a way, she wrote the book for me. This quote may tell you something about her: “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.”

My novel won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. The award was presented to me by Princess Anne at a dinner at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.

How does it come to be self-published? In 2015, my American publisher at the time saw fit, without seeking my agreement, to assign rights, free of charge, to a third party. When I politely queried their action, they responded with anger, ceased publication and returned all rights to me. I had no choice then, but to self-publish.

What made you want to be an author?

On February 13, 1945, an envelope addressed to Master Maurice Herbstein, Talyllyn, Vlei Road, Muizenberg, arrived in our postbox. It contained a light blue card, headed CAPE TIMES SQUIRREL CLUB, Young Writer’s Blue Certificate and bore the inscription, “This is to show that the work of MAURICE HERBSTEIN has appeared three times on Squirrel Club pages since the beginning of 1939.” I still have the card. It bears a picture of a squirrel writing in an open book with a pen with a removable nib, an inkpot sitting conveniently by. So, I started young.

In later years, I was active in anti-apartheid activity. In Nigeria in 1960-61, the weekly Service Magazine published several articles of mine about the situation in South Africa. In Bombay in 1963-65, I wrote for both The Times of India and Blitz Magazine. I have copies of poems and plays I wrote in those years, but I never tried to have them published.

How have libraries played a role in your indie author journey?

In 1910, a Carnegie Public Library was built in Muizenberg at a cost of $7800. During school holidays I would take out six books at a time. In 1953, the Apartheid government limited its use to the white population. In later years the building housed a police station and then a police museum.

My parents were great readers. In later years I would find books to read in their home library.

When Akua and I returned to Ghana in 1970, one of my first jobs was to supervise construction of the new British Council building in Accra, which included a library. When the new building was opened, I signed on as a member of the library. Sadly, it closed, I think in 2003, its books donated to other libraries.

When I started writing Ama, I made good use of the excellent libraries at the University of Ghana, where there was open access to the shelves. There is a fascinating history of libraries in Ghana at https://www.library.gov.gh/assets/brochure/brochure.pdf.

On a visit to New York in the late 90s, I spent several days in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, ordering books on my list, three at a time, and having photocopies made of relevant pages.

Once Ama was published, I asked for permission from some 200 copyright holders and set up a website, www.ama.africatoday.com, with texts I had consulted. My intention was to give lay readers access to source material to use in checking the authenticity and plausibility of my writing. That website is Ama’s on-line library. An African proverb says, “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” I’m 88. I hope that when I die, that on-line library will survive me.

Do you have any advice for aspiring indie authors?

Don’t give up your day job. Don’t give up your dreams of sharing your writing with many readers.

What does winning this award mean to you?

The Slave Trade has left open wounds on both sides of the Atlantic. I hope that sharing Ama’s story will help library users in the U.S. and Canada to heal those wounds.