 | Ama : A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade Manu Herbstein was born and educated in apartheid South Africa. He has lived and worked in England, Nigeria, India, Zambia, and Scotland. Since 1970, he has made his home in Accra, Ghana. By profession a civil and structural engineer, he has contributed to the design and construction of power stations, bridges, water supply and sewage treatment plants, river works, highways, and buildings. He is a fellow of the British Institution of Structural Engineers and a fellow and onetime council member of the Ghana Institution of Engineers. In his youth, he traveled widely, especially in Africa, hitchhiking from Cape Town to Lusaka while still at school and from Nairobi to Pretoria some years later. In 1957, he worked his passage around Africa to Europe in an ocean-going tramp. In 1963, he spent three months traveling in West, Central, and East Africa. His support for and association with the African National Congress of South Africa goes back to the late fifties. Manu Herbstein first visited the slave castle at Elmina, Ghana, which features in this novel, in 1961. He has returned many times since and says that the experience never fails to move him. Civil disturbances in rural northern Ghana sparked the writing of this novel. Seeking to understand the 1994 Guinea Fowl War. |
