Sargrenti is the name by which Major General Sir Garnet Wolseley, KCMG (1833 - 1913) is still known in the West African state of Ghana. Kofi Gyan, the 15-year old boy who spits in Sargrenti's eye, is the nephew of the chief of Elmina, a town on the Atlantic coast of Ghana. On Christmas Day, 1871, Kofi's godfather gives him a diary as a Christmas present and charges him with the task of keeping a personal record of the momentous events through which they are living. This novel is a transcription of Kofi's diary. Elmina town has a long-standing relationship with the Castelo de S o Jorge da Mina, known today as Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and captured from them by the Dutch in 1637. In April, 1872, the Dutch hand over the unprofitable castle to the British. The people of Elmina have not been consulted and resist the change. On June 13, 1873 British forces punish them by bombarding the town and destroying it. (It has never been rebuilt. The flat open ground where it once stood serves as a constant reminder of the savage power of Imperial Britain.) After the destruction of Elmina, Kofi moves to his mother's family home in nearby Cape Coast, seat of the British colonial government, where Sargrenti is preparing to march inland and attack the independent Asante state. There, Melton Prior, war artist of the London weekly news magazine, The Illustrated London News, offers Kofi a job as his assistant. This gives the lad an opportunity to observe at close quarters not only Prior but also the other war correspondents, Henry Morton Stanley and G. A. Henty. Kofi witnesses and experiences the trauma of a brutal war, a run-up to the formal colonialism which would be realized ten years later at the 1885 Berlin conference, where European powers drew lines on the map of Africa, dividing the territory up amongst themselves. On February 6, 1874, Sargrenti's troops loot the palace of the Asante king, Kofi Karikari, and then blow up the stone building and set the city of Kumase on fire, razing it to the ground. Kofi's story culminates in his angry response to the British auction of their loot in Cape Coast Castle. The loot includes the solid gold mask shown on the front cover of the novel. That mask continues to reside in the Wallace Collection in London. The invasion of Asante met with the enthusiastic approval of the British public, which elevated Wolseley to the status of a national hero. All the war correspondents and several military officers hastened to cash in on public sentiment by publishing books telling the story of their victory. In all of these, without exception, the coastal Fante feature as feckless and cowardly and the Asante as ruthless savages. The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye tells the story of these momentous events for the first time from an African point of view. It is told with irony and with occasional flashes of humor. The novel is illustrated with scans of seventy engravings first published in The Illustrated London News. This book won a Burt Award for African Literature which included the donation by the Ghana Book Trust of 3000 copies to school libraries in Ghana. In 2016, at the annual conference of the African Literature Association held in Atlanta, GA, it received the ALA's Creative Book of the Year Award. Prof. Stephanie Newell, Yale University, writes, "Manu Herbstein has done what the best cultural historians of Africa should do: that is, read between the lines of the colonial archives to imagine what it was like to be an African alive at that time, witnessing and interpreting events." The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye is a story for adults of all ages, both "young adults" and those no longer so young.

The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye

Literature & Fiction

Herbstein, Manu

Genre Fiction

Manu Herbstein

“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.”
During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived.
This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories. It is a story, just one of a possible 12 million or more. 
Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name, in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in the early chapters of Homegoing. 
Ama occupies center stage throughout this novel. As the story opens, she is sixteen. Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather. Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother.
It is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of the Dagomba kingdom dispatches a mounted raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama. 
That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders’ camp. The rescue bid fails. Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho’s mangled corpse. For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need.
In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother. When the adolescent monarch, Osei Kwame, conceives a passion for her, the regents dispatch her to the coast for sale to the Dutch at Elmina Castle.
There the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects here as his concubine, dressing her in the elegant clothes of his late Dutch wife and instructing the obese chaplain to teach her to read and write. De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe. He makes a last trip to the Dutch coastal outstations and returns infected with yellow fever. On his death, his successor rapes Ama and sends her back to the female dungeon.
She comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, The Love of Liberty. Before the ship leaves the coast of Africa, Ama instigates a slave rebellion. It fails and a brutal whipping leaves her blind in one eye.
The ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm cripples it and drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil. 
Ama finds herself working in the fields and the mill on a sugar estate. She is absorbed into slave society and begins to adapt, learning the língua franca, Portuguese.
 Years pass. Ama has lost the sight of her good eye and is now totally blind. Clutching the cloth which is her only material link with Africa, she reminisces, dozes, falls asleep. 
A short epilogue brings the story up to date. The consequences of the slave trade and slavery are still with us. Brazilians of African descent remain entrenched in the lower reaches of society, enmeshed in poverty. 
“This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Simões da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatises the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. 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 civilization.”

Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade

United States

Ama is an enslaved African woman. In Brazil, old and ill, she is determined that the story of her life shall survive for future generations. Her story is one of violence and heartache, but also of courage, hope, determination, and ultimately, love. Since Ama is blind, she has to dictate to her long separated only son, Kwame Zumbi. Kwame - named Zacharias Williams by the white Christians who have raised him - considers her an ugly old pagan and has little interest in doing more than is necessary to fulfill his obligation to her. But the acts of hearing and writing down the details of his mother's story change him forever. This novel is a sequel to Manu Herbstein's novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, winner to the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. An incredible story. Millions of Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery across the Atlantic Ocean. For the descendants of those people, the repercussions are still reverberating today. The distant drum is still heard. This is a beautifully written, thought-provoking book about age-old questions involving man's inhumanity to man. Betty Kowall in The Waterloo Region Record. A powerful tale. Readers will be moved as much by Ama's intelligence and unwavering sense of self respect as by her hideous experiences. KIRKUS Review

Brave Music of a Distant Drum: Sequel to the prize-winning novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade

"Karatu, farkonka madaci, karshenka zuma." (Study is difficult but the rewards are great.) Akosua Annan is a confident and fiercely intelligent student at a posh school in Cape Coast, Ghana. There she comes under the influence of a charismatic feminist teacher. Osman Said's background is very different. Upon the death of his parents, a police sergeant and an unschooled market trader, immigrants to Accra from the North, he is adopted by a retired school teacher, Hajia Zainab. After a spell as an apprentice in an auto workshop, he returns to school. There, finding the teaching inadequate, he becomes an avid reader and educates himself. Akosua and Osman are thrown together by chance in the course of a school visit to the slave dungeon at Cape Coast Castle. Their paths cross again as finalists in the national school debating competition where the subject is "The problem of poverty in Ghana is insoluble." They meet for the third time as students at the University of Ghana and as we leave them, it looks as if their relationship might develop into something permanent. "This fascinating novel tells the story of how these two young people from these disparate backgrounds are brought together as if by an unseen hand, in a process that teaches us about our history, our common humanity despite ethnic differences, the need to pursue our ambitions, the strength of human sexuality and the need for self-discipline, and, above all, the power of love." The Judges, Burt Award for African Literature, 2011.

Akosua and Osman

Teen & Young Adult

2050. The global village has disintegrated. The Third World War, ending in a stalemate, has left the planet split between two hostile powers, each with a captive sphere of influence. The Atlantic Ocean has become an American sea. West Africa has become a desert of failed states and anarchy, dotted with mines and oil rigs, stockaded and armed by U. S. corporations. From their island outpost of St. Thomas (S o Tome), the Americans dispatch expeditions of geologists and mining engineers into the dangerous interior of the Dark Continent to search for untapped resources. One such expedition has gone missing. Ekem "Crash" Ferguson, born in the U.S. in 2008 of African parents and abandoned to the care of foster parents, is a Captain in the Marine Corps. His career blocked and his marriage failing, he accepts an offer to proceed to Ghana on a one-man mission to find the missing experts. His arrival in Africa is inauspicious: in a shack amongst the coconut palms he comes across two human skeletons. A boy guides him to a coastal village. He tells the chief that he has come to Ghana to search for his natural parents. The chief delegates fisherman Kofi Kom to accompany him to Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, 120 miles up-country. Kofi leaves Crash at a run-down lakeside holiday resort while he proceeds to Kumasi to obtain permission to enter the city. A troupe of actors is rehearsing a version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in the local language, Twi. He meets an ambitious young feminist actress, Yaa. In Kumasi, Kofi finds Crash a room and suggests that he employ Boafo, who occupies the adjacent room, as his guide. In a bar, Crash hears rumors of Americans imprisoned in the Kumasi Fort. Despite his failure to gain access to the Fort, he is convinced that the missing Americans are imprisoned there. When Boafo takes him to a soccer match at the city's stadium, he identifies this as an ideal landing ground for the VTOL aircraft, Thunderbirds, which will stage a rescue mission. Crash is not aware that Boafo is a professor of electronics and has been monitoring his communications with Washington. Crash goes to the stadium at dead of night to await the arrival of the three Thunderbirds, each carrying an armored vehicle that will take the rescue party to the Fort. As the Thunderbirds touch down, they are blown up. Crash survives and is arrested. The wristcom which he has used to communicate with Washington is confiscated. Anokye, the Ashanti king's first minister, interrogates Crash. He is put on trial and convicted but Anokye intervenes to save him from execution. His sentence is unusual. He will feature in a movie to be made about the abortive invasion, designed to build up nationalist sentiment. Yaa is appointed to direct the movie. The movie is premiered at Edweso, Yaa's home town. There, Crash meets Robert Service, one of the missing Americans, who turns out to be Yaa's husband. Service tells him that after the sudden death of the team's leader, he and his colleagues discovered that they were being used as dupes to locate natural resources that could be exploited by American corporations. All of them agreed to stay on in Ashanti to assist in developing the crippled economy. As part of his sentence, Crash travels the country as the movie is screened in one village after another. He is impressed by what he perceives as a unique social experiment, led by Anokye, an attempt to build a decent, viable society in an economy barely above subsistence level. Back in the U.S. Crash is charged with treason, tried and subsequently executed.

Ramseyer's Ghost