Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade is the debut historical novel by Manu Herbstein. It has been described as a work of faction that "successfully blends extensive and meticulous research with abundant imagination to transport the reader into the violent world of the Atlantic Slave Trade." [1]
The book won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best First Book.
The Kingdom of Dahomey was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. The kingdom fell when the last king, Béhanzin, was defeated by France, leading to the country being annexed into the French colonial empire. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau amongst the Fon people in the early 17th century and became a regional power in the 18th century by conquering key cities on the Atlantic coast.
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans, particularly in the Americas. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of various enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Some of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with one another to create overseas empires.
A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinguished from the term "comic book", which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.
Manu Herbstein is the South African author of Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2001), which won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the first time the award had been given to an electronic book. The first chapter of the novel may be read on-line at the link below.
The Fon people, also called Fon nu, Agadja or Dahomey, are a Gbe ethnic group. They are the largest ethnic group in Benin found particularly in its south region; they are also found in southwest Nigeria and Togo. Their total population is estimated to be about 3,500,000 people, and they speak the Fon language, a member of the Gbe languages.
The Bight of Benin or Bay of Benin is a bight in the Gulf of Guinea area on the western African coast.
The Slave Coast is a historical name formerly used for that part of coastal West Africa along the Bight of Benin that is located between the Volta River and the Lagos Lagoon. The name is derived from the region's history as a major source of African people taken into slavery during the Atlantic slave trade from the early 16th century to the late 19th century.
In comics in the United States, a trade paperback is a collection of stories originally published in comic books, reprinted in book format, usually presenting either a complete miniseries, a story arc from a single title, or a series of stories with an arc or common theme.
The British Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron at substantial expense in 1808 after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The squadron's task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa. With a home base at Portsmouth, England, it began with two small ships, the 32-gun fifth-rate frigate HMS Solebay and the Cruizer-class brig-sloop HMS Derwent. At the height of its operations, the squadron employed a sixth of the Royal Navy fleet and marines. In 1819 the Royal Navy established a West Coast of Africa Station and the West Africa Squadron became known as the Preventative Squadron. It remained an independent command until 1856 and then again 1866 to 1867. Between 1830 and 1865, more than 1,500 British sailors died on their mission of freeing slaves with the West Africa Squadron.
AiT/Planet Lar is an American comic book publishing company based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1999 by Larry Young and Mimi Rosenheim. The company focuses on releasing original graphic novels into the mass market, although the company has published trade paperbacks of serialized mini-series originally published by other companies.
Philip Dearmond Curtin was a Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University and historian on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. His most famous work, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) was one of the first estimates of the number of slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th century and 1870, yielding an estimate of 9,566,000 African slaves imported to the Americas. Although subsequent authors have disputed this number, his work remains the most commonly cited. He also wrote about how many Africans were taken and from what location, how many died during the middle passage, how many actually arrived in the Americas, and to what colonies/countries they were imported. Deirdre McCloskey has described Curtin as the "doyen of African economic historians."
Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient world. When the trans-Saharan slave trade, Indian Ocean slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practised despite it being illegal.
Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein was a Dutch Christian minister of Ghanaian birth who was one of the first known sub-Saharan Africans to study at a European university and one of the first Africans to be ordained as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. He is credited with spreading the use of the written word in his native Ghana. Though a former slave, Capitein wrote a dissertation defending the right of Christians to keep slaves.
The Horus Heresy is an ongoing series of science fantasy set in the fictional Warhammer 40,000 setting of tabletop miniatures wargame company Games Workshop. Penned by several authors, the series takes place during the Horus Heresy, a fictional galaxy-spanning civil war occurring 10,000 years before the far future of Warhammer 40,000. The war is described as a major contributing factor to the game's dystopian environment.
Babouk is a political-themed novel by Guy Endore, a fictionalized account of the Haitian Revolution told through the eyes of its titular slave. Though virtually unknown today, Babouk has gained some notoriety in academic circles through its linking of the slave trade with capitalism, and one professor has suggested that it would make a valuable addition to post-colonial literary discourse. A committed leftist and opponent of racism, Endore spent many months in Haiti researching the story that would become Babouk, and much of his findings make their way into the text, either in the form of epigraphs or explicitly noted in the text itself. Babouk is also notable for the digressions the narrator makes from the main narrative, to expound his political sympathies.
Anowa is a play by Ghanaian playwright Ama Ata Aidoo that was published in 1970, after Aidoo returned from Stanford University in California to teach at the university of Cape Coast. It is based on a traditional Ghanaian tale of a daughter who rejects suitors proposed by her parents Osam and Badua, and marries a stranger who ultimately is revealed as the Devil in disguise. The play is set in the 1870s on the Gold Coast, and tells the story of the heroine Anowa's failed marriage to the slave trader Kofi Ako.
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is a three-volume work published by the Nation of Islam. The first volume, which was released in 1991, asserts that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. The Secret Relationship has been widely criticized for being antisemitic and for failing to provide an objective analysis of the role of Jews in the slave trade. The American Historical Association issued a statement condemning claims that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic slave trade, and other historians such as Wim Klooster and Seymour Drescher concluded that the role of Jews in the overall Atlantic slave trade was in fact minimal. Critics of the book assert that it uses selective citations in order to purposefully exaggerate the role of Jews.
The Big Blow is a 2000 novel written by American author Joe R. Lansdale. It tells a fictional story of real life boxing great Jack Johnson.
The Christian Recorder is the official newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and is the oldest continuously published African-American newspaper in the United States. It has been called "arguably the most powerful black periodical of the nineteenth century." at a time when there were few sources for news and information about Black communities.
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