About
Manu Herbstein (b. 1936 near Cape Town, South Africa) holds dual South African and Ghanaian citizenship. In the 1960s he worked as a civil and structural engineer in England, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Ghana again, Zambia and Scotland. He returned to Ghana in 1970 and has lived there since. He began writing seriously as he approached retirement. His first novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. It has been published in South Africa, India and Ghana. In the U.S.A, it is available from Amazon and Ingram and as an eBook. A companion website, www.ama.africatoday.com, is a rich repository of primary and secondary texts and images related to the novel. Brave Music of a Distant Drum, first published by Red Deer Press in Canada and the U.S. in 2011, is a sequel aimed at younger readers. Akosua and Osman won one of three 2011 Burt Awards for African Literature in Ghana. Ramseyer's Ghost is a dystopian/utopian political thriller set in Ghana in 2050. President Michelle or Ten Days that Shook the World is a short story aimed at U.S. readers. Manu's latest novel, The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye, received the U.S.-based African Literature Association's 2016 Book of the Year Award for Creative Writing, awarded for "an outstanding book of African literature."
Featured Work
Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
"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."
In the course of four hundred years some twelve million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to serve European settlers and their descendants. Only the barest fragments of their stories have survived. Manu Herbstein's ambitious, meticulously researched and moving novel sets out to recreate one of these lives, following Ama, its eponymous heroine, from her home in the Sahel, through Kumase at the height of Asante power, and Elmina, centre of the Dutch slave trade, to a sugar plantation in Brazil.
"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 dramatizes 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."
Other Works
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Planet Earth: Wake Up!
2022
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Earth, Fire, Air, Water
2022
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Akosua and Osman
2017
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Ramseyer's Ghost
2016
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President Michelle, or Ten Days that Shook the World
2016
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The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye
2014
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The Dibbuk
2013
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Building Bridges
2011
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The Car Doctors of Maamobi
2011
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Brave Music of a Distant Drum
2011
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Jai Hind
2009
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Suikerbossiestroopfontein
2008
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Have a Good Day
2008
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Sankofa in Rhode Island
2008
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Reflections in a Shattered Glass
2008
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50 Years Ago: Zeke in Nigeria
2008
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Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
2002
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The Clock
1945
Awards and Recognition
- Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book, 2002
- Burt Award for African Literature in Ghana (twice)
- African Literature Association's Book of the Year Award for Creative Writing, 2016