Manu Herbstein · 2000 · exile

Manu Herbstein's 2000 novel, which took the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for a first book from Africa. It follows one girl from a savannah hamlet in 1775 through the hands of the Dagomba, the Asante, the Dutch, a British slave captain and Brazilian traders to a sugar estate in Bahia.

1. 1
   The hamlet

   A Bekpokpam settlement in the savannah of what is now northern Ghana, 1775. Nandzi is fifteen and betrothed. A Dagomba raiding party takes her, and Itsho, who leads the attempt to get her back, is killed doing it.

2. 2
   Yendi

   The Dagomba capital, and the reason the raid happened: Asante has beaten Dagbon twice and fixed the annual tribute at five hundred slaves. Nandzi is part of a payment.

3. 3
   Kumase

   The Asante capital, where she is given to the Queen-Mother and renamed Ama Donko - the name she keeps through every later one imposed on her. Then the young king Osei Kwame wants her, and the regents send her to the coast.

4. 4
   Elmina

   The Dutch castle, taken from the Portuguese in 1637. The Director-General De Bruyn makes her his concubine, dresses her in his dead wife's clothes and has the chaplain teach her to read - and then he dies.

5. 5
   The Middle Passage

   The Love of Liberty, a British slaver, and the crossing that the book refuses to summarise. Ama is one of roughly twelve million; almost none of their accounts survive, which is the whole reason this one was written.

6. 6
   Salvador

   Bahia, and the slave market. Sold again, and given a third name - Pamela - by people who will never ask what the first one was.

7. 7
   The Reconcavo

   A sugar estate in the country behind the Bay of All Saints, and the rest of a life. In Brazil teaching a slave to read was a crime; when abolition came, barely a thousand of them could.