Manu Herbstein · 2015 · overland
Manu Herbstein's novel of the Sagrenti War, winner of the African Literature Association's 2016 Book of the Year. A boy from Elmina watches the British burn his town, follows Wolseley's column inland to Kumase, and tells the campaign from the end of it that the dispatches did not.
- 1Elmina
1873, and the town is destroyed by the British as a preliminary - the Dutch having handed their castle to Britain, and Elmina having been an Asante ally. Kofi's home is gone before the war has properly started.
- 2Cape Coast
His mother's family town, eight miles along the shore, and the seat of British government on the Gold Coast - where Sir Garnet Wolseley is assembling an expedition and the Fante are calling him Sargrenti.
- 3Kumase
The march inland over the Pra and through the forest to the Asante capital, which the British burn in February 1874 - the campaign that made Wolseley's reputation and is remembered rather differently at the other end of it.
- 4Cape Coast
Back to the coast, and the boy's own account of what he saw - written by a novelist who has spent a lifetime in Ghana, and given the African Literature Association's Book of the Year for 2016.