{"title":"Manu Herbstein","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"brave-music-of-a-distant-drum-book-manu-herbstein-9789988233068","title":"Brave Music of a Distant Drum","description":"\u003cp\u003eAma 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis novel is a sequel to Manu Herbstein's novel, \u003cem\u003eAma, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade\u003c\/em\u003e, winner to the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAn 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 \u003cem\u003eThe Waterloo Region Record.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA powerful tale. Readers will be moved as much by Ama's intelligence and unwavering sense of self respect as by her hideous experiences. \u003cem\u003eKIRKUS Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572549165329,"sku":"GOR013205295","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51066403750161,"sku":"NIN9789988233068","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/998823306X.jpg?v=1751385549"},{"product_id":"brave-music-of-a-distant-drum-book-manu-herbstein-9780889954700","title":"Brave Music of a Distant Drum","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBrave Music of a Distant Drum\u003c\/i\u003e, a blind old slave woman, Ama, summons her son to come and write down her story so that her granddaughter and her granddaughter's children can one day read it and know their history.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAma's son, Kwame Zumbi - named Zacharias Williams by the white Christians who raised him - considers her an ugly old pagan and has little interest in doing more than is necessary to fulfill his obligation to her. How he is changed by the acts of hearing and writing down the details of his mother's story is as powerful and important a story as Ama's.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe story of an African enslaved in Brazil, Ama's story is violent - it includes murder, rape, and betrayal - and yet it is also a story of courage, hope, determination, and love.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50373870780689,"sku":"CIN0889954704G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50373871993105,"sku":"CIN0889954704VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B00A2RP790.jpg?v=1752575856"},{"product_id":"ama-book-manu-herbstein-9781585869329","title":"AMA","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis unique collection brings together rare and obscure texts concerning the lives and experiences of women throughout history. With excerpts from diaries, letters, and other sources, this book provides a unique window into the world of women from a variety of cultures and time periods. Accompanied by detailed footnotes and bibliographical references, this book is a valuable resource for historians, feminists, and anyone interested in women's history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eScholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50393345720593,"sku":"CIN1585869325A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50393349030161,"sku":"CIN1585869325G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1585869325.jpg?v=1750762132"},{"product_id":"ama-book-manu-herbstein-9781770100039","title":"Ama","description":"Through a successful blend of research and abundant imagination, the author tells the story of a girl's and, later, a woman's life through the horrors of slavery and her growth and battles in the attainment of self liberty. Ama is as much about the violence of colonialism, patriarchy, female sexuality or gendered reproduction, economic production and the site of imperial contest, racial difference, as it is about resistance. Ama's journey allows us to read the complexities and contradictions of a time, where all classes, free and slave, women and men, black and white are interrelated in a complex dynamic that results from relations of power.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50716961505553,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50716962193681,"sku":"GOR010675193","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51547525808401,"sku":"GOR006768865","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1770100032.jpg?v=1751311699"},{"product_id":"boy-who-spat-in-sargrenti-s-eye-book-manu-herbstein-9789988233044","title":"The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51066349388049,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51066351911185,"sku":"NIN9789988233044","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52412547596561,"sku":"CIN9988233043G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9988233043.jpg?v=1750840228"},{"product_id":"ama-a-story-of-the-atlantic-slave-trade-book-manu-herbstein-9789988233051","title":"Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade","description":"\u003cp\u003eI 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDuring a period of 400 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories. It is \u003cem\u003ea\u003c\/em\u003e story, just one of a possible 12 million or more.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLawrence Hill created another in \u003cem\u003eThe Book of Negroes\u003c\/em\u003e (\u003cem\u003eSomeone Knows my Name\u003c\/em\u003e, in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in the early chapters of \u003cem\u003eHomegoing\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAs the story opens, Ama 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIt is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of the Dagbon dispatches a mounted raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThere the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects her 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eShe comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, \u003cem\u003eThe Love of Liberty\u003c\/em\u003e. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAma 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 l ngua franca, Portuguese.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eYears 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis is story telling on a grand scale, writes Tony Sim es 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. \u003cem\u003eAma \u003c\/em\u003eechoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51067933753617,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51067934507281,"sku":"NIN9789988233051","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52509299900689,"sku":"CIN9988233051G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9988233051.jpg?v=1751223519"},{"product_id":"ramseyer-s-ghost-book-manu-herbstein-9789988243166","title":"Ramseyer's Ghost","description":"\u003cp\u003e2050.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe global village has disintegrated.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe Third World War, ending in a stalemate, has left the planet split between two hostile powers, each with a captive sphere of influence. \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe Atlantic Ocean has become an American sea.\u003cbr\u003e West Africa has become a desert of failed states and anarchy, dotted with mines and oil rigs, stockaded and armed by U. 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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.\u003cbr\u003e As part of his sentence, Crash travels the country as the movie is screened in one village after another. 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