Translating Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade

More than 4 million enslaved Africans came to Brazil between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almost a million of them came from the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa, known as the Coast of the Mine, which included present-day Ghana, Benin and Togo. In 2002, a South African engineer named Manu Herbstein, who had relocated to Ghana, decided to write a novel about this violent history. Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade narrates the capture and forced displacement of Ama, a young woman from the Bekpokpam people, through the networks of enslavement that connected West Africa to Brazil. This project interrogates the methodology and cultural imperative of translating this novel into Brazilian Portuguese as part of decolonising storytelling practices and as a means of reinforcing identity connections between Brazil and Ghana.