Professor Gustavo Brito (PhD) talks about reading and translating Ama

I met my good friend, the award-winning author Manu Herbstein, in Johannesburg exactly 10 years ago at the 40th the Conference of the African Literature Association (ALA), held at the University of the Witwatersrand. I was there presenting my master’s thesis on the Zimbabwean author, Chenjerai Hove. I believe I was the only Brazilian there. It was an auspicious event, with Manu Herbstein from Ghana, Mia Couto from Mozambique, and Susan Kiguli from Uganda in my audience.

40th the Conference of the African Literature Association (WITS, 2014)

Over these 10 years, I have had the privilege of getting closer to and developing projects with all three authors. I translated Susan Kiguli’s poem “Love” into Portuguese (the poet joined an online meeting with my students in 2023), and I produced the play The Day Mabata-bata Exploded, an adaptation of Mia Couto’s short story of the same name (Mia assisted with the copyright). However, the most intense collaboration that emerged from this meeting in South Africa was certainly with Manu.

Right after my conference, Manu and I were introduced. He told me he was a novelist and had written two novels set during the Atlantic slave trade: Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Brave Music of a Distant Drum. We didn’t have the chance to talk much after that, but we exchanged emails. When I returned to Brazil, after an intense conference, my perception of the relationship between Brazil and Africa was forever changed. In 2014, we were celebrating another 10-year anniversary—the enactment of Law 10.639/03, which requires that content about African history and African literature be incorporated into the curricula at all levels of education across the country.

Given this, a question began to bother me: “Why should Brazilians read African literature?” There are countless answers, but what would be the best ones? I wrote a short manifesto addressing the law and the question, and I sent it to some of the authors I had met at the ALA. Manu Herbstein recorded a wonderful video responding to the question. At that moment, a long and rich exchange of emails and experiences began.

Por que os Brasileiros devem ler Literatura Africana?

After watching Manu’s video, I became intensely curious about his work, and when I finished reading Ama, I was convinced that this novel should hold a special place in the literature in Brazil. Ama needed to be read by more Brazilians because the novel deals with a shadowy, if not obliterated, period of our history—specifically, the history of the Africans who arrived in Brazil, before they were enslaved and during their diaspora.

Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade is a historical novel set in the 18th century that deals with the brutal realities of the Atlantic slave trade. Meticulously researched, the book offers insights into the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the period. The story follows Ama, an African woman born in a small village in West Africa, who is captured by slave traders, separated from her family, and sold into slavery.

The narrative tracks her journey from Africa to the Americas, highlighting her resilience, struggles, and quest for freedom. The novel explores themes such as the inhumanity of the slave trade, the loss of identity, cultural displacement, and the strength of the human spirit, while also addressing the broader implications of slavery for both individuals and societies. The work won the Best First Book Award at the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

With this story in hand, I decided to share it with my students. In 2015, we read Ama in an English students group for the first time, and at the end of the course, we inaugurated an online session at my school with a conversation between the students and Manu. It was extraordinary to be able to read a novel about the intrinsic relationship between Brazil and Africa and to have the honor of commenting on and asking questions about the work directly to the author. In 2017, I read the novel with a new group of students who also had the opportunity to converse with the author. And in 2020, during the pandemic, we read Brave Music. Manu’s participation is available here: https://youtu.be/7FjedRBS12M

Conference Class (2015)

The importance of the novels Ama and Brave Music for our historical and aesthetic formation as Brazilians is profound. Literature does this—it offers us a new perspective, a new vision—and I believe that this novelty that Manu’s novels bring is more than necessary for us to better understand our ancestry, our origin as a people (I have talked about it in some lectures). The reading of these novels by Brazilians is a way to give a past and a voice to those who lost everything coming to Brazil. And it is with this sentiment that we began the translation of the novel Ama into Portuguese. In October, I will present the development of the translation at the Pa Gya! Festival in Ghana.

African Literary Studies and Educational Policies (UEG, 2024)

Seminar: Diasporic Literatures, Identities and Cultures (UFG, 2019)

Finally, this semester we will have another course on the novel Ama. It will be an English-language course focused on the novel and the historical issues involved in the plot. The course will be online, and we will primarily be celebrating the life and work of Manu. Long live Manu Herbstein!