"I am a human being
I am a woman
I am a black woman
I am an African.
De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe..
There 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.
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.
In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother.
For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need.
Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho\'s mangled corpse.
The rescue bid fails.
That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders\' camp.
They capture Ama.
The ruler of the Dagbon dispatches a mounted raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam.
Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves.
It is 1775.
Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother.
Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather.
As the Story opens, Ama is sixteen.
S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in the early chapters of Homegoing.
Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name, in the U.
It is a story, just one of a possible 12 million or more.
This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories.
Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived.
When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate.
In the Americas, teaching a Slave to read and write was a criminal offense.
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." During a period of 400 years, European Slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. "I am a human being
I am a woman
I am a black woman
I am an African
