Manu Herbstein

Bio: Manu Herbstein was born and educated in apartheid South Africa. He has lived and worked in England, Nigeria, India, Zambia and Scotland. Since 1970 he has made his home in Accra, Ghana. By profession a Civil and Structural Engineer, he has contributed to the design and construction of power stations, bridges, water supply and sewage treatment plants, river works, highways and buildings. He is a Fellow of the British Institution of Structural Engineers and a Fellow and one-time Council Member of the Ghana Institution of Engineers. In his youth he traveled widely, especially in Africa, hitchhiking from Cape Town to Lusaka while still at school and from Nairobi to Pretoria some years later. In 1957 he worked his passage round Africa to Europe in an ocean going tramp. In 1963 he spent three months traveling in West, Central and East Africa. His support for and association with the African National Congress of South Africa goes back to the late 1950’s. Manu Herbstein first visited the slave castle at Elmina, Ghana, which features in this novel, in 1961. He has returned many times since and says that the experience never fails to move him. Civil disturbances in rural northern Ghana sparked the writing of this novel. Seeking to understand the 1994 ‘Guinea Fowl War,’ he learned that one of the causes might have been the deeply buried collective memory of events in the late eighteenth century. This led to speculation about what it was to have been a slave. His novel is an exploration of the human side of the trans-Atlantic Holocaust. Manu Herbstein spent more than four years researching this novel, seeking to understand not only the victims but also the beneficiaries of the evil trade in human beings. Manu Herbstein’s wife Akua owns and manages a furniture factory and housing estate development company in Accra, Ghana. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the University of Ghana. They have two sons.