The Hundred Wells of Salaga

A 2016 Miles Morland Foundation Scholar whose Harmattan Rain was short-listed for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Attah here focuses on two women in precolonial Ghana who might be seen as enemies but together become stronger in their discovery of the other. Aminah lives a bucolic, idealized existence until she is brutally forced from her home. Wurche leads the privileged life of a chief's daughter but recognizes a difference she can make in battling the slave trade at the end of the 19th century. Attah uses these protagonists to challenge prevailing ideas of religion, slavery, and gender roles in Africa at the time. Her view of domestic slavery and especially its consequences for women is one that has rarely been told. But Attah uses the essence of Ghana—its distinctive landscape and the particularities of its people—to demonstrate what this changing time must have felt like. It was, indeed, the end of a civilization.