All Comments on 'African Cargo'

A feel good slave story?......come on.....get outta here...I read the first page and stopped ....pure disgust.

This title caught my eye, and I decided I would read it based on the description. It's obviously very short, so I'm thinking at best this is maybe meant to introduce something that could go longer, provided you feel enough readers visited and effectively justify some reason to continue.

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I readily admit that it short nature makes classifying and scoring this much more difficult, for the reasons I already named above. However I will mention a few things, such as the bodily examination the captain conducted on Ashanti was very typical by historical standards. It's not just that she's beautiful; she is definitely considered property, and the fact you mentioned he would not put her below decks meant that he indeed wanted to protect her from his sailors, because it was exceptionally common practice for sailors to abuse African women on board. So, this captain was playing it smart, although it would have been very uncommon historically for any captain-- despite the value or perceived value of a certain individual - - to do this. This is necessarily a historical fiction piece, because you're talking about something that might have happened in some certain circumstance. Because of this, I checked etymologies of words, and found that you employed vocabulary that would have predated this incident. So on that count you were certainly on target. The one thing that is wildly off the mark is that there is no record of French going to Islamabad, nor having any type of formal relations with that place until about the 1950s, so that's a red flag. Most of the documentation is going to deal with the Spanish and Portuguese going to South America, namely Uruguay and Brazil, where of course the British would have gone to Africa, then come to the Americas.

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About Ashanti in particular, her name can mean grateful from the Ghana language, but in Twi or another African origin language, her name can mean warlike. From how you present her toward the end of this account, she is certainly not the uneducated individual that could have been typical of those Africans taken as cargo to be shipped elsewhere for working. In fact, you suggest that she has a very calculated mind, and is going to try to manipulate the situation to her advantage. This would be quite the role reversal, and would be something I would love to see you develop.. however, the problem is I'm seeing this only because I'm digging into the story.. and the short nature of this story precludes others from perhaps grasping the significance of her mind and her inner workings. Therefore, the fact that this story is much shorter than it should be easily deducts a star from the rating. It is absolutely crucial that you should have somehow revealed more of Ashanti's innermost thoughts while the captain was examining her, and or done something like detailed a little more about her preparation before being received on to the ship, so most of the rest of the audience can read the explicit content and therefore see that perhaps this one individual is really going to stand out for sure. I realize you utilized the captain to provide inferences about her value beforehand, and what she might have received in her village because of her proposed marriage, but aside from that you don't really give a lot for a normal reader to go on. For that another star has to come off.

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In general, I believe you could have.. if you're using this as an introduction to probe possible reader interest, added one more page which would have sufficed to explain some of the hidden or implied meanings with Ashanti and the possible story direction later. So at this point, it's primarily the story length and the lack of detail that concerned me, although your implied direction for Ashanti fascinates me. Despite that I have to rate this no higher than 3. Now, I would be very interested to see you write more on this, because perhaps you are looking to provide a novel story that posits a unique conclusion to these opening events. I frankly hope you will move forward and develop this, fleshing it out far more by providing further detail of certain necessary parts of Ashanti's backstory, as well as necessary sections that reveal hidden thoughts and motivations that only readers would know of upon perusing this tale.