BORN ON A SATURDAY

A Novel of the Gold Coast

He was born with a name. They gave him a number.

On the Gold Coast in 1824, eighteen-year-old Kwame is kidnapped from the shores of Lake Bosomtwe and sold into the gold mines of Obuasi. His name vanishes into a register. To his masters, he is Number Fourteen.

But a name is harder to erase than a man.

A year later, on a plantation where a Portuguese merchant had planted a crop that no one in that country had ever seen before. Cocoa doesn't bear fruit for five years—which means the man who planted it must keep his workers alive for five years.

The estate is run by his granddaughter. Amina frees fifty people from their chains—not with a speech about dignity, but with a set of figures showing that the chains reduce productivity by twenty percent.

It works. That's the problem.

The workers learn to read. The chains are turned into tools. Families are ransomed from slavery one by one, and a community takes root beneath the trees—and between Kwame and Amina, something is born that neither of them dares to name aloud.

When the district planters come at night with torches, they do not come because the ledgers are wrong.

They come because the ledgers are right.

Spanning three generations and told from three perspectives, Born on a Saturday is the story of a man who was turned into property and spent the rest of his life insisting on the exact value of things.

He was Number Fourteen.

His name was Kwame.

And he was born on a Saturday.