The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone

Abstract

The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone. By Iyunolu Folayan Osagie. (Athens: University Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 180. Illustrations. $35.00.) Few slave revolts in the western hemisphere enjoyed happy endings. Most rebels swung from the gibbet for the crime wanting to be free. But Sengbe Pieh (commonly known as Joseph Cinque after his Spanish owners changed his name to disguise his status as a bozales, an African illegally imported into Cuba after 1820) finally won his liberty in the Supreme Court and returned to Sierra Leone. Perhaps for that reason, the tale the Amistad captives has attracted the sort attention from novelists and playwrights that has eluded even the well-known slave rebel Nat Turner. From William Owens to Barbara Chase-Riboud to Steven Spielberg, writers and directors have attempted to interpret the story for a variety audiences. Now Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, an associate professor English at Pennsylvania State University and a native Sierra Leone, evaluates these popular art forms while weighing their relationship to both actual events and the construction a national identity in the nation Pieh's birth. Howard Jones, the author the standard account the case, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (1987), began his narrative with the 1839 mutiny and ended with the liberated captives setting sail for home. By comparison, Osagie rightly begins his study in the Vai-Mende country along the border Sierra Leone and the American colony Liberia. There, in the port town Lomboko, Portuguese and Spanish traders maintained ancient stone fortresses as grisly holding pens where captured Africans awaited slave buyers for shipment to the Caribbean. Following this promising beginning, Osagie wanders into a generic discussion slave revolts in the western hemisphere that adds little to his study. The author is right, course, in regarding the revolution in Saint Domingue as symbolic of the vigor slave resistance in the New World (29). Yet Haiti held no such meaning for the Amistad rebels, who had their own understanding unfree labor as well as their own traditions resistance. Osagie hints that Pieh may have heard the triumph Toussaint Louverture's legions while being resold in Spanish Cuba, but if so, Pieh neglected to mention that important fact to Roger S. Baldwin or any his other attorneys. The Africans certainly had never heard Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, or Nat Turner, all whom receive ample treatment here. All these men, like Pieh and the other Amistad captives, terrified the American planter class, but Osagie fails to develop this idea beyond writing that Pieh's protracted legal battle demonstrated the potential for positive relationships between black rebels and antislavery white activists. (Curiously, although this chapter appears to be grounded in modern scholarship, most the errors that appear in this section-from the incorrect number men who died with Gabriel, to the misidentification several Vesey's soldiers, to a misreading Louverture's 1799 tripartite pact with Britain and the United States-cannot be blamed on the monographs cited in Osagie's endnotes. …