African Captives Research Articles

Patterns in the intercolonial slave trade across the Americas before the nineteenth century

Abstract: The slave trade within the Americas, after the initial disembarkation of African captives in the New World, has received scant attention from historians, especially before the abolition of the transatlantic traffic. This article examines such intra-American trafficking as an introduction to the digital project Final Passages: The Intra-American Slave Trade Database, which aims to document evidence of slave voyages throughout the New World. This article does not provide statistics on this internal slave trade, as ongoing research will deliver new data. Instead, we consolidate qualitative knowledge about these intercolonial slave routes. As the article focuses on the era prior to British and U.S. abolition of the transatlantic trade (1807-1808), we leave out the nineteenth-century domestic slave trades in the United States and Brazil to focus on survivors of the Atlantic crossing who endured subsequent forced movement within the Americas.

The nameless and the forgotten: maternal grief, sacred protection, and the archive of slavery

ABSTRACTDeath, particularly of enslaved infants and children, cast a long shadow over the experiences of enslaved mothers. Almost half of all enslaved infants died within the first two weeks of birth and another quarter died by age two. Although profit–loss calculations tabulate the frequent deaths of enslaved youngsters, these accounts reveal very little about cultural conventions on maternal grief or how enslaved mothers responded to their children’s deaths. In addition to using the rhetorical to draw attention to the loss women experienced and archival silences on maternal grief, this article challenges the claims that enslaved Africans welcomed and celebrated death because it freed loved ones from bondage and reunited captive Africans with their ancestors. Attention to expressions of grief and evolving grieving practices reveal the transformation of enslaved people’s culture and the invisible suffering of the enslaved, which are sometimes overshadowed by narratives of resistance and the resilience of African culture and black mothers.

Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett

Reviewed by: Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett Scott Heerman (bio) Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Cloth, $35.00.) Sharla Fett's splendid book on illegally enslaved Africans is at once readable and accessible, while making several key contributions to scholarship on slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation in the nineteenth century. The book will interest a wide cast of scholars and would be appropriate for advanced undergraduate students. Before a few years ago there was relatively little scholarship on the slave trade after its abolition took effect in 1808, and historians have actively been working to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Fett is one of them, and her most recent book helps fill a crucial one. The book offers a tight chronology, mostly between 1857 and 1861, and traces the experiences of roughly eighteen hundred captive African slaves on four vessels: the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota. All four vessels embarked from Africa and were intercepted on the high seas, whereupon the human cargo was detained in various U.S. ports and the [End Page 650] would-be slaves were returned to apprenticeship, and eventually freedom, in Liberia. While Fett's narrative and argument are confined to a handful of ships over a few short years, the book is anything but narrow. Fett uses this history to offer different ways to conceptualize slavery and freedom in the wider Atlantic world. First among these is her framework for understanding the captives' harrowing journey. During the nineteenth century, African shipmates like those on the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota were typically called "liberated Africans," or emancipados, to mark their movement from slavery to freedom. Yet Fett's story confounds this simple binary and offers a careful history of enslaved people's experiences after their capture, detention, and repatriation. Fett prefers the term "recaptured Africans," which emphasizes "the constraints of death and suffering, containment and racialization, that African shipmates endured" (4). With this conceptual innovation, Fett analyzes the liminal zone that recaptured Africans occupied, and brings a deep knowledge of slavery in West Africa to bear on the history of emancipation in the Americas. The result is an erudite transnational history of the complexities of human bondage and emancipation. A second key conceptual contribution is the way in which Fett's study of the slave trade informs the history of U.S. slavery. Often, historians separate the Atlantic trade in African captives from the history of plantation production in the U.S. South. Yet Fett convincingly shows that slave smuggling "exerted a significant impact on nineteenth-century U.S. public debates and popular culture" (6). She situates the politics of slavery globally, highlighting that the 1850s was a period when slavery retreated in newly independent Latin American nations and in the British and French Caribbean, while also seeing an unprecedented reinvention that birthed new plantation complexes in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. The simultaneous abolition and expansion of slavery shaped debates over race and racial hierarchy, which in turn propelled the rise of scientific racism and theories of polygenesis to justify the institution of slavery. By examining the experiences of these recaptive Africans, Fett unearths new dimensions of this history. She does the bulk of that work in chapters 2 and 3. First she looks at the slave trade tourism at Fort Sumter, which brought paying tourists into close contact with the recaptives. Next, in chapter 3, she offers a careful reading of print culture. Looking in particular at Harper's Weekly, De Bow's Review, and other prominent publications of the time, she shows how recaptives' experiences in detention provided fodder for proslavery ideologies. In this way it becomes evident that the politics of race and slavery went beyond the halls of Congress and the statements of lawmakers, into popular print and culture. [End Page 651] After opening chapters that set out the contours of the illegal slave trade after 1808, the second half of the book focuses on...

Interwoven

This article explores the linkages between the slave trades to Spanish and Portuguese America during the Iberian Union (1580–1640). Drawing upon legal suits, it argues that Brazilian port cities were both destinations and hubs for the re-exportation of West Central African captives to Spanish colonies. Vessels frequently “stopped over” in Brazilian ports following the Atlantic crossing due to navigational exigencies and to avoid paying the higher duties on captives levied in Spanish American ports. This article demonstrates that the integration of the slave trades to Spanish and Portuguese America facilitated the spread of slavery well beyond sugar-producing regions.

Portuguese Encomenderos de Negros and the Slave Trade within Mexico, 1600–1675

This article focuses on local slaving agents, encomenderos de negros, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on notarial documents, Inquisition cases and investigations on contraband and tax evasion, the study explains how Portuguese intermediaries sold and distributed African captives in colonial Mexico between 1616 and 1639. The ability to extend credit was key to the success of these agents-on-commission. The article also explains why agents of the Grillo and Lomelín slaving monopoly (asiento) failed to replicate the success of their Lusophone predecessors in Nueva Veracruz, Mexico City and Puebla de los Ángeles in the 1660s and 1670s.

Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1840

Between 1500 and 1840, ships under Portuguese colors embarked more than 5 million enslaved men, women and children from the coasts of Africa. Despite its position as the preeminent slave trading empire in the Atlantic World, no studies have systematically traced the evolution in maritime investment practices in Portugal and its American colonies which propelled this massive forced transportation of captive Africans. Beginning with Portuguese merchants’ earliest forays into Atlantic trade, on the West African island of Cabo Verde in the fifteenth century, maritime cargoes were collectively owned through the distribution of small shares. Drawing on medieval Mediterranean precedents, these collective, legally constructed partnerships opened early transoceanic trading opportunities to a diverse group of traders, colonists, and mariners, creating a decentralized mercantile trade which diffused profits throughout slave trading communities. Slaving merchants in Salvador da Bahia adopted this collectivist model of investment by the early eighteenth century, converting commercial disadvantages into a prosperous and durable trade which wove together the economic interests of a heterogeneous cross-section of Salvador’s inhabitants—including merchants, their families and slaves, and mariners—within the business of slaving. This article traces the persistence of this financial strategy, and argues that it enabled the longevity of the transatlantic slave trade in Salvador.

Circuits of wealth, circuits of sorrow: financing the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the age of suppression, 1850–66

AbstractSlave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

Cuba, Haiti, and the Age of Atlantic Revolution

Cuba, Haiti, and the Age of Atlantic Revolution John Garrigus (bio) Ada Ferrer. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiv + 377 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, notes, and index. $80.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). Long before Fidel Castro, Cuba was a special case in Latin America as far as revolutions were concerned. For all appearances, the late eighteenth-century age of Atlantic revolution bypassed the island. Cuba was the last Spanish American society to end slavery (1886), and it was similarly late to achieve independence. Just fifty miles to the east, however, the French colony of Saint-Domingue experienced what many scholars regard as the most radical of all the Atlantic Revolutions. In 1791, enslaved workers there rose against their masters. For a dozen years they stymied attempts to re-enslave them until, in 1804, their leaders established the independent state of Haiti. Yet this was a paradoxical moment. The end of Saint-Domingue’s slave-produced sugar and coffee exports made it profitable for masters elsewhere in the hemisphere—notably in Cuba—to buy more captive Africans and produce more of these products. Slavery’s late heyday made Cuba, along with Brazil and the United States, central sites for what some scholars have dubbed the “second era of slavery.” In the first era, from roughly 1500 to roughly 1800, Europeans enslaved Africans in the New World with no state opposition. In the second era, slavery and antislavery coexisted. By 1810, the British Navy was moving to eliminate the transatlantic slave trade, and, Ada Ferrer argues, Haitian leaders were working to end slavery abroad. The main point of Freedom’s Mirror for Atlantic historians is that Cuba was, in metaphorical terms, the “hinge” between these two eras. Despite appearances, Ferrer maintains, the age of Atlantic revolution did not bypass Cuba; rather, Haitian opposition to slavery affected white, black, and brown Cubans in powerful ways that transcended higher sugar prices. Ferrer proves that Cuba came into its most profitable slave period despite a decade of exposure to the Haitian Revolution at every level of society. Along with her clear and beautiful prose, Ferrer’s ability to situate Cuba in the age of Atlantic revolution makes Freedom’s Mirror an important volume for [End Page 52] students of this age, even if they do not focus on Cuba. Caribbean historians already know her prizewinning 1999 book Insurgent Cuba: Nation, Race and Revolution, 1868–1898. Examining Cuba’s last thirty years as a colony, it addressed the same question that Freedom’s Mirror does: why did independence and the end of slavery come so late to Cuba? Both books address similar topics in their different periods: the forces holding Cuba in the Spanish Empire, the attempts of Afro-Cubans to claim freedom and citizenship, and white Cubans’ fear that their island would become “another Haiti.” Ferrer’s focus on how Cubans experienced the Haitian Revolutionary years builds on recent books in Cuban history by Sibylle Fischer, Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard, and Matt Childs. She also joins scholars like Jane Landers, Ashli White, and Sara Johnson in exploring the regional impact of Haitian independence. Like many of these scholars, she supports, at least implicitly, Eugene Genovese’s idea that the Haitian Revolution affected the political imagination of enslaved people in the Americas. In 1979, Genovese argued that Haiti’s success changed the political goals of rebel slaves, who no longer revolted to create African-style kingdoms. Henceforth, he claimed, they planned revolutions that would give them rights within a Western-style polity.1 However, in a series of carefully researched publications, David Geggus showed that many of these “Haitian-inspired conspiracies” had only loose connections to the new black state or its revolution.2 He speculated that most were provoked by local conditions, including masters’ paranoia. Ferrer does not resolve this issue, but she makes an important contribution to the debate by showing how deeply Cubans engaged with Haitian events and by demonstrating the effect of that engagement on Aponte’s Rebellion in 1812. The book begins with a document that reveals how, from the very beginning, the Haitian Revolution reverberated...

Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeeth-Century Suriname

Through the person of the ex-converso David Nassy, “Regaining Jerusalem” asks how seventeenth-century Portuguese Jews could seek their own religious liberty at the same time they were enslaving Africans in the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Guyana coast. Living in Amsterdam by the 1630s, Nassy was part of the Jewish community in Dutch Brazil, and then in the 1660s led the Jewish settlement in Dutch Suriname. Nassy was moved in part by eschatological hopes shared with other ex-conversos freed from Catholic tyranny, in part by his interest in plants and geography, and in part by entrepreneurial desire for profit. Nassy and his fellow Jews distinguished their own biblical exodus out of slavery from the destiny of their African captives, incorporating their slaves into the patriarchal Abrahamic household. This paper describes patterns of Jewish culture on the sugar plantations and the varied reactions of African men and women to it.

Prize Possessions: Transported Material Culture of the Post-Abolition Enslaved – New Evidence from St Helena

This article examines the artefacts of personal adornment recovered during recent archaeological excavations of a graveyard associated with the nineteenth century, British-run ‘Liberated African Establishment’ in Rupert's Valley, on the South Atlantic Island of St Helena. It presents evidence for the transportation of pre-enslavement cultural material, and identifies factors that may have affected the ability of captive Africans to retain personal effects. It also discusses the interpretative constraints that exist in identifying transported – as opposed to acquired – material culture in the context of the post-Abolition Transatlantic slave trade.

Rice and its consequences in the greater “Atlantic” world

Plantation slavery and rice agriculture in the Carolina Lowcountry drew upon captive Africans from a wide area of the African continent, but particular note has been made of the contributions of enslaved Africans originating in the Upper Guinea coast region who had sophisticated knowledge of indigenous rice agriculture. The “Black Rice Hypotheses” argues that their knowledge was crucial to the successful plantation regimes. Papers collected in this issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents explore the consequences of that interaction during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for the societies of the Carolina Lowcountry, as well as for the societies of coastal Guinea and Sierra Leone.

‘A Web of Community’: Uncovering African American Historic Sites in Deerfield, MA

In 2012, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association published the ‘Map and Guide to African American Historic Sites in Deerfield, Massachusetts’. The map provides information on 23 sites along the nearly mile-long street of Historic Deerfield, each of which is related to the story of free or captive Africans in the town's early history. As with the other case studies in this issue, the Deerfield Map and Guide operates as a trail in that it directs people through the town of Historic Deerfield while narrating a story about the early rural New England village. The map enables movement through the landscape of Deerfield and makes visible the history of slavery and race in a place that is so often associated with abolition and freedom. This paper discusses the process by which museum educators, historians, and academic and community advisors developed the map and guide in both digital and pamphlet form, including how information was collected and organized, and the intended goals of producing this material.

Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning, and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing

This essay examines how the circulation of British-produced cotton “Guinea” or “check” cloth between England, West Africa, and the Caribbean shaped the contours of the black Atlantic diaspora in the mid- to late eighteenth century. This cloth was exchanged for African captives in West African slaving ports, as well as exported to Caribbean markets to clothe Caribbean slaves. However, enslaved Caribbean women often reworked this fabric as a means to memorialize personal and collective histories, signify kinship, advertise status and skill, and provide material links within slave communities and to distant or unknown homelands. Looking to slave narratives that record the exchange of people for cloth, journals written by men and women such as Lady Maria Nugent, Thomas Thistlewood, and Mrs. Carmichael that record enslaved women’s work with cloth, and visual representations produced by Agostino Brunias, this essay explores how enslaved women’s textiles serve to circulate and convey messages, as well as to incorporate their makers and users into a social world.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

Reviewed by: Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert Jonathan E. Robins Sven Beckert. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. xxii + 615 pp. ISBN 978-0-375-41414-5, $35 (cloth). Sven Beckert’s long-awaited second book examines the central role of cotton in the making of capitalism. As Beckert and others have argued, writing the “history of capitalism” demands an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, and Empire of Cotton does not disappoint. Economic, political, social, and cultural themes are interwoven throughout the book as Beckert follows cotton—“one of the very few human-made goods that is available virtually anywhere”— across continents and oceans (p. xiii). The first chapter surveys the ancient history of cotton, but the real substance of the book is Beckert’s analysis of cotton as an engine of European expansion, capital accumulation, and industrialization after the sixteenth century. Beckert rejects the label of “merchant capitalism” to describe the political economy of European empire building in favor of a neologism, “war capitalism” (p. xv). This is an empirical description more than it is a theoretical concept. As Beckert amply demonstrates, state-backed violence was at the heart of capital accumulation between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, smashing open new markets and commandeering goods, land, and labor for the benefit of firms and individuals. Several chapters evoke Eric Williams’ famous thesis on slavery and industrialization, but Beckert identifies the flexibility of slave labor in the Americas, rather than plantation profits, as the key factor behind the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe. The early British spinning mills would easily have exhausted any capacity for expansion in the world’s other cotton-producing regions had the American South not arrived as a major exporter in the early nineteenth century, and the South met rising demand for raw cotton by exploiting land and labor on an unparalleled scale. African captives bought with cotton cloth— first with Indian fabric, then with European substitutes—were put to work growing cotton on land seized from native Americans. This was possible only in the Atlantic basin: Waging war to steal labor and land on the scale necessary to feed Europe’s new mechanized spinning mills could not have “even been dreamed of in Anatolia or Gujarat” (p. 108). The dynamism of the Atlantic system produced fortunes in Europe and the Americas, but it drove once-dominant agricultural and manufacturing regions in Asia into decline. The second half of the book focuses on the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. Beckert insists that state power and violence remained important even as capitalists came to the fore in the nineteenth century. Governments used bounties and tariffs to [End Page 991] foster infant industries, forced colonies to accept manufactured textiles, and helped manufacturers recruit and discipline a new class of proletarian workers for cotton mills. The American Civil War strained this expanding “empire,” but Beckert argues that the war ultimately “emancipated” cotton agriculture from slavery. In America, the line of argument is clear enough: Private and public violence created new labor regimes based on sharecropping and wage labor. In other parts of the world, the processes of change are less clear. From Berar to Brazil, cotton-growing peasants became utterly dependent on the world market for their survival, but it is not clear why this had to wait until the late nineteenth century, especially as Beckert argues that these communities had successfully resisted earlier efforts to intensify commodity production. The argument becomes clearer in Chapter 12, in which Beckert returns to the themes of state power and market making, this time looking at the “new imperialism” and the remarkable expansion of cotton agriculture in Africa and Asia in the twentieth century. Overt violence still played a role, but the bureaucratic violence of taxes, regulations, and coerced labor became more important in transforming peasants into specialized commodity producers. The last two chapters address the sudden collapse of the European core of the “empire of cotton.” In Beckert’s narrative, cotton manufacturing shifted from Europe to Asia because of a combination of entrepreneurship on the periphery, anticolonial mobilization, and rebellion among workers in the industrial core. The book moves quickly from...

The Limits of White Memory: Slavery, Violence and the Amistad Incident

This article addresses the Amistad incident, and the evolving way this event was viewed by Connecticut journalists and residents; an examination of the language used in contemporary newspapers reveals why the Amistad story was largely forgotten in popular imagination in the United States until the 1980s, and completely forgotten in Sierra Leone, the homeland of the captives. The Amistad displayed the nation's most racist beliefs, along with its worst fears, in Connecticut newspaper accounts, accounting for the discomfort with which Southerners in particular regarded the case. The rebellious African kidnap victims were exotic visitors to Connecticut, eliciting much commentary about the “ignoble savages” who might be cannibals, but most certainly seemed to be murderers with insight and intellect; more troubling, they were men – this seemed indisputable – and they were fighting courageously and against the odds for their own freedom, the pivotal American value. In a culture that evaluated savagery visually, there was much to identify as “savage,” but, nonetheless, as the Africans came to reside in Connecticut awaiting their trial, they became human beings, with their own voices, recorded in newspaper accounts. They acquired names, translators, Western clothing, English and Bible lessons, transforming their threatening black masculinity into the only image acceptable to white America, “the suffering servant”; in spite of the pro-slavery newspaper portrayal of the Africans as being lazy, inarticulate in English, mendacious slave-traders, a deliberate process of “heroification” of Cinque was occurring. These competing stereotypes of black man as supplicating victim versus black man as intelligent, violently forceful agent of his own fate were difficult for Lewis Tappan and his fellow abolitionists to navigate. The images also brought into question the value of “moral suasion” as a tool, especially when white Americans were faced with the reality of a strong, potentially violent African man. The Supreme Court decision freed the African captives, but set no precedent for future cases, and it did not improve the lot of even one other enslaved soul; worse yet, the returned captives found no peace after their hard-won return to Africa, nor did they choose to maintain their Christianity, much to the disappointment of their American hosts. Furthermore, the unhappy postscript of the Africans' resettlement called into question the value of the colonization plans so beloved by activists.

Building an Historical Landscape, Commemorating W. E. B. Du Bois

The history of the W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington Massachusetts is traced from the present to its earliest inhabitation after the arrival of Europeans and African captives. Social processes of class and race operating at different time scales have constrained the ways the members of Du Bois’s maternal relatives, and more recently private foundations and the public institution of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have made use of the property. The Homesite figures in Du Bois’s memories of his childhood and was a source of pride during his 26 years of ownership. Telling its story backwards provides insights into how larger social and ideological forces affected individual actions, observations that provide guidance for future commemoration efforts at this National Historic Landmark site honoring the accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Black Catholicism

Black Catholicism

Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism by Matthew J. Christensen (review)

Christensen, Matthew J. 2012. Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. Albany: SUNY Press. $65.00 hc. $23.95 sc. $23.95 e-book. 202 pp.Sengbe Pieh, often known in US as Joseph Cinque, was one of fifty-three captives who staged a successful revolt aboard slave ship Amistad in 1839. He was an outspoken advocate for rights of captives when they fought in US courts for their return to Africa. More than 150 years later, Pieh is probably most widely known in United States as heroic protagonist of 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad, but he is, more significantly, a beloved icon in Sierra Leonean public arts and theater. He is a symbol of Sierra Leonean national pride and a figure of agency and courage of captive Africans. In United States, he is an emblem of moral authority in exaggerated retellings of nineteenth-century America's emerging devotion to liberty and democracy. His image has been exploited by both Sierra Leonean and US governments to create an imagined heritage of revolutionary heroism in defense of freedom, a lineage from which both governments claim descent. At same time, for political activists, Pieh is an icon of Black transnationalism and centuries- long struggle against global capital's exploitation of people of African descent around world.Matthew Christensen investigates this powerfully elastic trope of revolutionary-who-would-not-be-enslaved in his new book Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and. Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. As Christensen illustrates, Sengbe Pieh and Amistad revolt are mobilized as symbols by people of African descent to critique contemporary patterns of racialized, global and emblematize complex dynamics of black transnational subject formation within global networks of capitalist production, past and present (10). Ironically, however, image of slave revolt is also appropriated as a rhetorical tool of neoliberal propagandists, who perniciously utilize language of freedom and equality to justify development and other political schemes (such as structural adjustment programs of 1990s) that force African nations into dependent status through debt, undermine opportunity for citizens of African nations, and exacerbate inequality for people of African descent.Christensen's recounting of life of Amistad narrative reveals that, by twentieth century, slave revolt was largely forgotten in Sierra Leone by everyone except a few academics. In 1987, narrative resurfaced through two complementary documents, one published by Sierra Leonean government at request of then presidentjoseph Saidu Momoh and other produced a few months later by United States Information Service for distribution through its Sierra Leone ambassador. Both documents celebrated heroes of Sierra Leone in attempts to bolster each office's hegemonic power over state and national imaginary (58).But these simplistic images of state power and heroism did not go uncontested. Through well-veiled double-speak that skillfully avoided government censorship, Charlie Haffner's play Amistad. Kata-Kata (1988) produced a counter- history to totalizing narrative produced by governments. As Christensen deftly argues, trope of cannibalism-the fear that reportedly motivated Sengbe Pieh and his compatriots to slave-ship rebellion-is evoked as a potent counter-metaphor that exposes the economics of exploitation that consumed enslaved African bodies and decimated African communities from which they were stolen (59). In months following 1992 coup against Momoh's regime and twenty-four-year single-party rule of All People's Congress, largely undereducated and underemployed young men launched a public art campaign in which they painted portrait of world-traveling political icon Sengbe Pieh (among others) on walls across city as a reminder of political empowerment of youth. …

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”: