Staging the Amistad. Charlie Haffner

      Introduction

      Staging the Amistad

      MATTHEW J. CHRISTENSEN

      Any black African artist who performs his art seriously, professionally and with sincere dedication to his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. He must take part in the action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle.

      —Yulisa Amadu Maddy (paraphrasing Frantz Fanon), “His Supreme Excellency’s Guest at Bigyard”*

      INCLUDED HERE in print for the first time are historical dramas about the Amistad slave revolt by three of Sierra Leone’s most influential playwrights of the latter decades of the twentieth century, Charlie Haffner, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, and Raymond E. D. de’Souza George. Prior to the initial public performance of the first of these plays, Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata, in 1988, the 1839 shipboard slave rebellion and the return of its victors to their homes in what is modern-day Sierra Leone had remained an unrecognized chapter in the country’s history. For the three playwrights, the events of the insurrection provided a new narrative for understanding Sierra Leone’s past and for mobilizing the nation to work collectively toward a just and prosperous future. This renewed examination of Sierra Leonean history coincided with the near collapse of the great dream of political independence from British colonization. Fueling the drive for self-rule had been the expectation of political and economic equality on the world stage. In Sierra Leone, as in so many other parts of Africa and the formerly colonized world, the persistent structural inequities of global capitalism, the cynical capture of the state by venal kleptocrats, and the post–Cold War geopolitical realignments conspired to preempt the realization of these expectations. Sierra Leoneans suffered worse than most the results. The combined effects of global inequality, political self-dealing, and debilitating economic misery found their most horrific form in a decade-long civil war that began in 1991. The conflict took tens of thousands of lives and displaced 2.6 million people.¹ How Sierra Leoneans had let the dreams of freedom and equality slip from their grasp and how to reenergize them were not new topics for the country’s writers, but they took on a new and more profound urgency in this period.

      To explore these questions, Haffner, Maddy, and de’Souza George could have drawn on any number of uprisings, rebellions, and insurgencies in Sierra Leone’s past, including the country’s most famous, Bai Bureh’s anticolonial war of 1898. In the events of the Amistad slave insurrection and its legal aftermath, however, the playwrights discovered especially rich material to examine historically and allegorically the discrepancy between the dreams of independence and its lived reality. The revolt took place off the Cuban coast in the early morning hours of July 2, 1839. Led by Sengbe Pieh (known also by his slave name Joseph Cinqué), fifty-three Africans broke their chains, took up a cache of cane knives, and commandeered the ship. Once liberated, the men and children, mostly Mende speakers, attempted to sail the schooner back to their home in the area of West Africa that is now southern and eastern Sierra Leone. Their initial freedom was short-lived. Unschooled in navigation, Sengbe Pieh, Grabeau, Burnah, and the other mutineers found themselves at the mercy of the Spaniards, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, who sailed east by day but west and north by night, ensuring that the Amistad never strayed far from North America. In late August, the schooner was seized anew by a U.S. naval vessel and transported to New London, Connecticut, where the Amistads, as the Africans came be known, were jailed on piracy charges and made the curious objects of a legal battle over the regulation of international commerce, national sovereignty, and the natural right to liberty. By its conclusion a year and a half later, with an unlikely victory for the Amistads in the U.S. Supreme Court, the drama involved no less than the Queen of Spain and U.S. presidents Martin Van Buren and John Quincy Adams. Theirs was not, nor would ever be, a completely unqualified triumph. Upon his long-awaited return to his village, Sengbe Pieh found his family and entire village had vanished, presumably victims of the slave trade. Moreover, neither he nor the other mutineers, nor any other inhabitant of Mendeland for that matter, would ever be able to escape fully the patronizing and paternalistic oversight of white Westerners. The Christian mission set up by the white Americans accompanying the Amistad mutineers would eventually blossom and later be turned over to the British-based United Brethren of Christ Church, which, in turn, paved the path for British colonization of what was to become Sierra Leone.

      Like the anticolonial discourses of earlier Sierra Leonean and African writers, Haffner, de’Souza George, and Maddy seek to reinvigorate the promise of decolonization by narrating the Amistad history in ways that privilege the values of collective endeavor, the political agency of everyday Sierra Leoneans, Sierra Leone’s power to shape world affairs, and, above all, liberty. Theirs are heroic tales of the oppressed and downtrodden asserting their rights in a world incapable of recognizing African dignity or sovereignty. The Amistad revolt proved doubly resonant in this regard because enslavement has featured more prominently in Sierra Leone’s historical consciousness of itself than in most other West African nation-states. Capital city Freetown was founded in 1787 as a haven for freed slaves from the Americas and, after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the city expanded with an influx of arrivals from the entire West African coast who had been liberated from illegal slave ships by British patrols. Thus, for a country in which the meanings of liberty and equality remain shaped as much by the experience of the Atlantic-world slave economy as by the tyranny of colonization, the Amistad insurrection’s narrative of capture, enslavement, Middle Passage, liberation, and return reenergizes the common account of Sierra Leone’s origin and its status as a “province of freedom.” Yet, at the same time, the playwrights, de’Souza George especially, also find in the Amistad narrative material for questioning how Sierra Leone, with all its promise at the time of independence from British colonialism in 1961, could have found itself so quickly engulfed in such a quagmire of misery. Unlike the vast majority of the liberated African Americans and West Africans (largely Yoruba) who originally settled Freetown, the Amistad revolt’s protagonists and the slave-catchers who sold them into slavery hailed from communities that are part of modern-day Sierra Leone. The capture of the Amistad mutineers more than fifty years after Freetown’s founding thus served as a powerful reminder that just outside Freetown’s confines the Atlantic trade raged on. For as much as the plays celebrate the will to freedom emblematized by the Amistad rebels, they simultaneously highlight the pernicious social divisions and devaluation of individual life that made permissible the commodification and sale of Africans by other Africans during the era of the transatlantic trade and that were so apparent in Sierra Leone in the postindependence period when the three plays were written.

      That the story of the Amistad rebellion found its home on the Sierra Leonean stage and that so many different playwrights would mine the narrative to rethink the country’s past and future is not surprising. Lacking neither dramatic conflict nor narrative suspense in its account of despotism, heroic struggle, and courtroom sparring, the history makes for good theater. In fact, in 1839, only four days after the mutineers found themselves imprisoned in New Haven jail cells and long before any reliable information about what actually occurred was available, New York City’s Bowery Theater staged a sensationalized “nautical drama” of “Piracy! Mutiny! & Murder!” titled “The Black Schooner, or the Pirate Slaver Armistad” [sic].² To this day, the rebellion remains a seductive topic for U.S. writers, artists, and performers. Owen Davis in the 1930s and opera librettist Thulani Davis and filmmaker Steven Spielberg in the 1990s brought the mutiny to stage and screen. Poets Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Hayden, Kevin