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The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-3455603

1527-5477

Anthony E. Kaye,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

On 2 July 1839 enslaved captives on the brig Amistad cut short the final leg of their Middle Passage from the Windward Coast of West Africa to fresh cane fields in Cuba. They killed the cook, then the captain, and resolved to return to Sierra Leone. After the rebels spent seventeen months in a jail in New Haven, Connecticut, their case ground through the US judicial system to the Supreme Court; they earned their passage touring a performance on the abolitionist circuit; and they completed their odyssey on 13 January 1842.Marcus Rediker offers his fascinating account of the Amistad revolt as a supplement to The Slave Ship, his award-winning book on the British transatlantic slave trade. The present work has his characteristic knack for the arresting turn of phrase, keen eye for the revealing detail, and craftsmanship, molding a story around biographical sketches. His admiring portrait of the Amistad rebels has shadings of his radical histories of Atlantic pirates.The Amistad rebels were from the Gallinas region, mostly Mende with a number of Kono, Gbandi, Temne, and Bullom people. Rediker traces both their enslavement and the success of their rebellion to the rampant wars in Gallinas over land and trade. Some of the rebels were Mende warriors, and at least one was among the mercenaries employed in the Vai campaign to expand their control over the slave trade (35–38).The practices of a secret society prevalent among many peoples in Gallinas guided the rebels and shaped the polity they created in New Haven. In their homelands the Poro Society adjudicated disputes, mediated relations with ancestral spirits, and had their say in decisions about war and peace. Initiates to the society ascended its ranks as they mastered its secret knowledge and skills, such as hunting, fighting, and acrobatics (31–33). When captives on the Amistad discussed threats by a member of the crew, Rediker argues, they “met as a kind of displaced but reconstituted floating Poro Society” (74–75).During the winter of 1840–41, jailed in New Haven, the Amistad Africans reinvented themselves as the “Mendi People” (8, 174, 216). Rediker treats this transformation as an instance of ethnogenesis and attributes it to contending against a racist jailer who exploited their labor and cooperating with abolitionist allies who insisted they learn English and Christianity. They remade themselves, as the abolitionists required, yet in their own way as “Mendi People.”The encounter between the rebels and the abolitionists at the New Haven jail will also interest readers of this journal. The abolitionists, Rediker shows, were by turns uncomprehending and subtle observers. They misconstrued the Africans’ Mende and Kono ethnicities for a time yet searched tirelessly for means of communication. A Yale linguist constructed vocabularies. Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the innovative educator of the deaf, interviewed the Africans by signs. African-born translators, Rediker emphasizes, made the breakthrough. Charles Pratt and James Covey, Mende-speaking sailors, enabled the rebels to tell their story, and the abolitionists to publicize it and to bring their case to court. Meanwhile Cinqué and Grabeau, leaders among the rebels, entertained visitors to the New Haven jail with “astonishing feats of agility” they had learned in the Poro (133). Journalists and artists produced newspaper articles, prints, paintings, and drawings—in short, a commercial entertainment. Rediker describes the rebels’ skillful telling of their story and the sympathetic representations of the rebels in vivid detail with canny interpretations.This insightful narrative will leave many ethnohistorians wanting more. Rediker’s well-paced story does not permit him to tarry long over matters that cry out for thick description. This is the best book we have about the Amistad rebellion and, one would hope, not the last.