January 9, 1998

The Amistad Mutiny

The Amistad Mutiny, and the film Amistad produced by Debbie Allen, and that master of modern cinematography Stephen Spielberg is a matter of historical and artistic moment. If Schindler's List, by the same Stephen Spielberg as Director put the spotlight on Hitler's Holocaust, then Amistad focuses world attention on the worst holocaust in human history, African slavery. And, indirectly on the attendant genocide of the native people of the Americas and the Caribbean in the service of capitalist greed. Amistad is more than episodic. It has meaning for all downpressed, anywhere and everywhere!

What then is Amistad about? I was asked by a young State College student, doing her 'A' Levels this year, who had never heard of the historic mutiny, indeed, the rebellion of blacks declaring their own freedom. An historical moment, of world historical importance, impinging on African, Caribbean and American history. That fact alone, underscores the point that unlike most other people, the modern history of the people of African descent, be they born in Africa, the Caribbean or the Americas, is at one and the same time, national, but more so international. Yet, of the Amistad mutiny this 'A' level student had never heard head nor tail of the matter. Our school system numbs, if not dumbs.

For the central figure of the Amistad Mutiny, Singbe-pieh, known in America and in the film as Joseph Cinqué was a young man of West Africa's Mende people. A people who met in a unique democracy. Three times a year Mende men and women met and decided all important questions, leaving elders and chosen persons to execute the policy the Mende community had determined. I am being very deliberate here, for the myth has been assiduously propagated that Africans had no system of government. Added to that, there was a Western refusal to admit that the Greek city-state of ancient Greece originated in Africa and came to Ancient Greece, via Egypt and Kush, (modern Ethiopia). Where this most democratic form of government, known to man, died out almost completely in Europe, it survived even the slave trade in Africa - the worst testament of man's inhumanity to man, the 'thingification' of African women and men. After the African dehumanisation the "thingification" of all men and women, of whatever race, would be produced by modern industrial labour, where workers are reduced to the endless repetition of one and the same dull task, like an automation.

So Singbe-pieh was born in the early 1800's up river, far from the ocean, in what is probably modern Sierra Leone, and where the Mende people built large family compounds and raised crops, ensuring judicious, if not totally equitable distribution. Singbe-pieh married and was raising young children in a family compound, where children were not only the responsibility of the parents, but of the whole compound. The West has only recently discovered that it takes more than a nuclear family to raise a child. Moreso, because the intolerable pressures of modern industrial life shatter the nuclear family. Africa, US President Clinton's wife learnt had that wisdom long ago. The film, Amistad, only hints at the high quality of the African family. And that is enough. For everything cannot be said all at once, and not in a film of 2 1/2 hours! Spielberg's splendid cameo on this score, the high quality of the African family, sufficed, even though presented as an idyll.

But back to the story. Mendeland in the 19th century, like all of Western Africa was haunted by one of history's long dark nights which lasted over 300 years. Tens of millions of people - from the Mene, Ashanti, Ibo, Ga, Yoruba, Krumen, Awikan, Mandingo and all other peoples of Africa - had been ripped from their social and civilised moorings and mores, sold and carried off by white traders as 'cargo'. It was not that slavery was new. But the reduction of men and women to less than human, their very humanity emphatically denied, and the denial supported by Biblical and canonical texts, was entirely new. A wholesale assault on humanity had begun by the white western world, not just on African and Africans, but it would return to plague the inventors. The modern holocaust of Jews in Europe, is not unrelated to the more total holocaust of Africans in Africa and in the diaspora. More on that some other time.

If, as indeed was the case, some ten million Africans perished in the Middle Passage, between Africa and the Americas, many millions more died in wars and raids organised and inflamed by the slave trade. Africans had to sell each other or themselves be sold as slaves. The exact numbers of those killed and stolen will not be known, with certainty.

The people of Africa did not know what the slavers did with their captives. What could explain the insatiable, the almost unending craving which these Europeans had to capture more and more Africans of all ages, and any gender? What? Explanation boggled the mind. Were they eaten by these persistent marauders, for whom cruelty was routine? Were they worked to an early death in some system of forced labour? There were rumours. But no African returned, so none knew for sure what happened in this bourne, beyond the sea, from which no traveller returned.

One day, Singbe-pieh disappeared. His village mourned him, fearing he was dead or kidnapped at the hands of the marauders. His story however, was different. Different from millions of other Africans. He returned. He immortalised himself in history. Yet he is still unknown in our school. He came unto his own and his own, alienated, received him not.

Over 30 Africans led by Singbe-pieh successfully fought their way back - to freedom. The slave ship they seized, the Amistad, is now known throughout the world as a symbol of unrelenting black revolt. Singbe-pieh is known to the world too, by the name his captors gave him, Joseph Cinqué.

So we continue with that particular historical name. Cinqué was seized in Mendeland, to be as precise as the historian can, around January 1839. In a way then, we are celebrating an anniversary of sorts. Africans under the cruel impact of the slave trade, had one choice. Either sell others as slaves or be sold. (Which would you choose?) Cinqué then was seized by a raiding party sent by a neighbourhood people. He with others were forced marched for then days, down the valley of the Gallinas River toward the sea. There Cinqué was "warehoused" with people from all over the region in the crude "slave factories", not my term, but the term of the time, owned by Pedro Blanco on the heavily fortified island of Lomboko.

By the way, the historical record compels me to state, that not all slaves were seized by raids. Some were sold, as in the Bible for unpaid debts. Others there were who were sold into slavery for adultery. Promiscuity, contrary to white western historians, better described as hagiographers, was frowned upon in most of Africa. Adultery carried a heavy sanction in Africa. Christianity through the religion of Osiris, derived from Aekanathon and Imhotep in Egypt, probably inherited prohibition of adultery this in the Mosaic law, in the cross fertilisation of civilisations between Africa and the Middle East. But Judaeo Christians have been made to believe that they and their teachings are at once, alpha and omega. The African origins of so many things have been expunged from the historical record beginning at least with Alexander the great with his sacking of the libraries in ancient Timbuktu.

Anyway, Blanco gathered over 600 Africans and loaded them onto a notorious Portuguese slave ship Teçora. The African slaves were packed as tight as tight could be, chained two by two, in decks with standing room only!

In April 1839 they sailed. The Middle Passage for the Teçora was the usual tale of horror, most graphically described by Spielberg, in a scene which, believe it or not, forced me to close my eyes and duck, even though I knew what to anticipate. When I see the film at Deluxe I hope that the second time around I will be able to look! Reading history is one thing. Seeing its horrors made flesh is quite another. And even on film horror is horrible. Especially when the historical imagination knows that the horror one is witnessing was even more horrible in the reality. So it was with Amistad for me. But that's another matter.

The fare on board the Teçora was rotten food in the main, and the naked Africans, men and women, were whipped if they did not partake of the rotting food, the historical record shows. An estimate of the horror is provided in that the ship's diary shows that vinegar and gunpowder were rubbed into the open wounds of the African slaves - as extra punishment. A third of the slaves on the Teçora, 200 out of 600, died at sea. Even now, in this era of horrors, that would make the world news. It made no news then. Africans were mere cargo. And Lloyds would pay for the loss of this cargo.

When the Teçora arrived at Havana, Cuba, the African slaves were led naked, to a large open barracoon, a corral for human beings, where they were sold off to various Spanish-Cuban landowners, after a thorough examination, men and women standing naked, their private parts gawked upon.

Forty-nine of the African slaves on the Teçora were sold to Don José Ruiz and four children were sold to Don Pedro Montes. Both these two slaveowners then purchased false papers from the Cuban authorities, stating that these slaves were born and bred in Cuba.

Then on June 28, the 53 Africans were transferred to the Amistad for a 300 mile voyage from Cuba to Puerto Principe.

On the Amistad, the Africans were chained to each other by the neck and attached to a wall in the dark and dank cargo hold. For food - they were given one plantain, a piece of bread and a cup of water per day, per person. At mealtime, and as he passed around what passed for food, the cook mocked them. The Africans on board the Amistad reported that "talking with his fingers" this cook told them they would be cooked and salted down after death to be used as meat. The Africans had no alternative but to believe that this would be their lot at the hands of what appeared to them to be cannibals.

Cinqué decided he was not going to be nobody's meat kind. He had found a nail, on the upper deck, which he kept hidden, some say in his armpit, others say in the crevice of an area of the human body where the sun don't shine! That evening, in keeping with this democratic community traditions, the African slaves spoke among themselves. One of them Kin-na later described the meeting. The captive Africans felt, like Sartre, that there was no exit. They turned to Cinqué. He said he would work up a plan. Kin-na reports him as saying the following: "If we do nothing we will be killed. We may as well die trying to be free, than to be killed and eaten." Cinqué's prose anticipated Claude McKay's verse some 80 years later. Dare to be free, or when not physically captive, dare to expand freedom. Such is the sum of a worthwhile human existence. All else is mere consumption in which one is pointlessly consumed.

A great modern thinker, who died last year, Sir Isaiah Berlin, once penned a passage made famous by liberal pundits. Sir Isaiah wrote "Liberty is Liberty, not equality or fairness, or justice or culture or human happiness or a quiet conscience." There is nothing that Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote with which I disagree more. There can be no liberty without equality, and neither without justice. Where these are absent all culture is pre-human culture. And in that view, I am as fixed as is the North star. Sir Isaiah was accommodating his enormous gifts of mind, and his great knowledge of human struggles, to the existing neo-liberal order. Like Cinqué, I have long parted company, with such accommodation to evil, under whatever guise.

And so, on the third day of Cinqué's journey on the Amistad, he used the nail creviced wherever it was, to break the chain free from the wall. The others did likewise. They found machetes in the hold and armed themselves. It was moonless and raining in the black velvet night. The Africans moved to the upper deck, as it were, noiselessly. Cinqué killed the dread cook with one swift decapitating blow. The Captain, as captains must, resisted felling an African and wounding others, but Kin-na and not Cinqué (as in the film version) brought him down. Meantime the Amistad's two sailors slipped over the side and escaped. Ruiz and Montes were captured. The Africans were free. Free, but adrift twenty miles off the coast of Cuba. Free, but without navigational skills. But, nevertheless,

This is as true as when the great poet Percy Byshe Shelley wrote his tribute to the Manchester workers who faced government troops in 1819; as it was true when Cinqué faced his captors and downpressors; as it is true now of those in the Third World suborned to petty men posing as Colossi; and true too, for all of humankind subject to a monopolising globalisation, be it in American inner cities or to an Asian principality spawned by the corrupt. But, we must "Rise, like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number. There is no other way. There is no deliverance save self-deliverance in community.

Lacking navigational skills, as so often happens in African and Caribbean history, the free African slaves, had to turn to their captors for the navigational skills they lacked. They ordered Montes to navigate their return to Africa. Montes, as is their habit, decided to deceive the Africans. He sailed into the rising sun toward Africa by day, then sailed west and north by night, hoping to arrive on the east coast of North America.

Cinqué and the others suspected Montes' treachery but could do no more than vainly threaten Montes with death. It is to be noted that the Africans aboard the Amistad having freed themselves, did not treat their captors as their captors had treated them. Ruiz like Montes had the freedom of the ship. I leave you to draw whatever conclusion you must from that.

Soon enough though, in the back-and-forth in the North Atlantic food and water ran out. The Amistad rebels stopped passing ships begging for food and supplies. Few gave.

Soon enough too articles started appearing in the U.S. press about "a black schooner" displaying no flag, manned by dozens of black men! Cinqué knew not of Haiti, the only freed black nation then. And even if he knew, he did not have a Haitian flag! "The crew had a very savage appearance" one white sea captain reported, in spontaneous prejudice. What would he have said if he saw the savagery on board the Amistad before its liberation? He would have found such savagery "civilised", or part of "the civilising mission"! Racial prejudice, it is to be hoped, does not spring eternal.

After some 63 days at sea, as the Amistad rebels were weakened from hunger and thirst, they sighted land - a low coast covered with sand dunes. It was bright, though. It was summer. It was in actual date, August 26, 1839.

Some of the Amistad rebels Cinqué and Kin-na inclusive went ashore. There in the sand dunes they met two white sea-captains bird hunting. By way of signs they asked two all important and simple questions. Where are we? And is this a slave-owning country?

The bird-hunting sea captains, Henry Green and Peletiah Fordham, startled out of their wits to meet four men, armed, almost naked, and black to boot, quickly explained that the Amistad had landed at New York on New York's Long Island, near Montauk Point. And, said they, there were no slave-owners in New York State. Fine and dandy, Cinqué concluded. But then and there a new struggle for freedom had to begin anew. How would New York accept free black men on a liberated black ship, the Amistad? Freedom, after all, is the constant overcoming of antagonisms within a social whole. That is not me, but CLR James. Freedom is not an event, on a given day at a given time. It is a process. A process of overcoming. More on the Amistad's overcoming next time.

Cinqué, at any rate, could say, as the late great Martin Carter said later

He had led the liberation of slaves on a slave ship and had led hopeless men and women, not only to hope, but to their own liberation.

Remember too, it was Cinqué's simple nail, hidden in the crevice of some human orifice, which changed history. It quickened the pace of black liberation the world over. For sure abolitionists in the U.S. used Cinqué's triumph and that of the Amistad as a rallying point for abolition of slavery in the U.S.

But remember too, that Cinqué's nail could not have overturned the unjust, unfair, unfree, inequitable social order that was the Amistad, without a community of persons, self-organised, acting and activist, in concert.

Cinqué even now provides a large lesson, a profound guide as to what is responsible for historical movement as an advance over corruption, misrule, abuse of human and material resources, leading to a new and more human social order. Cinqué be praised!