course on national consciousness. He premiered the play with the Freetong Players, the theater troupe he founded for the purpose, two years later, in 1988, at the British Council auditorium in Freetown. The Freetong Players also recorded a popular narrative ballad, “Sengbe Pieh,” included in this volume, that they and other groups performed in schools, lorry parks, markets, and just about anywhere they could find an audience. Almost single-handedly, Amistad Kata-Kata made the 1839 shipboard rebellion and Sengbe Pieh central figures in Sierra Leone’s historical imaginary.
Amistad Kata-Kata unfolds as a relatively conventional nine-scene stage drama. The play is plot driven, featuring a chronological narrative that begins with Sengbe Pieh’s capture, proceeds with the Amistads’ sale in Havana and their shipboard uprising, and concludes with the U.S. Supreme Court trial. Its one departure from the historical record comes in the form of a frame narrative set in a Mende village in the 1980s in which a university student and his grandmother discuss the imperatives of historical memory. In its frame and core narratives, Amistad Kata-Kata privileges accessibility over aesthetic complexity, favors clear dialogue over stylized language, and keeps symbolism and metaphor to a minimum. Despite the seriousness of the topic, the play does not shy away from occasional humor. Its depiction of the would-be Cuban slave owners as woebegone subjects of the victorious Amistad rebels regularly generated laughs during the performances I viewed in Freetown in 1990 and 1991, as did depictions of Sengbe Pieh flustering his white American foes by demanding to be called by his Mende name. In terms of its staging, the play requires few props and no complicated lighting, sound, or other theatrical apparatus, its modest demands reflecting the conditions of the Sierra Leonean auditoriums, public parks, school lecture halls, and other informal venues available to the country’s theater companies. While Haffner gives the play a Krio-language title that translates loosely as “Amistad Revolt,” the play itself is in English.
Thematically, Amistad Kata-Kata aims for a similar transparency, returning repeatedly to a few key points. The play depicts the rebels as never anything less than the authors of their own lives even in the moments when freedom seemed most remote; it insists that cultural self-respect is the bulwark to withstanding the crushing forces of geopolitically dominant institutions such as the transatlantic slave trade or the U.S. legal system; and it posits historical memory as a necessary foundation for civic well-being. This is not to say that Amistad Kata-Kata shies away from aesthetic or thematic nuance. In its interplay of oral and written historical practices, the play problematizes meanings of modernity, and in its employment of the multivalent trope of cannibalism, it situates the Amistad rebellion as just one, though uniquely emblematic, moment in the long history of suffering under the regimes of global capitalism.9 And, as work that above all seeks to fashion a global heroic past for the Sierra Leonean nation-state, it highlights the transnational underpinnings of postcolonial nationalism.
Amistad Kata-Kata holds its own as a literary text, but the play’s cultural importance stems significantly from its status as a work of public history. Readers and audiences should pay special attention to the figure of the grandmother who appears in the frame narrative and reappears periodically to comment on the action. In Amistad Kata-Kata’s opening framing scene, for instance, she laments the poor state of historical memory in Sierra Leone, going so far as to declare that public amnesia about resistance figures like Sengbe Pieh stands as a root cause of many of the country’s social and economic ills. Without overtly suggesting that contemporary Sierra Leoneans should follow Sengbe Pieh’s example of armed uprising, she nevertheless asserts that proper memorialization of those who resisted tyranny will go a long way toward improving the quality of life in the present. The pronouncement serves both to introduce the Amistad history to Sierra Leonean audiences and to assert Haffner’s perspective on the relationship between historical memory and collective well-being. In the same opening scene, the grandmother castigates her university-educated grandson for putting too much faith in written histories, which, according to her, are untested by the rigors of oral tradition and public debate. Like the narrative tradition lauded by the grandmother, Amistad Kata-Kata offered itself to audiences as oral history. And like the oral tradition, the Freetong Players tailored individual performances to their audiences. As a result, few performances were identical, but each amplified the same themes. In several important ways, Amistad Kata-Kata set a template for the plays to follow.
The Amistad Revolt
Yulisa Amadu Maddy (1936–2014) premiered his play, The Amistad Revolt, at the University of Iowa in April 1993. He would stage it one more time, two years later, with the title Give Us Free—The Amistad Revolt, at Morris Brown College. Based on the success of these stagings and on Maddy’s reputation as a playwright and novelist, Steven Spielberg flew Maddy to Los Angeles for discussions about developing the play into a screenplay for what would become his film. For undisclosed reasons, Maddy walked away from the negotiations, replaced by the American screenwriter David Franzoni, whose screenplay focuses the greater part of its narrative conflict on the redemption of its White American protagonists.
The Amistad Revolt stands as one of the final complete works in Maddy’s career of writing and directing for the stage. His first four plays were published by Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1971 under the title Obasai and Other Plays. Two years later Heinemann brought out his novel No Past, No Present, No Future. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Maddy continued to write and stage plays, performed primarily by his drama company Gbakanda Afrikan Tiata. All of Maddy’s productions, including The Amistad Revolt, share a commitment to exposing injustice and advancing the national struggle for freedom and dignity. In addition to working in stage drama, Maddy trained and directed the Zambian National Dance Troupe for Expo ’70, in Japan, and the Sierra Leonean National Dance Troupe for FESTAC ’77, in Nigeria. During the nearly three-decade period he spent in exile following his imprisonment related to the staging of Big Berrin, Maddy also taught drama in Nigeria and the United States. In 2007, he returned to Sierra Leone, where he remained until his death in 2014.
Like Haffner’s before him and de’Souza George’s after, Maddy’s play narrates the events of the Amistad rebellion and its legal aftermath from the perspective of its Mende protagonists, depicting their uprising as a story of heroic struggle in which the enslaved maintain the unambiguous right to use violence in order to secure their liberty. And like the other two plays, the bulk of its action takes place on board the Amistad, in the Connecticut prison, and in the U.S. Supreme Court chambers. With the exception of two fictionalized African American characters, the play puts the key historical figures on stage. In his obituary for the playwright, literary critic and fellow Sierra Leonean Eustace Palmer writes that Maddy enjoyed a “profound knowledge of what the theater was capable of, what worked and what did not, and the innovations that could be made.”10 This understanding is evident in The Amistad Revolt’s complex narrative arc, its frequent time shifts—often signaled by lighting and spatial organization—and ambitious thematics, all highly demanding on the sixty or more performers who appear on stage. But while Maddy takes advantage of the disproportionately greater technological and stage resources available to him in the United States (recorded sounds, visual projections, spotlighting, and so on) than would have been available to Haffner or de’Souza George in Freetown, the script never comes across as so reliant on them that the play could not have been staged in Sierra Leone.
For all the thematic and narrative similarities to Amistad Kata-Kata, The Amistad Revolt is distinguished from the earlier stage production by its more extensive incorporation of the written record. Like Haffner and de’Souza George, Maddy quotes directly from Andrew Judson’s and John Quincy Adams’s courtroom transcripts and Kale’s letter to Adams, in which the child captive expresses so heartbreakingly his agony in face of America’s racial hypocrisies. But Maddy takes his intertextuality a significant step further. In addition to drafting dialogue from nineteenth-century legal records and personal correspondence, Maddy borrows fictionalized characters, narrative conflicts, and entire conversations and interior monologues from Barbara Chase-Riboud’s 1989 historical novel about the
