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 Young, and Elizabeth Alexander, novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, and muralist Hale Woodruff have explored its themes of liberty and heroism. Even Herman Melville draws from the Amistads’ mastery of the ship and its White commanders for its narrative conflict in his novella Benito Cereno. And this is just a short sampling. Apart from Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), released nearly a decade after Charlie Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata premiered, few of these works would have been available in Sierra Leone and none circulated outside small circles, but a similar recognition of the rebellion’s historical and cultural import and its theatrical potential captured the country’s playwrights. Perhaps even more importantly, in Sierra Leone the stage has served as a primary site for exploring political and social questions such as those provoked by the Amistad history. This is due in part to drama’s disproportionate impact in a country with low literacy levels and a tiny population able to afford newspapers, books, or magazines. It is also a function of the country’s dynamic oral storytelling cultures and ritual performance traditions. And, as in many other former British colonies worldwide, stage drama enjoyed a privileged status as both entertainment and social critique throughout much of the twentieth century.
Stage drama was first brought to England’s colonies as a performative assertion of Britishness, and it was not uncommon to find elaborate theaters staging Elizabethan drama at the farthest-flung outposts of the empire. By the 1930s, Sierra Leoneans had begun to adapt, transform, and indigenize the theater with Krio-language translations of Shakespeare, for example, and with original scripts reflecting African realities.3 Beginning in the late 1960s, Yulisa Amadu Maddy shifted Sierra Leonean drama away from manneristic plays about Freetown’s high society to gritty realist narratives centered on the lives of petty thieves, street boys, and prostitutes who suffered firsthand the legacies of colonial racism and the hypocrisies of the social, political, and economic elite. Maddy’s plays and his position as head of the drama department at Sierra Leone Radio ushered in a new generation of playwrights, including Charlie Haffner’s and Raymond de’Souza George’s mentor, Dele Charley, dedicated to exposing corruption and the abuses of power in the young nation-state.4 If the colonial-era productions enabled white administrators and merchants to buttress their Britishness against what appeared to them as the heart of darkness (as well as, of course, to impart the so-called gift of their culture to the colonized), theater for Maddy’s generation was critical in illuminating the threats to Sierra Leone-ness while simultaneously keeping alive the nationalist ideals that fueled the drive to independence. Because they drew attention to internal as well as external threats, their work did not go unpunished. In reaction to Maddy’s play Big Berrin (1976), which takes aim at the excesses of Sierra Leone’s political elite, President Siaka Stevens jailed Maddy, added dramatic works to the country’s censorship act, and closed Freetown’s largest and most popular venue.5 These actions dampened political critique in the theater for nearly a decade, but Maddy’s generation had firmly established theater as the dominant mode of cultural production and cultural critique—more so than the novel—and as the literary form for which the country’s writers became internationally known. At the time Haffner began writing Amistad Kata-Kata, there remained, even in the face of government hostility, more than forty active drama companies in Freetown, a city with a population of only about one million.
Despite theater’s popularity, producing a play in the 1980s about an 1839 slave revolt that took place in the Americas remained neither a risk-free proposition nor an obvious choice of topic. During the worst years of the government’s clampdown on the arts, staging a play about armed insurrection was a likely ticket to jail. A few years prior to the premiere of Amistad Kata-Kata, President Siaka Stevens imprisoned a group of actors on charges of inciting violence after they attempted to stage a play about the nineteenth-century anticolonial leader Bai Bureh.6 As a brash, novice playwright with dreams of transforming Sierra Leonean society, Charlie Haffner was nevertheless savvy enough to avoid the same fate. Although Amistad Kata-Kata neither lacks veiled critiques of contemporary Sierra Leonean society nor shies away from celebrating armed insurrection against tyrannical overlords, Haffner made astute use of the new president Joseph Saidu Momoh’s 1985 campaign platform, “Constructive Nationalism,” to fashion his historical narrative as a tale of civic pride in which Sierra Leoneans take center stage in international affairs. Amistad Kata-Kata was thus all the more subversive for not proclaiming its subversiveness.7 The bigger challenge, however, might have been that the revolt history was almost entirely unknown in the country. In various interviews and presentations, Haffner has described the deep skepticism of Sierra Leonean audiences who refused to believe that common villagers could have played so prominent a role on the global stage without the revolt having already become a central chapter in the country’s historical narrative of itself.8 For Haffner, as again for Raymond de’Souza George six years later, the skepticism was symptomatic of the very problems that he sought to address in the first place and would lead him to write a play that is as much about the necessity for a robust culture of public memory as it is about the Amistad rebellion itself.
Amistad Kata-Kata
Of the three plays included here, Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata was the first one written and remains the only one to have been staged primarily in Sierra Leone. Born in 1953, Haffner was first introduced to the Amistad narrative as a student at Fourah Bay College, in Freetown, by the American anthropologist and historian Joseph Opala. A lively and dynamic lecturer with an unwavering belief that Sierra Leone lacked a set of shared symbols on which to build a national civic pride, Opala had started championing Sengbe Pieh as just such a symbolic figure about the same time Haffner enrolled in the college’s Institute of African Studies. Opala was not the first to recognize the leading role Sierra Leoneans played in the revolt. Sierra Leonean historian Arthur Abraham had written about Sengbe Pieh previously. But Opala was perhaps the most vociferous. Inspired by Opala’s lectures and his ideas about heroic nationalist symbols, Haffner wrote
