include the incorporation of its fictionalized characters Henry Braithwaite and his daughter Vivian Braithwaite; its attention to District Court Judge Andrew Judson’s prior involvement in the Prudence Crandall case; and its shared characterization of John Quincy Adams as being haunted by having been president of a slave-holding republic. Additionally, Maddy’s play replicates some of the novel’s narrative architecture and its linking of racial and gender inequality. So extensive are Maddy’s borrowings from Echo of Lions that his surviving family and Barbara Chase-Riboud agreed that it would be most appropriate to publish the play as an adaptation of her novel.
By no means does the play’s status as a partial adaptation of another literary text make it less compelling critically or aesthetically. Quite the opposite, in fact. Much of the The Amistad Revolt’s richness stems directly from the way that it incorporates primary source documents and fictional representations as equivalent records. At the most basic level, Maddy’s inclusion of fictional material as a historical source in its own right highlights the erasure of the slave rebel’s voice in Black Atlantic history. Apart from Kale’s letter and the brief courtroom testimony of the few Amistads chosen to speak, rarely in the court records, missionary archives, newspaper accounts, diaries, and other archival documents can Sengbe Pieh’s voice or that of any of the other rebels be found. This absence is just as true for the Amistads as for Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and the thousands of other protagonists in slave rebellions, large and small, in Africa, on board slave ships, or in the Americas. By turning to a fictional source for representations of those voices, Maddy only further highlights their profound absence in the public historical record. Like so many other authors of neo-slave narratives, Maddy also fills this vacuum, of course, with his own fictionalization of the expansive private lives of the Amistad slave rebels, imagining likely conversations, feelings of trauma, and sources of resilience, but always in transatlantic dialogue with Chase-Riboud’s “historical” source text. A second effect of giving a novel equal footing as a nineteenth-century document is to call attention to the textuality of the nineteenth-century archival materials. Those historical documents were produced by lawyers, judges, journalists, abolitionists, missionaries, and diarists who, no matter their views on slavery, were never free from the ideologies of race and civilization of their era. By giving equal credence to a twentieth-century novel by an African American writer, Maddy suggests that the available primary sources are no less fictional than a contemporary novel and that a contemporary novel can be no less factual than court records, newspaper reports, and the like. Haffner does something similar when he has the grandmother in Amistad Kata-Kata’s frame narrative question the reliability of written records. But Maddy is perhaps the more radical in turning to fiction to critique the racism of the archive and to locate voices lost to history.
The other significant difference between The Amistad Revolt and the two other plays in this volume is its deeper engagement with the psychosubjective effects of antebellum American racism on its West African protagonists. From the opening scene to the last, the mutineers’ struggle to comprehend and resist their racialization is made a central thematic focus. This is not to say that Haffner and de’Souza George ignore the effects of racism and racialization on the mutineers but rather that Maddy highlights to a much greater extent the traumas they induce. At a moment of what is perhaps his most acute despondency, Maddy’s Sengbe accuses even his supporters of viewing him as “an unwelcome nigger, to be disposed of in any way as soon as possible.” The greater focus on racism and subjectivity stems in part from the influence of Chase-Riboud’s novel. Maddy borrows the Braithwaites, her fictional African American father and daughter, using them in much the same way Chase-Riboud does to root the Amistads’ legal battle, which grew increasingly focused on esoteric questions of international trade law and executive power, in the cultures of American race relations. In the play as in the novel, the Braithwaites help Sengbe Pieh and the other Amistads understand the racial dynamics of their ordeal, naming the Amistads’ humiliations as racism and historicizing that racism as one of the foundational contradictions of American society. In return, the Amistads offer the African Americans a glimpse of a life and subjectivity untainted by the daily degradations that define Black experience in the United States. Each ultimately helps the other resist the pressures to internalize Western racial ideologies. The extensive focus on race is also very much of a piece with Maddy’s oeuvre. From his earliest plays, to his novel No Past, No Present, No Future (1973), and to his coauthored scholarly study of children’s literature, colonial racism and its internalization by Africans on the African continent and in the diaspora was central to his writing. The Amistad Revolt is especially fascinating in this respect not only because it offers one of Maddy’s most nuanced psychological portraits of the racialization of Africans displaced to England or America, but also because it represents a rare direct transatlantic dialogue between Sierra Leonean and African American writers on race, the meanings of enslavement, and resistance.
The Broken Handcuff
The final play in this collection is Reverend Raymond E. D. de’Souza George’s The Broken Handcuff. Like Haffner, de’Souza George credits Joseph Opala, his colleague at Fourah Bay College, for sparking his fascination with the 1839 revolt, and in the play’s treatment of heroic struggle and Sierra Leone’s geopolitical impact, it echoes Opala’s lectures and Haffner’s earlier rendition. And like Amistad Kata-Kata, it debuted at the British Council auditorium in Freetown. De’Souza George staged it one more time, with a reduced cast, at the 1994 Victoria Canadian fringe theater festival. It has not been performed since. The Broken Handcuff ultimately shies away from Amistad Kata-Kata’s celebratory air, cloaking the rebellion narrative instead with a bleaker, more dystopic vision. The play comes to its climatic close in the U.S. Supreme Court chambers with the announcement of the Amistads’ legal victory, but any triumph is undercut in the same scene by a slip-of-the-tongue reference to Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, whose Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision just a few years later, and by a reminder of Sengbe Pieh’s discovery upon his return to Mendeland of the likely enslavement of his entire family. De’Souza George also devotes significantly more stage time to the Mende-speaking Africans who collaborated with the coastal slave dealers, depicting them not so much as one-dimensional craven monsters than as individuals motivated by the all-too-recognizably human qualities of jealousy, grievance, and ego. And, moreover, instead of emphasizing the civic well-being to be gained by celebrating forgotten resistance heroes, The Broken Handcuff dwells more on “how much of our history and culture were swept away” because of the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of enslavement.
A significant measure of the difference from Haffner’s play must be attributed to the changed historical context. In 1991, three years after Amistad Kata-Kata’s debut, Sierra Leone suffered the first wave of armed raids by a rebel militia calling itself the Revolutionary United Front/Sierra Leone (RUF/SL). After remaining relatively contained in the south and east of the country for a year and a half, the RUF/SL launched a major offensive in September 1992 that culminated in the capture of a large diamond-mining concession. From that point on, the already weakly equipped government forces found it increasingly difficult to check the rebel militia’s spread. In contrast to Haffner, writing only six years earlier, de’Souza George offers a narrative about the Amistad rebellion that functions much less to will into being a more civic-minded future than to question how Sierra Leone could have fallen so far from its modest prosperity at the point of political independence and let its ambitious postcolonial dreams slip away in such violent fashion.
Born in 1947, Raymond de’Souza George has played a leading role as a writer, director, actor, and mentor for young theater professionals coming up through the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College, where he spent his professional career. As a founding member of the influential drama company Tabule Theater, de’Souza George acted in a leading role in Dele Charley’s Blood of a Stranger, the best original drama award winner at FESTAC ’77, the festival of black arts held in Lagos, Nigeria, which saw the staging of now-canonical plays like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii’s critique of neocolonialism I Will Marry When I Want. De’Souza George’s own scripts include the Krio-language play Bobo
