Trial for a Will, plays that take aim at the corruption of Sierra Leone’s political leaders and the failure of the country’s citizens to stop it. Like other Sierra Leonean playwrights of his generation, de’Souza George has refused to assign external figures such as Euro-American slave traders and British colonizers sole blame for the country’s ills, preferring instead to lay a portion of the responsibility in the hands of the country’s own precolonial and postindependence elite. De’Souza George does not, however, propose that Africa has met the West on equal footing. Suggesting that Euro-American slave traders would not have been able to purchase slaves if there were not Africans willing to sell their fellow Africans, de’Souza George asks, “If the West came to Sierra Leone and wanted to buy [slaves] and the Sierra Leoneans didn’t sell, who would they have bought?” At the same time, he nevertheless insists that slavery is only possible when transatlantic economic conditions are defined by a stark “difference in levels of opportunity.”11 One of the tensions giving his writing its richness stems from the challenge of representing that local culpability without losing sight of the relative socioeconomic disadvantage structuring it.
In a significant departure from Haffner’s earlier staging of the Amistad history, de’Souza George develops The Broken Handcuff’s thematics through its sophisticated aesthetic architecture as much as through plot and character. Readers and theater companies interested in staging the play thus need to pay close attention to its use of allegory and metaphor, its interplay of languages (English, Krio, and Mende), and its Brechtian theatricality. Before we are ever even introduced to the Amistad revolt protagonists, for example, part 1, scene 3 stages an allegorical encounter set in the ancestral world of the nation-state to suggest that Sierra Leone’s common historical narrative of itself has blinded its citizens to the root sources of the avariciousness and exploitation plaguing the country. As the scene begins, the lights come up to reveal a confrontation between the first colonial governor and six anticolonial nationalists from Sierra Leone’s colonial and early independence past. In their cataloguing of the physical and epistemological violence done by colonialism, the anticolonial nationalists end up unable to escape the binary relation of colonizer-colonized or to produce a useful critique of the root causes of the contemporary exploitation depicted in the play’s opening frame. At the point when the anticolonialists’ tactics appear to have reached their discursive limits, Sengbe Pieh, standing all the while in richly metaphoric shadow at the edge of the stage, steps into the light to authoritatively assert that the country’s myopic focus on its colonial history has blinded it to other equally significant genealogies, including, most obviously, the transatlantic slave trade. Similarly, in a second example, de’Souza George implicitly challenges Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s contention that African languages give the most authentic and uncorrupted expression to African cultures. By giving the only African-language lines in the play to the characters who have most fully embraced the Atlantic trade’s devaluation of human life—the Mende slave-catchers—the play seems to suggest that so deeply corrupted was Mende society and culture that the Mende language itself speaks the language of enslavement and alienation.
Despite his play’s bleak tone and outlook, de’Souza George never loses sight of the fact that the Amistad revolt tells the story of resistance to the seemingly overwhelming forces of exploitation in a globalized world. For as much as the Amistad rebels’ experience in his telling points to Sierra Leone’s amnesia about its exploited and self-exploitative past, the play asserts that freedom and dignity are worth fighting for and, indeed, must continuously be fought for. For all the differences that distinguish Amistad Kata-Kata, The Amistad Revolt, and The Broken Handcuff, they share this assertion. And they share the assertion that Sierra Leone, with all of its political and economic crises and with its dream of decolonization painfully deferred, is an idea absolutely worth defending. Their plays, too, serve as a reminder that Sierra Leone remained, and remains still, a work in progress, knee deep in the necessary labor of fashioning a past to define its present and energize its future. While stage drama has lost some of the dominance it enjoyed in the second half of the twentieth century, the Amistad plays’ distinct cultural labors continue to exert outsized influence over Sierra Leone’s literary production, especially in prose fiction, which has blossomed in the postwar first decades of the twenty-first century. In novels no less committed to opening up Sierra Leone’s future, Aminata Forna, Eustace Palmer, Onipede Hollist, and J. Sorie Conteh have taken up and extended the three playwrights’ attention to the country’s pasts for both the root causes of its current conflicts and the cultural, social, and historical resources required to achieve the nation’s promise. Sitting at the forefront of this literary zeitgeist, the three Amistad plays offer a powerful reminder about how literature remains a vital force in the ongoing struggle for independence and equality.
Notes on the Texts
Charlie Haffner and Raymond de’Souza George provided typescript copies of Amistad Kata-Kata and The Broken Handcuff and consulted closely for their publication in this volume. Yulisa Amadu Maddy passed away shortly before I began to assemble the plays. His personal records and manuscripts remain currently in significant disarray in Sierra Leone and England. For these reasons, the version of The Amistad Revolt that I have included here is based on a script provided by Ansa Akyea, the Ghanaian actor who played Sengbe Pieh in the University of Iowa performances in 1993. Akyea’s manuscript is extensively marked up, with passages of dialogue and song, some quite long, crossed out or added by hand. I worked with Akyea to produce a script that conforms as closely as his memory allows to the version of the play that Yulisa Amadu Maddy directed. Posthumous publication is always fraught, but I am confident that Maddy would have approved this text. I would like to note, however, that even the published script of Amistad Kata-Kata challenges accepted standards for what constitutes an authoritative text. During the height of Amistad Kata-Kata’s popularity, Haffner and his theater troupe, the Freetong Players, rarely treated the script as a fixed text. They routinely revised dialogue and adapted individual stage performances to take advantage of differential resources or to address different types of audiences. Amistad Kata-Kata was, and remains to them, a dynamic work in progress.
In my preparation of the plays for publication, I remained minimally interventionist in my editing. I corrected obvious typographical errors and made minor changes to formatting to ensure that the plays conform to general play publishing standards. Readers and actors should assume that all punctuation, language usage, and style, no matter how nonstandard, are intentional. Sierra Leonean English typically employs British spellings (e.g., honour, centre, etc.), as is reflected in Raymond de’Souza George’s script. Charlie Haffner’s play appears here with American spellings in conformity with the typescript he gave me. Maddy’s original manuscript mixed British and American spellings, with the same word occasionally spelled both ways and with no obvious organizing logic. Given that the majority of Maddy’s spellings were American and given that he wrote and only ever staged the play in the United States, his family and I chose to use American spellings throughout.
Readers of Maddy’s play should also note his differential capitalization of racial terms. In every instance, he decapitalizes the word “white” when referring to European Americans, and, with few exceptions, capitalizes “Black” and “Negro.” The differential capitalization would remain indistinguishable aurally, of course, but, visually, it ascribes with unusual force the humanity and dignity to people of African descent that the proper noun denotes and forces White readers to confront their own assumptions and privileges. Where the manuscript did not capitalize these terms, I considered the context and made a judgment about whether the decapitalization was intentional or a likely typographical error and revised accordingly. For instance, when Judge Judson spews his racist venom about race pride I chose to leave his use of the word “blacks” uncapitalized, as it appears in the manuscript, because it signifies Judson’s view of Africans and African Americans as unworthy of proper noun status. But Maddy also leaves “white” uncapitalized in the same lines of dialogue, which comes across visually as Maddy’s attempt to subvert the violence of Judson’s racist rhetoric, a rhetoric that certainly had not disappeared from American life by the 1990s.
Timeline
