Marcus Rediker. The Amistad Rebellion

In his review of Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997), film critic Roger Ebert identified the film's chief weakness when he observed that “[i]t is too much about the law and not enough about the victims.” It is a shame that Spielberg did not have Marcus Rediker's moving account of the Amistad rebellion, which puts the focus where it always belonged: on the illegally enslaved Africans who rose up against their captors, won their freedom, and eventually returned to their homeland. While Spielberg found his drama inside the courtroom, Rediker demonstrates that the real drama took place elsewhere. The Africans come to life more fully in Rediker's gripping narrative than they ever did in Spielberg's dreary courtroom drama. Using the biographical information available for 44 of the 53 Africans on board the schooner, Rediker argues persuasively that “everything the rebels did, from the moment of enslavement to the moment of repatriation and afterward, was based to a large extent on their experiences in Africa before capture” (p. 21). The Africans were enslaved through a variety of means; some were captured in war, others were kidnapped, while others were enslaved because of crimes or debts. From near and far, slave traders brought captives to the barracoons owned by the Spaniard Pedro Blanco, one of the most notorious and successful slave traders on the West African coast in the 1830s. The captives came from at least nine different ethnic groups, but the Mende predominated, and that shared ethnicity along with the Poro Society, a secret society open to men in the Gallinas region from which most of the Africans originated, provided a basis for cooperation. Blanco sold them, along with hundreds of other captives, to Portuguese or Brazilian slavers on an illegal slave ship bound for Havana. The slavers landed them by night and hustled them into barracoons located right outside the city walls, and over the next few weeks they were sold to various buyers including the group who were loaded onto La Amistad for shipment to another part of the island.

Ancient history · Art · Diaspora · Drama · Ethnic group · Homeland · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Repatriation · Shame · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law