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The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone. By Iyunolu Folayan Osagie. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 180. Illustrations. $35.00.)
Few slave revolts in the western hemisphere enjoyed happy endings. Most rebels swung from the gibbet for the crime of wanting to be free. But Sengbe Pieh (commonly known as Joseph Cinque after his Spanish owners changed his name to disguise his status as a bozales, an African illegally imported into Cuba after 1820) finally won his liberty in the Supreme Court and returned to Sierra Leone. Perhaps for that reason, the tale of the Amistad captives has attracted the sort of attention from novelists and playwrights that has eluded even the well-known slave rebel Nat Turner. From William Owens to Barbara Chase-Riboud to Steven Spielberg, writers and directors have attempted to interpret the story for a variety of audiences. Now Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and a native of Sierra Leone, evaluates these popular art forms while weighing their relationship to both actual events and the construction of a national identity in the nation of Pieh's birth.
Howard Jones, the author of the standard account of the case, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (1987), began his narrative with the 1839 mutiny and ended with the liberated captives setting sail for home. By comparison, Osagie rightly begins his study in the Vai-Mende country...