The Amistad Rebellion (5 page)

Origins of the
Amistad
Africans

The slave trade tried to create a faceless, anonymous mass of laborers for the plantations, but the
Amistad
Africans can be known as individuals—who they were, where they were from, what nations and ethnic groups they were part of, what sorts of work they had done, what kinds of families they had lived in, how old and how tall they were, and finally, how they were enslaved and how they got to Fort Lomboko on the Gallinas Coast. Much can be known about the thirty-six men and children who were still alive in early 1840, considerably less about eight others who can be identified by name, bringing the total to forty-four of the fifty-three Africans who were aboard the schooner during the uprising. Little evidence has survived about the other nine. 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.
¹³

The
Amistad
Africans were multiethnic, or motley: the original fifty-three consisted of people from at least nine different groups. The dominant group were the Mende. Of the thirty-seven for whom a cultural identity can be recovered, at least twenty-five, and as many as twenty-eight, including Fuli and Margru, called themselves Mende. Four—Moru, Burna (the elder), Sessi, and Weluwa—were Gbandi. Bagna, Konoma, and Sa were Kono. Pugnwani was from the Kono chiefdom of Sando. Pie and his son Fuliwulu were Temne, while Gnakwoi was Loma, Beri was Gola, and Tua was Bullom. Burna suggested that among the ten men who died at sea after the rebellion were one Kissi and one from the multiethnic Kondo confederation. This represents most of the major culture groups of southern and eastern Sierra Leone in the first half of the nineteenth century. All except the Bullom were located in the interior, fifty to two hundred fifty miles inland.
¹⁴

These groups had different histories and cosmologies, but they shared common cultural characteristics, practices, and beliefs, especially about kinship, family, ancestral spirits, and the afterlife. Most people lived in villages, towns, or cities that consisted of small conical houses, built of mud wattled around posts and sticks, with thatched roofs and compressed earth floors. Many settlements, especially among the Mende, were palisaded against the chronic threat of war. Town walls were twelve to fifteen feet high, three feet thick at the bottom, eighteen inches thick at the top, with sharpened sticks at the apex. Depending on the size of the population, the compound would have had four to six well-guarded gates and might encompass five to forty acres of land.
¹⁵

Islam was spreading slowly through the region, largely among members of the upper classes, who converted, usually in superficial ways, grafting a thin layer of the new religion onto a long-held core of traditional spiritual beliefs. Muslim holy men, variously called
maribouts
, mori-men, or book-men, were growing in number on the Gallinas Coast and in its hinterlands, often as advisers to chiefs and kings such as Siaka. They also played a role in warfare by helping to create charms or amulets, locally called
greegree
, believed to have protective supernatural power for those going into battle. Arabic writing on a
small bit of parchment was a common part of the charm or “medicine.” Cinqué’s second in command on the
Amistad
, Grabeau, had seen people in his hometown write “from right to left.” The Irish abolitionist Richard Robert Madden noted that one unnamed
Amistad
African knew how to recite prayers in Arabic.
¹⁶

The
Amistad
Africans came from a region about which people of European descent in 1839 knew almost nothing. Even though Europeans had traded in Sierra Leone since the sixteenth century, and mapped its coastline, few had gone inland and they were therefore especially ignorant of the Mende, whose name first appeared in print only in 1795. “Mende” did not appear on maps of West Africa prior to the arrival of the
Amistad
in Connecticut. By the 1830s, the people the name referred to—largely “Liberated Africans” taken by the British off captured slave ships and settled mostly around Freetown—had become known by another name: Kossa, or the variations Kosso or Kussoh. This added confusion to ignorance. When an American abolitionist explained that “we had a book in which their country is described as
Kossa
, they [the
Amistad
Africans] say, that is not its true name, but it is
a term of reproach
, a name that has been applied to the Mendi people by the English, and by those who dislike them! This accounts for their never having mentioned the word
Kossa
to their teachers and friends.” Kossa was indeed a term of contempt, used by the acculturated settlers and recently freed slaves of African descent brought to Sierra Leone by the British. The
Amistad
Africans initially identified themselves by town and leader, not language group.
¹⁷

Those who traveled into or near Mende country in the mid-nineteenth century imagined it to be a vast land, teeming with people. American missionary and abolitionist George Thompson, who lived among the Mende and spoke to both African and European travelers, thought that the land of his hosts “stretches eastward hundreds of miles—for weeks’ journey. This we know, for we have often seen persons from the interior from such distances. Doubtless many millions of people speak the Mendi language, for we do not find it in its purity till we get some 200 miles back from the sea.” A British missionary named A. Menzies later noted that Mende was spoken in twelve districts,
only three of which had he been able to visit over an eighty-mile expanse. He too was sure that Mende country was immense. The
Amistad
Africans themselves told their teacher that Mende was “a very
great great
country.” It was, in fact, less a country than a large agglomeration of localized societies loosely connected by a common, though regionally variable, language.
¹⁸

Where had this numerous and expansive people come from? Some “old Mendians” told missionary John Brooks that “their forefathers came from the east,” making war against western tribes, capturing large towns, settling and building farms along the way, intermarrying and forming alliances “with the people around them.” The elders succinctly described what historians now call the “Mane Invasions,” in which Mende warriors pushed south and west beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, conquering and settling as they went, and permanently altering the political and cultural geography of southern Sierra Leone. Over the ensuing two centuries, the Mende shared a common language and culture over a wide geographic expanse, but they formed no large political state, had no sense of unity, and shared little sense of common identity. Victorious warriors gathered their families, friends, and soldiers to form farms and villages on newly conquered lands.
¹⁹

Leadership among the Mende was, for the most part, earned rather than inherited. Kings, chiefs, and “big men” tended to be those who combined military and economic acumen and resources in what were predominantly small, decentralized societies. These leaders, usually in concert with a council of elders, ruled patrilocal and patrilineal societies, meaning that young families lived with or near the family of the husband and that the male line defined identity and property transmission. The Mende were also polygynous: a man could take two or more wives at the same time, if he had the necessary wealth. “Polygamy is common among the wealthier classes,” ex-plained the
Amistad
Africans. “Big men” in the region had “a plurality of wives, and if a king hundreds.” Siaka’s son, King Mana of the Vai, for example, was said to have five hundred wives. The accumulation of wives at the top often created a shortage of women for the poorer
males, who found it difficult “to get even one.” Bride-wealth costs could be prohibitive—four, five, or six bullocks and other goods. Wealth in Mende society was reckoned by the number of wives, children, slaves, and cattle a man had. Only thirteen of the
Amistad
Africans indicated that they had wives, which was a comment on their relative youth and class.
²⁰

Almost all of those held captive aboard the
Amistad
were commoners, people who worked the land or plied their craft. And the commons of Mende country was rich—decidedly not a place for the “starving savage” of imperial imagination. Wild bush yams and coco in particular made it easy to live with little work. “Blessings are scattered with a lavish hand,” admitted the exasperated Thompson, who sought to discipline his Mende congregants to a Protestant work ethic. The lavishness included nuts, grapes, pineapple, orange trees, and fig trees. Learning to survive in the bush was an essential skill. The
Amistad
Africans explained to their teacher, “Their soil is very productive, and they are obliged to labor but a small part of the time to procure the comforts of life.”
²¹

Only four of the
Amistad
Africans claimed any kind of elite status. Gbatu explained that his father “is a gentleman and does no work.” Fakinna’s father, Bawnge, was a “chief or king” at Dzhopoahu, in Mende country. It was said that Cinqué’s father was a “big man” in his own society. Several others, on the other hand, had been slaves. Yaboi had been captured when his village was surrounded by soldiers in an act of grand pillage and thereafter served a Mende master as a slave for ten years before he was sold to “Luiz, the Spaniard.” Pugnwawni, a Sando man, was enslaved and forced to work for two years cultivating rice before he too was sold to the Spanish traders on the coast. Kimbo’s experience encompassed both ends of the class structure: his father was a gentleman, he said, but after his death, Kinna was enslaved by his king (probably because his father was in debt) and given to a son who resided in Bullom country. He was then sold to another Bullom man, who sold him to a Spaniard at Lomboko.
²²

The Mende, like the Temne and many others from the Gallinas area, were traditionally rice farmers. Working the rice fields was a
primary experience among the
Amistad
Africans. Cinqué, Grabeau, Ba, and Bagna described themselves as “planters of rice,” while several others also mentioned the staple crop of the “Grain Coast.” Rice lands were communally owned and labor was cooperative. Men and women tilled the plentiful rice fields as the young and the old fended off the small yellow ricebirds that could destroy a crop. In an upland system of rice production that depended on rainfall, they worked a given piece of land for two or three years, then let it lie fallow for five or six years before returning it to cultivation. Women had especially important roles in threshing rice, in ways that seemed to anthropologist Kenneth Little to have shaped their forms of dance: “There is a very close and striking similarity between the rhythm and movements of the Mende dancer and the rhythm and movements of a woman treading and threshing rice.” They grew rice to eat and to sell, especially as the slave trade expanded and bondsmen had to be fed in the barracoons and on the ships. Some of the
Amistad
Africans may have been feeding the monster that would eventually devour them.
²³

Their communities were economically sophisticated, and several men engaged in more than one occupation. Burna the younger “was a blacksmith in his native village, and made hoes, axes, and knives; he also planted rice.” Sessi, a Gbandi man, was also a blacksmith, a trade he had learned from his brother and one that carried prestige and spiritual power. Grabeau planted rice and worked as a merchant, traveling widely (and learning four regional languages) to sell ivory and camwood. Pie, on the other hand, was a hunter. He had killed five leopards in Temne country, “3 on the land, and 2 in the water,” for which he may have earned royal distinction. One leopard skin he “hung up on his hut, to show that he was a hunter.” His weapon of choice seems to have been the European musket. His hands had been “whitened by wounds received from the bursting of a gun barrel, which he had overloaded when showing his dexterity.”
²⁴

The division of labor was sufficiently developed in Mende and other societies to make iron and cotton manufacture significant parts of their political economy. Iron ore was of especially high quality in the region, and metalworking artisans like Burna the younger and
Sessi were many. The tools they made of “true country iron” were valued above European imports. Cotton had been grown throughout the Gallinas region, especially in Mende country, since at least the seventeenth century. One of the
Amistad
Africans told his teacher, “Cotton make the hills
white
.” George Thompson, who traveled extensively in Mende country, noted, “Everywhere I went, I observed many of the women spinning, and men weaving their country cloths.” Weavers spun cotton and dyed it red (using camwood), yellow (“Bassel tree”), blue (“a green bush, called the Serang”), and green (camwood and “Bassel tree” together), then wove it into six-inch strips, which were sewn together, primarily to make clothing for personal use and for exchange. “Country cloth,” as it was called, had a ready market, and a broad one. Several of the
Amistad
Africans were skilled weavers who practiced their craft while they were in jail to produce napkins in the “fringed African style,” which, as skilled artisans, they proudly demonstrated at public meetings after their liberation from jail.
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