Iyunolu Folayan Osagie. The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone.

Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000. 197 pp. $19.95.

The Amistad story and its complex triumph over the horrors of enslavement have lived within the collective memory of many African Americans since the incident occurred between 1839 and 1843. Its hero, Sengbe Pieh or Joseph Cinque as he is better known in the African Diaspora, symbolizes a singularly successful legal defeat for slave trading and its associated process of American slavery in the nineteenth century. Sengbe's story as well as that of his compatriots has symbolized the hope of freedom for those remaining captive Africans who weren't so fortunate. In both its historical context and its symbolic meaning, the Amistad story itself reveals the crucible upon which African humanity and the global commodification of the black body became ensconced. In its historical context, the Amistad story illuminates the contradictions inherent in the nineteenth century, as a few European powers jockeyed for global economic and political ascendancy at the expense of lower-class, disenfranchised Europeans and disempowered non-Europeans. Moreover, the Amistad affair represents unbridled nineteenth-century capitalism in serious conflict with the coming-of-age of the American rule of law. As such, the Amistad story illustrates the African encounter with those forces which sought to dehumanize, commodify, and reconstitute the African presence globally. For African descendants in the United States, the Amistad story remains a mnemonic trope for African heroism and for the possibility of victory over oppression, as well as a tome for collective liberation. That Sengbe and the surviving Amistad Africans returned home resonates with the oral narratives about those Africans who flew home to Africa over the River Jordan.

Iyunolu Folayan Osagie's work The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone broadens the scope of the Amistad story and re-examines its significance on both sides of the Atlantic. It contributes to identity politics discourses and to several levels of curricula focused in contemporary African Diaspora Studies. The book deepens our conceptual understanding of what "Global Africa," to use Joseph E. Harris's term, really means. Osagie's meticulous reading of the Amistad story as a trope in the creative writing and visual works of African Diaspora and Sierra Leonean artists speaks to an African-centered nationalistic enterprise articulated by Olabiyi B. Yai as an inherently transnational and, therefore, multidimensional identity (see Yai's "African Disaporan Concepts and Practice of the Nation and Their Implications in the Modern World," African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, ed. Sheila S. Walker [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001]: 244 55.). Osagie's book challenges Paul Gilroy's conflicted reading of identity politics in The Black Atlantic (1993) by examining the tragedy and potency of both the mythical and the historical evidence that inform the Amistad event.

Structurally, the book comprises two overarching themes, "Remembering the Past" and "Reinventing the Present," each of which is examined in three chapters. In her introduction, Osagie guides the reader through her own rediscovery of the Amistad story as she seeks to provide textual richness to her teaching of Charles Johnson's novel Middle Passage and Melvin Tolson's poem of the same name. As an associate professor of English, she became intrigued with the tale's various creative and intellectual iterations. As a Sierra Leonean, she was awed by the identity of the Amistad Africans and their obfuscation in the homeland that she shared with them. In her search for the "missing pieces in the Amistad story," Osagie reconstructs one of the many bridges of "memory and identity" that connect Africans in myriad ways to the far reaches and implications of their global history and cultural legacy. In the afterword, she challenges artists, scholars, and activists as well as readers to rethink the political ramifications of the Amistad story in contemporary Sierra Leone and the United States:

   In Africa, the experiment of slavery throughout the nineteenth
   century and the systematic colonization of Africans by Europeans
   into the twentieth century plunged the continent into structural
   underdevelopment.

She continues:

   The present crisis of contradictory racial discourses in America
   has its parallels in the Amistad court trials.

      The Amistad case was singular not just because its successful
   outcome was unprecedented but mainly because its legal victories
   did not foster a just pattern of development in other court trials
   involving race.

In the six intervening chapters, Osagie places the literary and historical narrative in dialogue with the politics of identity and invisibility within their respective national and global communities. Her rich literary analysis and penetrating historical research transform not only the Amistad narrative but also our approach to it. The book itself undertakes the Herculean task of (re)placing the Africans at the core of their own narrative and, by extension, centralizing their dichotomous role at the crucible of identity politics, past and present.

In Part One, "Remembering the Past," Osagie examines the Amistad story as a literary trope in African American prose, poetry, and drama, and as an historical event that influenced the political and racial landscape of the United States and other parts of the Western Hemisphere. She carefully reconstructs the American landscape in its national and hemispheric roles, onto which the African body as commodity and the African people as human beings mapped a Western and global past and shaped the conflicts of the present in Africa and the Americas. Her reading of the Saint Domingue and the Haitian revolts against Melville's Benito Cereno demonstrates how such events conflated the questions of African identity, rebellion, and aspirations with the fears of American slaveholders, politicians, and religious leaders. By aligning the Amistad revolt with other major slave revolts led by such notables as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, Osagie recalls that these African voices and actions represented the "unthinkable" for a European and American power structure that had no place for African agency or humanity. Viewed against this backdrop, her chapter on the return of the Amistad Africans to Sierra Leone and the establishment of the Mende Mission underscores the conflicting agendas of the American Colonization Society. In tracking the challenges faced by Sengbe Pieh's return home, she also revisits the meaning of the founding of Sierra Leone itself, and challenges us to rethink African agency, or lack thereof, in "the colonial project of modernity" in all of its "complicities and resistances." Where she demonstrates the benefits of missionary education in the rise against colonial rule, she also pinpoints its role in the physical and psychological disjuncture that Africans in Sierra Leone and America experienced as a result of the rupture in African cultural autonomy and legitimacy. A true bridge-builder, Osagie also discusses the continuous role of Sierra Leoneans in the educational development of Diaspora Africans after emancipation and in the evolution of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

In Part Two, "Reinventing the Present," Osagie draws upon the collective literary and cultural memory of Diaspora African in drama and art as an expose into the politics of identity and the reconstruction of black identity in the African Diaspora and Sierra Leone. She calls upon W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness and Toni Morrison's (re)memory to bracket her close readings of several African American and Sierra Leonean creative works. By drawing upon the artistic legacy of the Saint Domingue and Haitian revolts, she reminds her readers that African identity came into question as a function of the need to control a huge, racially identifiable free labor force. In her analysis, she suggests that the Amistad story assuages the trauma and anguish of enslavement by reconstituting the fractured human identity of its descendants. Osagie proposes that this reconstructed African Diasporic identity serves as an instrument of resistance and resilience against an imposed silence and invisibility.

In her analysis of Ed Hamilton's three-sided sculpture with its profound fourth panel celebrating the Amistad story, she notes that

   ... the Amistad incident is not just the story of Sengbe Pieh and
   other Africans who returned to Africa, but is equally the story of
   the African Americans who never left the Americas. Perhaps what is
   singularly intriguing ... is that Sengbe is representational because
   he seems to speak with, rather than apart from, the other figures
   in the bronze casting. The background images remain compelling
   because they tell the story of the Middle Passage and symbolize (in
   the courtroom segment, the second panel), the African American rite
   to citizenship, and because they configure African anxieties for
   nationhood and universal acceptance.

This latter challenge in the face of "African anxieties for nationhood and universal acceptance" moves her to examine why the Amistad story vanished from Sierra Leonean consciousness prior to 1992, and the role that its subsequent resurrection has played in the reformation of the country's national identity.

Osagie centralizes the return of the Amistad Africans as an historic Sierra Leonean narrative. She seeks to initiate the reconstruction of their histories through both oral and written sources. In her examination of the nineteenth-century record, she recovers critical information about the fate of Sengbe, the Amistad Africans, and the American Colonization Society. Sadly, she discovers that Sengbe's beloved village, Mani, had been destroyed, and that the villagers' former lives were circumscribed by internal conflicts and the early stages of Western imperialism. In dealing with this important issue and given the contemporary geopolitical backdrop against which Sierra Leonean, Liberian, and West African interests are poised, Osagie's well-documented book collapses the chronological gap between the pivotal questions of identity and national interests that underscored the legal victory of Sengbe Pieh and his compatriots. In so doing, she raises serious questions about the outcomes of that victory after the Amistad Africans returned home. There, they immediately engaged in a conflict of competing interests, first with their own countrymen and then with the agents of capitalism associated with the missionary zealots of the American Colonization Society. But she notes that, while their American triumph and the narrative itself was lost in the long shadow of colonialism, its revival since 1992 has come to serve as a source of national identity, pride, and hope for contemporary Sierra Leoneans.

In an equally close analysis of Sierra Leonean popular theater and oral traditions, Osagie locates a powerful revival of the Amistad story and its modern currency in such plays as Charlie Haffner's Araistad Kata Kata and Raymond Desouza George's The Broken Handcuff. Both works attempt to address contemporary Sierra Leone's longing for icons of national identity by embracing the Amistad narrative. For the nation's dramatists and street artists, the triumph of the Amistad Africans becomes a powerful trope for African agency and humanity in a world which seeks to deny both. As a tool for the reconstitution of a national identity, Osagie suggests that

   the return of the "spirited" past ... is not an attempt by these
   artists to focus on the haunting phantom of wrongs done and evils
   committed. Rather, this call to memory represents the surge of hope
   birthed in the struggles of ancestors, their legacies of resistance,
   and their testimonies of self-recognition both in Africa and the
   United States.

In the final chapter, Osagie brilliantly examines how the "unthinkable" in American parlance mutes the African and African American voices in Steven Spielberg's movie Amistad. She acknowledges that Spielberg's good intentions collide with Western cultural hegemony and America's select historical memory, suggesting that the director falters not in his capacity as a film maker but in his aesthetic and narrative choices which, in effect, circumscribe and invalidate the Africans' memory of their own experiences. Osagie speaks to the power of such global African dispossession when she notes:

   ... the privileging of speech in Amistad as the province of the white
   intelligentsia is problematic to the rich rhetorical heritage of
   African Americans. Perhaps Spielberg was trying to present the
   broader significance of the gag rule which in the nineteenth
   century prohibited politicians sympathetic with the cause of
   slavery from addressing this sensitive subject matter. It was also
   unlawful for blacks (both free and slave) to testify against whites
   in southern courts. African American memory was thus called into
   question by the dominate society not only for its reliability in
   relation to "truth" but also for its validity in an environment
   that had already denied the humanity of the witness. In essence,
   only white men could gainsay white men. Perhaps Spielberg wanted
   this point emphasized in Amistad; otherwise, the disturbing erasure
   of the African American voice and the displacement of knowledge and
   the role of memory ascribed to antebellum American slaves,
   especially in the free states, defy explanation. Thus, both African
   American and African agencies in the movie are constricted by the
   power of white speech.

Osagie's book urges us to decolonize the Amistad story and to undertake the arduous task of reconstructing the cultural histories and identities of its contemporary descendants in the Americas and Africa. As such, its enormous contribution to African Diaspora and African Studies will prove invaluable to those seeking to come to terms with these still largely understudied areas. In all cases, Osagie's work forces its readers to confront African humanity and to dialogue with its myriad internal and external contradictions and possibilities.

Diedre L. Badejo

Kent State University