The African Roots Of The Amistad Rebellion: Masks of the Sacred Bush. (recent exhibitions).

THE AFRICAN ROOTS OF THE AMISTAD REBELLION Masks of the Sacred Bush The Peabody Museum of Natural History Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut July 15, 2000-December 31, 2001

"The African Roots of the Amistad Rebellion" exhibits forty pieces of art from the Mende and related peoples of Sierra Leone and surrounding areas, together with twenty contextual photographs and explanatory and identifying information. Its focus is the art and traditional life from which the African voyagers of the Amistad were taken and that they brought with them to Connecticut as they struggled for their freedom.

In June 1839, fifty-three Mende-speaking people were sold as slaves in Havana. They were taken on board the Amistad, and by the morning of the fourth day at sea, two of the Africans had freed and then armed themselves and their comrades. Under their control, the ship sailed north and east, eventually following the U.S. coastline and arriving off Long Island, where it was seized and taken to New London, Connecticut. After a long battle in the U.S. courts, the African prisoners, aided by local supporters, won their freedom. In November of 1841, the thirty-five surviving Africans and five missionaries set sail for Sierra Leone.

The journey of the Amistad is well documented, but its complexity is perhaps still to be understood. Recent commemoration of these events has stimulated a great deal of activity in the popular and scholarly cultures of the United States and particularly Connecticut. This effort by the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is an example. The notion of presenting a view of the cultural underpinnings that shaped and carried the personal and public lives of the Africans aboard the Amistad is compelling. As Michelle Gilbert, the exhibition's guest curator, said at the opening: "This exhibit is about the role of memory and the importance of place. It is about how the past instructed the present. It is about how the rebellion of the young men and women on the Amistad was informed by their past in West Africa and where their ideas of identity, gender, and ethnicity were molded, and their ideas of how people are supposed to behave were formed." It is not an overstatement to say that such ambition for a small exhibition quickly reaches the edge of the resources at hand. The efforts of the curators, Gilbert and the Peabody's Frank Hole, the consultant, William Siegmann, and the designer, Ingvild Horn, were severely constrained by the space allotted. They were successful in harnessing a large idea, synthesizing a mountain of ethnographic data, selecting a group of superb objects, and installing those objects in a very modest gallery.

A museum of natural history is an effective setting for such an undertaking. The Peabody is a small, active museum where one finds parents, grandparents, and a raft of children viewing specimens and a modest collection of ethnographic material in cleverly built environments. It is an animated and welcoming space. The museum currently exhibits no Africana save these Amistad-related materials. The choice to present a serious corpus of African ethnography that predates and in part explains a piece of Connecticut history is venturesome, and intellectually the resulting exhibition is commendable.

The installation fills approximately one quarter to one third of the first of three ethnographic galleries just off the foyer of the museum. Looking past a half wall that sections off the gallery, one sees a magnificent nonwooden men's Gbini mask that announces the exhibition. A major portion of the show describes Poro and Sande, the men's and women's societies, and their place at the center of traditional life. Opening with men's society masks, the space is punctuated by a combination of didactic panels, photographs, and labels that explain the objects. The thumbnail photos, grouped in fours and located near didactic panels, are engaging and offer a truly animated view of daily life in Sierra Leone.

The panels are quite dense, presenting descriptions of both male and female associations and the actions and concerns of their members regarding socialization, gender, education, and authority. For students of Africa and particularly west African art, these notions are hardly new. However, this presentation is far more balanced than usual in terms of the two organizations, and it contains objects that are unique and more thoroughly documented than is the case in much of the literature, not to mention exhibitions.

The quality and variety of known and unknown objects assembled at the Peabody may be even more interesting than the attempt to interpret them. Anyone concerned with African history, non-Western art, masking, or personal adornment--even those without a tremendous familiarity with the work of the Mende and their neighbors--will be engaged by this selection. Wooden male masks are often erroneously associated with the women's Sande society. This exhibition provides strong examples of the wooden Sande masks as well as the wooden and nonwooden masks of Poro and shows the differences among the three forms and their uses.

The first mask, Gbini, insulates Poro from the uninitiated (Fig. 2). And just a few steps away one becomes aware of helmet masks whose facial attachments relate to musicians' regalia and whose iconography announces gender and instructs in the ways of Poro (Fig. 1). A costumed men's helmet topped by a long-necked head, a mask type that appears widely in the region, is a Poro portrayal of feminine beauty that is quite distinct from Sande masks, though it is often labeled as such. At the opposite end of the long, narrow exhibition space are Sowei masks whose splendid quality quickly distinguishes them within a corpus that is often seen and reproduced. In the center of the space, along opposing walls, one finds female healing figures and items of personal adornment--particularly ivory and silver pendant jewelry worn by women returning from Sande initiation, ivory trumpets and snuff containers, and a bit of beaded apparel.

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

Early ethnographers of Sierra Leone and Liberia describe Poro but are somewhat dismissive of Sande in terms of its social impact. Recently that focus has reversed, and Sande has been held up as an association of social consequence. The Peabody exhibition points out several noteworthy and not altogether common facts about Poro and its masks, and relates them to Sande. One of its strongest intellectual contributions is this balanced presentation of the gender-based societies, revealing the counterpoint and harmony that exist between them. One particularly interesting and very clear indication of the tale not told or only implied is a mask that derives from a Yoruba (Dahomean/Nigerian) presence in Freetown. The exhibition is full of teases like this--treats that appear as one gives oneself over to the objects and to information that is rich but not always easily accessible in an abridged version of the story.

Two concerns arise from the abbreviated state of the exhibition. First, there is no catalogue. Second, the information is new to many visitors, and it is presented in great detail, perhaps too much to be contained in or absorbed from densely printed text panels aligned with field photos. Again, the visual impact of the explanatory material is well integrated, but the content is obscured by that same presentation and integration. Similarly, one must stretch to make the broader connections between the object and, first, the origins of the Africans aboard the Amistad and, second, the contemporary struggles in Sierra Leone. While the former is a more obvious effort, at least by virtue of the title of the exhibition, it does not seem to provide much more than what the observer already knows.

What the Amistad voyagers sought, valued in the views and behaviors of others, and described themselves draws heavily upon a sensibility that would have derived from socialization and training in the Poro or Sande society. But even if it is not at a great level of detail or in strong relief, the presentation of a traditional or of a predating sociocultural underpinning for the men and women of the Amistad and their kinspeople is available to the careful observer of the exhibition. A potential depth of interpretation exists in this rich corpus of material, and for the trained viewer it is a testament to a strong belief in and demonstration of ethnography as practiced and espoused by those who still hold that humans and their ways can be observed, described, and understood by others.

One can only imagine the fertile field for future cultivation when space, a catalogue, and a wider representation of objects can be assembled. It would be in that context that current travail on the west Atlantic coast of Africa might be best inspected for connections and even solutions in the past and in social mechanisms of the peoples of west Africa that have persisted into the present. I applaud the Peabody Museum for searching for the connections between the voyagers of the Amistad and their beginnings and for the awareness that this informs our lives today, even beyond Connecticut and the west coast of Africa. But at the same time, I hear the call for more--a wider context for the information already here, and an expansion of that information to fully focus on and to continue to refine our understanding of the cultures of west Africa through their arts and social organizations. It is encouraging to see the possibility of a true blending of social history, art history, and ethnography, not as academic disciplines but as complementary lights in a well-polished jewel the gem of human experience in both crisis and in everyday life. Where better to have started than in Connecticut and at the Peabody, and where better to continue than on the foundations offered by this exhibition?

ED DECARBO is an anthropologist who teaches African art in the Department of Art History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He is also the Director of Education at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.