and written historical practices, the play problematizes meanings of modernity, and in its employment of the multivalent trope of cannibalism, it situates the Amistad rebellion as just one, though uniquely emblematic, moment in the long history of suffering under the regimes of global capitalism.9 And, as work that above all seeks to fashion a global heroic past for the Sierra Leonean nation-state, it highlights the transnational underpinnings of postcolonial nationalism.
Amistad Kata-Kata holds its own as a literary text, but the play’s cultural importance stems significantly from its status as a work of public history. Readers and audiences should pay special attention to the figure of the grandmother who appears in the frame narrative and reappears periodically to comment on the action. In Amistad Kata-Kata’s opening framing scene, for instance, she laments the poor state of historical memory in Sierra Leone, going so far as to declare that public amnesia about resistance figures like Sengbe Pieh stands as a root cause of many of the country’s social and economic ills. Without overtly suggesting that contemporary Sierra Leoneans should follow Sengbe Pieh’s example of armed uprising, she nevertheless asserts that proper memorialization of those who resisted tyranny will go a long way toward improving the quality of life in the present. The pronouncement serves both to introduce the Amistad history to Sierra Leonean audiences and to assert Haffner’s perspective on the relationship between historical memory and collective well-being. In the same opening scene, the grandmother castigates her university-educated grandson for putting too much faith in written histories, which, according to her, are untested by the rigors of oral tradition and public debate. Like the narrative tradition lauded by the grandmother, Amistad Kata-Kata offered itself to audiences as oral history. And like the oral tradition, the Freetong Players tailored individual performances to their audiences. As a result, few performances were identical, but each amplified the same themes. In several important ways, Amistad Kata-Kata set a template for the plays to follow.
The Amistad Revolt
Yulisa Amadu Maddy (1936–2014) premiered his play, The Amistad Revolt, at the University of Iowa in April 1993. He would stage it one more time, two years later, with the title Give Us Free—The Amistad Revolt, at Morris Brown College. Based on the success of these stagings and on Maddy’s reputation as a playwright and novelist, Steven Spielberg flew Maddy to Los Angeles for discussions about developing the play into a screenplay for what would become his film. For undisclosed reasons, Maddy walked away from the negotiations, replaced by the American screenwriter David Franzoni, whose screenplay focuses the greater part of its narrative conflict on the redemption of its White American protagonists.
The Amistad Revolt stands as one of the final complete works in Maddy’s career of writing and directing for the stage. His first four plays were published by Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1971 under the title Obasai and Other Plays. Two years later Heinemann brought out his novel No Past, No Present, No Future. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Maddy continued to write and stage plays, performed primarily by his drama company Gbakanda Afrikan Tiata. All of Maddy’s productions, including The Amistad Revolt, share a commitment to exposing injustice and advancing the national struggle for freedom and dignity. In addition to working in stage drama, Maddy trained and directed the Zambian National Dance Troupe for Expo ’70, in Japan, and the Sierra Leonean National Dance Troupe for FESTAC ’77, in Nigeria. During the nearly three-decade period he spent in exile following his imprisonment related to the staging of Big Berrin, Maddy also taught drama in Nigeria and the United States. In 2007, he returned to Sierra Leone, where he remained until his death in 2014.
Like Haffner’s before him and de’Souza George’s after, Maddy’s play narrates the events of the Amistad rebellion and its legal aftermath from the perspective of its Mende protagonists, depicting their uprising as a story of heroic struggle in which the enslaved maintain the unambiguous right to use violence in order to secure their liberty. And like the other two plays, the bulk of its action takes place on board the Amistad, in the Connecticut prison, and in the U.S. Supreme Court chambers. With the exception of two fictionalized African American characters, the play puts the key historical figures on stage. In his obituary for the playwright, literary critic and fellow Sierra Leonean Eustace Palmer writes that Maddy enjoyed a “profound knowledge of what the theater was capable of, what worked and what did not, and the innovations that could be made.”10 This understanding is evident in The Amistad Revolt’s complex narrative arc, its frequent time shifts—often signaled by lighting and spatial organization—and ambitious thematics, all highly demanding on the sixty or more performers who appear on stage. But while Maddy takes advantage of the disproportionately greater technological and stage resources available to him in the United States (recorded sounds, visual projections, spotlighting, and so on) than would have been available to Haffner or de’Souza George in Freetown, the script never comes across as so reliant on them that the play could not have been staged in Sierra Leone.
For all the thematic and narrative similarities to Amistad Kata-Kata, The Amistad Revolt is distinguished from the earlier stage production by its more extensive incorporation of the written record. Like Haffner and de’Souza George, Maddy quotes directly from Andrew Judson’s and John Quincy Adams’s courtroom transcripts and Kale’s letter to Adams, in which the child captive expresses so heartbreakingly his agony in face of America’s racial hypocrisies. But Maddy takes his intertextuality a significant step further. In addition to drafting dialogue from nineteenth-century legal records and personal correspondence, Maddy borrows fictionalized characters, narrative conflicts, and entire conversations and interior monologues from Barbara Chase-Riboud’s 1989 historical novel about the Amistad rebellion, Echo of Lions. The most significant of Maddy’s adaptations from the novel include the incorporation of its fictionalized characters Henry Braithwaite and his daughter Vivian Braithwaite; its attention to District Court Judge Andrew Judson’s prior involvement in the Prudence Crandall case; and its shared characterization of John Quincy Adams as being haunted by having been president of a slave-holding republic. Additionally, Maddy’s play replicates some of the novel’s narrative architecture and its linking of racial and gender inequality. So extensive are Maddy’s borrowings from Echo of Lions that his surviving family and Barbara Chase-Riboud agreed that it would be most appropriate to publish the play as an adaptation of her novel.
By no means does the play’s status as a partial adaptation of another literary text make it less compelling critically or aesthetically. Quite the opposite, in fact. Much of the The Amistad Revolt’s richness stems directly from the way that it incorporates primary source documents and fictional representations as equivalent records. At the most basic level, Maddy’s inclusion of fictional material as a historical source in its own right highlights the erasure of the slave rebel’s voice in Black Atlantic history. Apart from Kale’s letter and the brief courtroom testimony of the few Amistads chosen to speak, rarely in the court records, missionary archives, newspaper accounts, diaries, and other archival documents can Sengbe Pieh’s voice or that of any of the other rebels be found. This absence is just as true for the Amistads as for Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and the thousands of other protagonists in slave rebellions, large and small, in Africa, on board slave ships, or in the Americas. By turning to a fictional source for representations of those voices, Maddy only further highlights their profound absence in the public historical record. Like so many other authors of neo-slave narratives, Maddy also fills this vacuum, of course, with his own fictionalization of the expansive private lives of the Amistad slave rebels, imagining likely conversations, feelings of trauma, and sources of resilience, but always in transatlantic dialogue with Chase-Riboud’s “historical” source text. A second effect of giving a novel equal footing as a nineteenth-century document is to call attention to the textuality of the nineteenth-century archival materials. Those historical documents were produced by lawyers, judges, journalists, abolitionists, missionaries, and diarists who, no matter their views on slavery, were never free from the ideologies of race and civilization of their era. By giving equal credence to a twentieth-century novel by an African American writer, Maddy suggests that the available primary sources are no less fictional than a contemporary novel and that a contemporary novel can be no less factual than court records, newspaper reports, and the like. Haffner does something