The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  Knowing and speaking multiple languages was common in Mende society, as George Thompson discovered in his own congregation: one man spoke Mende, Kissi, Bullom, Kittam (Krim), Vai, Kono, “Canaan,” and English—eight languages altogether. Most people, he found, including children, could speak two, three, or four languages, as could many of the Amistad Africans. Mende and Gbandi, both historically part of the Mande language group, were mutually intelligible. Konoma knew Kono and Mandingo, both part of the Atlantic language group. The most versatile linguist in the group was Grabeau, who as a trader had traveled widely and added to his native Mende the ability to speak Vai, Kono, and Kissi. Burna the younger spoke Mende, Bullom, and Temne. Several men had facility in the Bullom language, probably through commerce—and a few had themselves been the commodity traded. Kimbo, Kinna, Fuliwulu, and Tsukama had slaved in “Bullom Country,” where many merchants were allies of the Spanish. Fuliwulu had been to Freetown “a great many times,” while others had met traders from the British settlement in their own villages, towns, and cities.31

  Movement, free or forced, and contact with peoples and their languages throughout the region, created an unusual capacity for communication among the Amistad Africans. Unbeknownst to themselves, these experienced, mobile, sophisticated, multiethnic people had acquired tools that would serve them well in their Atlantic odyssey of slavery and freedom.

  Poro Society

  Central to the societies and identities of the Amistad Africans, and indeed to all peoples of the Gallinas region, was the Poro Society, an all-male secret society and fundamental governing social institution. All the adult men involved in the rebellion would have been members of the Poro in their native societies and therefore familiar with this type of self-government, even if the rules and rituals had varied from place to place and culture to culture. Everyone knew how the Poro worked, what it was supposed to do, and how to use it. They kept its secrets: there is no mention of the Poro Society in any contemporary records concerning the Amistad rebellion. Yet there can be no doubt that it played a significant role as Amistad rebels organized themselves throughout their long ordeal.32

  First described in a book edited by Dutch physician Olfert Dapper in 1668, Poro in the Gallinas was shrouded in mystery because members took a “solemn oath” on pain of death not to reveal the society’s lore. The Poro had a hierarchy of ranks, based on the degrees of sacred knowledge an individual possessed, and signified physically by ritual scarification. The greater the number of marks, the higher the authority of the Poro member. The heavily “tattooed” Grabeau’s high standing in the Poro would have been visible to any and all of the Amistad Africans as soon as they laid eyes on him. Likewise Fabanna, “tattooed on the breast,” and head man of his town. They read their bodies and honored their authority.33

  In cultures in which ancestral spirits (ndebla) loomed large, the Poro derived much of its power from its claim to serve as intermediaries to past generations, to embody their spirit, and to reach, through them, the remote supreme deity, Ngewo, linking the people to spirits great and small and connecting past to present. The Poro Society therefore had supreme authority in making decisions on behalf of the corporate group. The Temne Poro, Major Alexander Laing remarked, “possess the general government of the country,” a fact he considered “a most serious obstacle to its civilization,” that is to say, to European control.34

  The basic purpose of the Poro Society was to establish law and maintain social order—in a word, to govern—and its primary focus was settling disputes and policing the boundaries of behavior. Poro leaders adjudicated all of the normal disputes within and between communities, but a special concern was always witchcraft, the use of supernatural power for anticommunal ends. The elders of the Poro Society alone held the power of capital punishment and did not hesitate to use it against those they considered malevolent witches and sorcerers. In less extreme cases, the Poro used ostracism to move offenders “from communal grace to isolated individualism.” According to anthropologist Kenneth Little, the main purpose of the Mende Poro throughout its history has been to create ngo yela—“one word” or “unity.”35

  The Poro Society also made decisions about war. This was done in tandem with kings and chiefs and “head war men” (who were Poro members themselves), but the Poro had the stronger hand because they had often helped to choose the political leaders in the first place. George Thompson noted that “even the greatest kings” in Mende country feared Tassaw, the mysterious and awful leader of the Poro. Laing saw the same power in Temne country and was moved to speculate that the Poro Society had originated among slaves who ran away to the bush to escape their African masters. In what would become the sacred space of the Poro, they “confederate[d] for mutual support.” Because “the means of subsistence [was] easy to be procured” in the bush commons, and because the power of divided and quarreling local kings and chiefs “did not extend beyond the limits of their own town,” such an organization from below may soon “have become too powerful for any probable combination against them.” If true, Laing’s theory might explain the limitations the Poro placed on slave masters, who were forbidden to do anything that would draw the blood of their bondsmen.36

  Another important function of the Poro Society was to preside over the rites of passage in which boys became men. In the sacred bush, where the initiation took place, Poro members—all adult men—taught the skills of survival to the youth: how to hunt, how to fight, how to think about the material and spiritual worlds. They taught new disciplines of the body, such as acrobatics. They imparted knowledge about the values and beliefs by which the people lived. Each boy “died” in the bush and was reborn as a man and given a new name. The initiation into manhood also included scarification: “two parallel tattooed lines round the middle of the body, inclining upwards in front, towards the breast, and meeting in the pit of the stomach.” When a young man emerged from the bush, he could proudly show the “teeth-marks” by which his juvenile self had been devoured. To conclude the initiation, the Poro elders, “dressed as demons and wild men,” emerged from the bush, howling, torches in hand, to sow terror throughout the town, to impress upon one and all their arbitrary, absolute power. The ritual would be followed by all-night feasting and dancing.37

  Crossing boundaries of territory, class, clan, and family, the Poro Society could create unity among disparate individuals and groups who did not know each other. The Poro was an instrument of “mutual assistance.” F. Harrison Rankin could see this in the 1830s. He wrote that “the Purrah, or ‘law’ is a solemn bond uniting in brotherhood and purpose individuals scattered through immense districts.” Arguing that the Poro Society was the main instrumentality through which the Mende (and Temne) organized the Hut Tax War against the British in 1898, the eminent Mende scholar Arthur Abraham has written that “the Poro, more than any other institution, gives continuity to Mende culture and a sense of unity to the Mende people.”38

  “Word Never Done”

  The spoken word loomed large in all areas of life for the Amistad Africans, as theirs were oral, not written, cultures. Many European visitors commented on the eloquence of the people they encountered in and around Sierra Leone. In 1834 F. Harrison Rankin put the matter bluntly and broadly: “Negroes are eloquent by nature.” Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, a German missionary and linguist who went to the Gallinas Coast in 1847 to prove the rational principles of African languages and the unity of mankind, heard with a linguist’s ear “stirring extempore speeches, adorned with beautiful imagery and of half an hour’s duration.” George Thompson noted the many instances in which he heard “great native eloquence.” Major Alexander Laing was impressed by Mandingo, Foulah, and Kuranko speakers, “who will talk for hours with the greatest fluency.” Their eloquence lay in “familiar expressions, striking similies, and quaint remarks,” punctuated by “vehement action and gesticulation.”39

  “Head war men” gave stirring speeches to warriors preparing for battle, reciting history and the
transgressions against honor to be avenged. Spoken rites were critical to communication with ancestral spirits. Collective identity depended on the preservation of the history and cosmology of the village, town, and larger culture and their oral transmission from one generation to the next. Storytelling was an important art that used wit and drama not only to entertain but to impart knowledge and wisdom, all through an interactive, call-and-response communal style. Mende kings and chiefs often had a “speaker,” or lavale, who communicated the ruler’s wishes to lower-ranking officials and explained his goals and reasoning to society at large.40

  Of special importance were the words spoken at the traditional West African palaver, adapted from the Portuguese palavra, or “word,” which had a great many meanings. Among the Mende, a palaver could be a dispute or a problem that needed to be settled; a consultation (“peace palaver”); a religious meeting (“God-palaver”); a grudge (“a palaver live in my heart”); or simply a quest to learn. To read, for example, was called “book palaver.” A palaver could concern an accidental killing of a villager’s chicken or a deadly war that had gone on for years. A tremendous amount of cultural business was transacted through palavers at the bari, or public house, where the speaker learned his trade—how to combine intellectual rigor and dramatic flair to carry the day in argument. As the African interpreter of the German linguist Sigismund Koelle explained to him, “We can talk one thing in many ways…word never done.” Cinqué’s training in the palavers of his native society would serve him well as an orator in America.41

  Warfare

  Chronic, bloody warfare wracked the homelands of Amistad Africans during the 1830s, and left them experienced in the ways of violence as both agents and victims. Signs of war were everywhere, even when the fighting could not be directly observed. George Thompson took a trip on which he passed the ruins of twenty towns, many of them burned and razed to the ground, “swept clean,” as he put it. Here and there might be seen the skull of a head war man on a stick, a grisly public trophy by which conquerors announced their power. Piles of deliberately unburied bodies also littered the war-torn landscape as the vanquished were left to the disposal of wild animals. Wars closed roads and rivers and obstructed trade, as reflected in a comment Grabeau made about the extreme scarcity of salt in his village: it had become an expensive commodity that “none but the rich eat.” War also transformed the routines of daily life. A Mende chief named Kambahway remarked that, in wartime, “if the people go to work farm, a part have to watch with guns, while the others work.”42

  Even the physical arrangements of Mende towns reflected ubiquitous warfare. At the center of each town was the “war village,” where warriors and their weapons were always at the ready. Around this central place were built satellite villages, as many as eight to ten in number, with several thousand residents. Many towns had palisaded defense works with deep ditches; thick, oiled, slippery walls; spiked ditches on the inside; and an interior wall with gun holes and platforms from which town warriors might fire on invaders. Warriors worked as sentries on a town’s perimeter to detect and warn against intruders, and towns had strategies of escape in case enemies should breach their walls. People fled with a few essentials into the forest, where they hid and lived for weeks at a time, commoning until the marauding army had moved on.43

  Kissicummah, a “small, very old, smart, shrewd, kind” Mende king who had become a “Mahomedan,” explained a fundamental cause of such warfare: “So many chiefs in the country is the cause of the difficulty. It is as if there were many Gods, each opposing the plans and desires of the other. One wants to send rain, another sunshine—one this, and the other that, so they would be all the time contending.” He wished for a king powerful enough—himself, surely—to subordinate the others and thereby create peace, but he knew that “while there are so many kings, the country cannot come good.” Competition over land, trade, and honor spurred endless bloody conflicts.44

  By “many kings,” Kissicummah also meant many nations: the Mende fought the Temne, the Vai, the Gola, the Kru, the Bullom, and they fought each other, furiously. The Mende were known at Freetown, where many landed as Liberated Africans taken off the slave ships by the British antislavery patrol, as “a wild savage people, continually at war amongst themselves and against their neighbours, the Timnehs particularly.” One of the longest wars that wracked the region was fought between two rival Mende towns, Tikonko and Bumpe, whose warriors battled for almost twenty years. Reverend Thompson spent a great deal of time in peace palavers, trying to end the war between the two groups, repeatedly drawing attention to their cultural commonalities: “You are all in one country, of one color, speak one tongue, children of one Father, brothers of one family. Is it good for such persons to fight? Is it right?” Struggles for resources among localized polities pitted warriors of similar cultures against each other.45

  A second and related cause of war was the aggressive expansion of the slave trade, led by the Vai King Siaka, who, for the coastal region at least, became the kind of dominant leader Kissicummah had called for. Koelle noted that until around 1830 the Vai had controlled the area fifteen to twenty miles inland from the coast. At the instigation of the Spanish slave traders, they drove another twenty-five to thirty miles into the interior. War and slave-raiding slowly depopulated the coastal region, driving people inland to escape capture. Those who remained gained protection, but they suffered deskilling as they came to depend on European traders for useful items they had once made themselves. Most of all they depended on weapons—the guns and powder provided by Blanco and other traders that armed Siaka’s warriors and enabled their work of expropriation.46

  Because the Vai were not numerous and did not have enough warriors to carry out Siaka’s territorial and slave-raiding designs, the king hired mercenaries, sending messengers to villages near and far to “buy war”—that is, to make deals with head men for warriors who would be rewarded for their labors with plunder of various sorts: money, commodities, slaves, and land. Many of the mercenaries hired were Mende, whose warrior traditions served Siaka’s ambitions. Indeed, scholars agree that the movement of the Mende toward the coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries owed much to successful mercenary fighting, after which leading warriors were awarded land upon which they built new towns of their own. During the prolonged war of the 1830s between Siaka and Amara Lalu, Mende warriors fought on both sides. It seems that at least two of the Amistad captives, Cinqué and Bau, fought for Amara Lalu, against Siaka, in a losing cause.47

  At least one of the Amistad Africans, and probably several more, had experience as a mercenary “war boy.” Gnakwoi, a Loma, had served under the famous warrior Goterah, a “well-built, muscular man” who growled like a leopard, the magnificent creature from which he took his name. Goterah once announced to Thomas Buchanan, the American governor of Liberia, that “he makes war and carries it wherever he pleases.” As one of his instruments of war, Gnakwoi served the Vai against the Gola. He may have served in other campaigns in which Goterah and his men fought on behalf of Kondo and Mende kings against various enemies. But Gnakwoi’s service against the Gola came back to haunt him, for after the war, as he traveled through Gola country on his way to market, he was recognized as an enemy warrior, captured, and promptly sold into slavery, eventually to the very people—the Vai—on whose behalf he had once fought against his new masters. A Vai merchant in turn sold him to a Spaniard named Peli, which is how he ended up at Lomboko, then aboard the Teçora and finally the Amistad.48

  The main style of warfare in the region, which the Mende shared, was one of guerilla action—surprise, small-scale attacks, almost always at night, often when “the moon was dead,” the heavens dark. Goterah promised to attack a local mission at the “death of the moon,” and made good on the pledge. Some African soldiers used muskets and pistols, as these had been “scattered all over the country” by slave traders. The Temne and the Susu preferred the bow and arrow, while the Mende went into ba
ttle with the cutlass as their weapon of choice. Mende warriors uttered “horrible war shouts” as they breached the walls of a fortified town, rushing about, once inside, “in a frantic manner from one side to the other, and cutting anyone whom they encounter.” Slashing away right and left, they sowed “panic amongst the enemy,” forcing them to abandon the stockade. They sought to terrify and force flight, rather than to kill, partly because they wanted plunder, which included the capture of slaves for both domestic and Atlantic purposes.49

  Domestic Slavery

  The Amistad Africans knew domestic slavery in their own societies. Grabeau’s wealthy uncle owned slaves, and several of the rebels had slaved for African masters—Yaboi, for instance, for ten years. Adam Jones notes that slavery existed by the early seventeenth century, its extent was unknown, and that throughout the region the free and the enslaved were easily distinguished one from another. Yet “slavery” covered a broad array of power relations. West African varieties differed fundamentally from plantation slavery across the Atlantic, where people were brutally exploited as they produced commodities such as sugar for the world market. To be sure, labor could be harsh for slaves who labored in the Gallinas salt pans, and it could be deadly for those forced into armies and battle. Most slaves, however, probably cultivated rice, under material conditions that sometimes made it hard for European observers to tell who was the master and who was the slave. Authority over domestic slaves was paternal and familial, and many over time were absorbed into their host families and cultures. Pugnwawni noted that during his two years of slavery at the hands of an African man named Gardoba, he cultivated rice: “His master’s wives and children were employed in the same manner, and no distinction made in regard to labor.”50