from Research in African Literatures Volume 36, Number 1 Excerpt from:Leone's Intersecting Hegemonies in Charlie Haffner's Slave Revolt Drama Amistad Kata-Kata
MATTHEW J. CHRISTENSEN
The University of Texas-Pan American
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ABSTRACTThrough an examination of publications by Sierra Leone's president, the United States Information Service, and Sierra Leonean playwright Charlie Haffner, this article explores how the narrative of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt emerged in the late 1980s as a key modality through which meanings of Sierra Leonean nationalism and claims to state power were contested. The article argues that in its dialogic engagement with the two governmental texts, Haffner's play Amistad Kata-Kata transforms the fear of cannibalism that sparked the slave rebellion into a politically charged trope whereby it couples cannibalism as a name for the excesses carried out by local authorities with cannibalism as a description of the dehumanizing consumption of enslaved African labor within the Atlantic slave system. The trope thus forms a key for translating the slave revolt into a discrediting, disrupting critique of the complex interrelationships between global capitalism and excessive elite accumulation in the postcolony. According to slave revolt leader Sengbe Pieh, he and forty-eight other captives aboard the Amistad schooner rebelled after a slave belonging to the ship's captain gestured that their Spanish-Cuban captors intended to kill, dismember, and eat them. With this misinformation, the recently enslaved Africans unshackled themselves with a nail pried loose from the ship's woodwork, took up the cane knives stored alongside them, and stormed the deck killing the captain and his slave. With these actions the mutineers set in motion their ultimate return to the Mende region of what would become the Sierra Leonean nation-state. Amistad Kata-Kata, Sierra Leonean playwright and songwriter Charlie Haffner's 1988 historical drama about the 1839 Amistad slave rebellion, transforms this fear of cannibalism into a metaphor for the confrontation between Africa and the West during the slave-trade era. Setting much of its action in 1980s Sierra Leone, Haffner's play also evokes cannibalism's prevalent contemporary connotation of the material excesses carried out by local authorities. Coupling the two significations into a single trope, Amistad Kata-Kata stages the contestations depicted in the play among African slave traders, the American White House, the US judiciary, the British government, Cuban plantation owners, proslavery advocates, and numerous antislavery abolitionist factions over the bodies of the African mutineers as a reflection of the postcolonial nation-state with its own intertwined intra- and international competition over political, economic, and natural resources. As the work engages dialogically with two prior Sierra Leonean Amistad texts-published by the Sierra Leonean president's office and the US Department of State-Amistad Kata-Kata employs the cannibal trope as a politically charged hidden transcript to expose, discredit, and disrupt the imbricated relations of power at work in Sierra Leone during the late 1980s just prior to its descent into civil war.
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