The Amistad Rebellion (6 page)

The
Amistad
Africans were, by and large, urban people. Foone had lived in the “large town” of Bumbe, while Gnakwoi hailed from Tuma, “the largest town in the Balu country.” Their home cities, they insisted, were roughly equal in size to New Haven, which in 1840 had a population of roughly twelve thousand, suggesting significant urbanization in Mende country. The urban past of many was illustrated by Fuli’s comment about how man-stealers preyed on city dwellers, and perhaps even more dramatically by the way in which fully a dozen of the
Amistad
Africans were captured and enslaved while they were “on the road” traveling from one place to another, most often to “buy clothes.” The leaders of the rebellion, Cinqué and Grabeau, were both caught while “traveling in the road.” Burna was captured while “going to the next town,” Kinna while on his way to Kongoli.
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They were living, clearly, within a vibrant system of regional trade. According to their teacher Sherman Booth, they “traffic principally in rice, clothes, and cattle, and these are the only currency of the country.” There was also a ready trade in domestic items such as salt and fish, both from the coast, along with European goods of various kinds, especially the rum about which Cushoo spoke, as well as guns, gunpowder,
textiles, and tools. Over time the main commodity exchanged for the European items was slaves, but there was “by-play” (secondary trade), as one merchant explained, in ivory and camwood, in addition to rice required by the slave trade.
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The
Amistad
Africans presented themselves as part of extended, usually multigenerational kin groups that lived under the same roof, as was common among the Mende and their neighbors. Sessi lived with his three brothers, two sisters, wife, and three children. Fabanna was the only person to mention that he had more than one wife; he had two, and one child. It was later discovered by missionaries that Burna, who, in detailing his kin mentioned no wife, actually had seven. Fuli lived with his mother, father, five brothers, and, for a time, with his grandmother. Family trumped everything else, in his worldview. When asked if he might wish to stay in the United States after gaining his freedom, he replied, “If America people would give him his hat full of gold, and plenty of houses and lands, to stay in this country, he would not, for gold was not like his father, nor his mother, nor his sister, nor his brother.” Throughout their ordeal the
Amistad
Africans steadfastly insisted that they wanted to return to “their homes, their birth-place, the land of their fathers.”
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It is difficult to know precisely how old the
Amistad
Africans were because they did not reckon age according to the European calendar. A visitor to the jail grouped them into four basic categories, probably based on appearance and whatever information he had been able to gain through interviews. The youngest group was the four children, each of whom (including Margru) was probably around nine years old in 1839. Then came five youths, very likely in their early to mid-teens. Another eleven were said to be “in middle age,” which probably meant late twenties and early thirties. That left the largest group, sixteen, in early adulthood, late teens to mid-twenties. These numbers are consistent with the long-standing preferences of slave traders and American plantation owners, who always wanted to buy men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five for plantation labor such as awaited the captives in Cuba. There was also a tendency, as the slave trade evolved and traders found fewer men in the prime of life, to buy
younger men. Because age and experience were highly valued among the Mende and others of the Gallinas Coast, the eleven men of “middle age” exercised considerable authority within the group.
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The
Amistad
Africans were modest in size, although fit and athletic. In March 1841, John Pitkin Norton noted in his diary that they were “small men” but proud, unbowed by the experience of slavery. Ndzhagnwawni was the tallest adult at five feet nine inches, while Grabeau, an excellent acrobat, was the shortest at four feet eleven inches. The four children were all roughly four feet three inches tall. The average height of the
Amistad
men was a shade above five feet four inches at a time when the typical African American man was about the same size, and the American male of European descent was about two inches taller.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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“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.
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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.
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