The Amistad Rebellion (7 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
.
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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 battle 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.
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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.”
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Domestic slavery was increasing in the Gallinas region in the early nineteenth century; transatlantic slavery was one of the main reasons why. As Walter Rodney noted, African rulers who engaged in the slave trade with Europeans accumulated more slaves of their own, often vastly more, and this was certainly true of King Siaka, whose rise to power on the Gallinas Coast was based not only on sending thousands to the barracoons of Lomboko, but on settling thousands of others in towns, where they could be governed and kept ready for European demand. Many such towns existed throughout the region. During his travels in Temne country Major Alexander Laing mentioned several times Konkodoogore, a slave town of three to four thousand people.
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Even though most of the
Amistad
Africans had never seen European ships or people, they had, perhaps without knowing it, felt their impact as the global market sunk its tentacles ever more deeply into the Gallinas and its hinterlands. Commodities such as guns, alcohol, and tobacco—all brought to the coast by slave traders—were mentioned frequently as the captives described their homelands and their paths to the coast. Some had been trained in the use of firearms, part of the guns-for-slaves trading cycle that sustained the commerce in human beings. Grabeau mentioned that “smoking tobacco is a common practice” in his hometown of Fulu. Almost all of the
Amistad
men smoked, with relish. Several had pipes in their mouths when their portraits were sketched by William Townsend.
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As domestic slavery expanded throughout the Gallinas and its hinterlands, so did its antithesis, antislavery. The enslaved resisted, on African soil, in a wide variety of ways: they committed suicide, they ran away, and they formed fugitive (maroon) villages in inaccessible places, just as the enslaved were doing simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic. The greatest antislavery event was the Zawo War, in which thousands of slaves, beginning in 1825–1826 and lasting into
the early 1840s, fought back against King Siaka and his supporters. During this time, entire towns of insurgent slaves not only served as magnets for runaways and other fugitives, they waged war against the Vai king and won major concessions, including, for some, their freedom. The
Amistad
Africans knew the struggle against slavery in the 1830s and would carry their knowledge into a wider Atlantic world.
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Slave Trade

The
Amistad
Africans were unwilling actors in an Atlantic slave trade that began with Portuguese traders in the early sixteenth century and evolved slowly to connect the four continents around the Atlantic. Traders such as the Englishman Zachary Rogers arrived in the Gallinas region in the 1670s; he married an African woman and produced a multigenerational dynasty of slave merchants. By 1700, human cargo was a minor, though increasingly significant, part of European trade, alongside ivory, camwood, and
melagueta
pepper. In 1712, when the monopoly of the Royal African Company of England ended, “free traders” sent more slaving vessels to the Gallinas Coast, and by 1750 the trade in slaves had become a dominant part of the trade. The region became more important in the 1790s and then crucial following the abolition of the slave trade by the British and American governments in 1807 and 1808, when Cuban and Brazilian demand for slaves skyrocketed in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Another turning point was the rise to power of Pedro Blanco and King Siaka in the 1820s. Whereas in the eighteenth century slave ship captains had “coasted” from one minor shipping point to another, buying a few slaves at a time, post-abolition they had to load large numbers quickly from a centralized location, which required a concentration of capital and labor. As “fleets of prison ships” plied the coast in the 1830s, slaving was “the universal business of the country and, by far the most profitable.”
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The slave trade at Gallinas was lucrative, but it was also a desperate gamble for all involved. In an 1841 report to Parliament about the
Sierra Leone region, the knowledgeable British diplomat Richard Robert Madden estimated a 180 percent return on investment in slave trading. Yet high profits for merchants, high salaries for captains, and high wages for sailors all were shadowed by death and disaster. Slave-trade merchants lost money when British officials confiscated their vessels, as they did with increasing regularity as the government expanded the anti-slave-trade patrols after 1822, but Royal Navy Captain Frederick Forbes thought that one successful voyage out of four made the full investment profitable. Captains and seamen lost their pay, and often lost their lives, in the area long considered to be the “sepulchre of the Europeans.” The enslaved may have suffered most of all in this war, because of an irony on which naval officers, antislavery activists, and slave traders could agree: the abolition of the slave trade and the subsequent policing of the seas by the British navy, in the face of surging demand for slaves from Brazil and Cuba, fomented social conditions at the factories and on the slave ships that were more violent, more degraded, and generally more horrifying than ever. This would be the experience of the
Amistad
Africans as they were enslaved and transported to Lomboko and then across the Atlantic to Havana.
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