Staging the Amistad. Charlie Haffner

Woodruff have explored its themes of liberty and heroism. Even Herman Melville draws from the Amistads’ mastery of the ship and its White commanders for its narrative conflict in his novella Benito Cereno. And this is just a short sampling. Apart from Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), released nearly a decade after Charlie Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata premiered, few of these works would have been available in Sierra Leone and none circulated outside small circles, but a similar recognition of the rebellion’s historical and cultural import and its theatrical potential captured the country’s playwrights. Perhaps even more importantly, in Sierra Leone the stage has served as a primary site for exploring political and social questions such as those provoked by the Amistad history. This is due in part to drama’s disproportionate impact in a country with low literacy levels and a tiny population able to afford newspapers, books, or magazines. It is also a function of the country’s dynamic oral storytelling cultures and ritual performance traditions. And, as in many other former British colonies worldwide, stage drama enjoyed a privileged status as both entertainment and social critique throughout much of the twentieth century.

      Stage drama was first brought to England’s colonies as a performative assertion of Britishness, and it was not uncommon to find elaborate theaters staging Elizabethan drama at the farthest-flung outposts of the empire. By the 1930s, Sierra Leoneans had begun to adapt, transform, and indigenize the theater with Krio-language translations of Shakespeare, for example, and with original scripts reflecting African realities.³ Beginning in the late 1960s, Yulisa Amadu Maddy shifted Sierra Leonean drama away from manneristic plays about Freetown’s high society to gritty realist narratives centered on the lives of petty thieves, street boys, and prostitutes who suffered firsthand the legacies of colonial racism and the hypocrisies of the social, political, and economic elite. Maddy’s plays and his position as head of the drama department at Sierra Leone Radio ushered in a new generation of playwrights, including Charlie Haffner’s and Raymond de’Souza George’s mentor, Dele Charley, dedicated to exposing corruption and the abuses of power in the young nation-state.⁴ If the colonial-era productions enabled white administrators and merchants to buttress their Britishness against what appeared to them as the heart of darkness (as well as, of course, to impart the so-called gift of their culture to the colonized), theater for Maddy’s generation was critical in illuminating the threats to Sierra Leone-ness while simultaneously keeping alive the nationalist ideals that fueled the drive to independence. Because they drew attention to internal as well as external threats, their work did not go unpunished. In reaction to Maddy’s play Big Berrin (1976), which takes aim at the excesses of Sierra Leone’s political elite, President Siaka Stevens jailed Maddy, added dramatic works to the country’s censorship act, and closed Freetown’s largest and most popular venue.⁵ These actions dampened political critique in the theater for nearly a decade, but Maddy’s generation had firmly established theater as the dominant mode of cultural production and cultural critique—more so than the novel—and as the literary form for which the country’s writers became internationally known. At the time Haffner began writing Amistad Kata-Kata, there remained, even in the face of government hostility, more than forty active drama companies in Freetown, a city with a population of only about one million.

      Despite theater’s popularity, producing a play in the 1980s about an 1839 slave revolt that took place in the Americas remained neither a risk-free proposition nor an obvious choice of topic. During the worst years of the government’s clampdown on the arts, staging a play about armed insurrection was a likely ticket to jail. A few years prior to the premiere of Amistad Kata-Kata, President Siaka Stevens imprisoned a group of actors on charges of inciting violence after they attempted to stage a play about the nineteenth-century anticolonial leader Bai Bureh.⁶ As a brash, novice playwright with dreams of transforming Sierra Leonean society, Charlie Haffner was nevertheless savvy enough to avoid the same fate. Although Amistad Kata-Kata neither lacks veiled critiques of contemporary Sierra Leonean society nor shies away from celebrating armed insurrection against tyrannical overlords, Haffner made astute use of the new president Joseph Saidu Momoh’s 1985 campaign platform, “Constructive Nationalism,” to fashion his historical narrative as a tale of civic pride in which Sierra Leoneans take center stage in international affairs. Amistad Kata-Kata was thus all the more subversive for not proclaiming its subversiveness.⁷ The bigger challenge, however, might have been that the revolt history was almost entirely unknown in the country. In various interviews and presentations, Haffner has described the deep skepticism of Sierra Leonean audiences who refused to believe that common villagers could have played so prominent a role on the global stage without the revolt having already become a central chapter in the country’s historical narrative of itself.⁸ For Haffner, as again for Raymond de’Souza George six years later, the skepticism was symptomatic of the very problems that he sought to address in the first place and would lead him to write a play that is as much about the necessity for a robust culture of public memory as it is about the Amistad rebellion itself.

       Amistad Kata-Kata

      Of the three plays included here, Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata was the first one written and remains the only one to have been staged primarily in Sierra Leone. Born in 1953, Haffner was first introduced to the Amistad narrative as a student at Fourah Bay College, in Freetown, by the American anthropologist and historian Joseph Opala. A lively and dynamic lecturer with an unwavering belief that Sierra Leone lacked a set of shared symbols on which to build a national civic pride, Opala had started championing Sengbe Pieh as just such a symbolic figure about the same time Haffner enrolled in the college’s Institute of African Studies. Opala was not the first to recognize the leading role Sierra Leoneans played in the revolt. Sierra Leonean historian Arthur Abraham had written about Sengbe Pieh previously. But Opala was perhaps the most vociferous. Inspired by Opala’s lectures and his ideas about heroic nationalist symbols, Haffner wrote the first draft of Amistad Kata-Kata in 1986 as an assignment for Opala’s course on national consciousness. He premiered the play with the Freetong Players, the theater troupe he founded for the purpose, two years later, in 1988, at the British Council auditorium in Freetown. The Freetong Players also recorded a popular narrative ballad, “Sengbe Pieh,” included in this volume, that they and other groups performed in schools, lorry parks, markets, and just about anywhere they could find an audience. Almost single-handedly, Amistad Kata-Kata made the 1839 shipboard rebellion and Sengbe Pieh central figures in Sierra Leone’s historical imaginary.

      Amistad Kata-Kata unfolds as a relatively conventional nine-scene stage drama. The play is plot driven, featuring a chronological narrative that begins with Sengbe Pieh’s capture, proceeds with the Amistads’ sale in Havana and their shipboard uprising, and concludes with the U.S. Supreme Court trial. Its one departure from the historical record comes in the form of a frame narrative set in a Mende village in the 1980s in which a university student and his grandmother discuss the imperatives of historical memory. In its frame and core narratives, Amistad Kata-Kata privileges accessibility over aesthetic complexity, favors clear dialogue over stylized language, and keeps symbolism and metaphor to a minimum. Despite the seriousness of the topic, the play does not shy away from occasional humor. Its depiction of the would-be Cuban slave owners as woebegone subjects of the victorious Amistad rebels regularly generated laughs during the performances I viewed in Freetown in 1990 and 1991, as did depictions of Sengbe Pieh flustering his white American foes by demanding to be called by his Mende name. In terms of its staging, the play requires few props and no complicated lighting, sound, or other theatrical apparatus, its modest demands reflecting the conditions of the Sierra Leonean auditoriums, public parks, school lecture halls, and other informal venues available to the country’s theater companies. While Haffner gives the play a Krio-language title that translates loosely as “Amistad Revolt,” the play itself is in English.

      Thematically, Amistad Kata-Kata aims for a similar transparency, returning repeatedly to a few key points. The play depicts the rebels as never anything less than the authors of their own lives even in the moments when freedom seemed most remote; it insists that cultural self-respect is the bulwark to withstanding the crushing forces of geopolitically dominant institutions such as the transatlantic slave trade or the U.S. legal system; and it posits historical memory as a necessary foundation for civic well-being. This is not to say that Amistad