Staging the Amistad. Charlie Haffner

records. But Maddy is perhaps the more radical in turning to fiction to critique the racism of the archive and to locate voices lost to history.

      The other significant difference between The Amistad Revolt and the two other plays in this volume is its deeper engagement with the psychosubjective effects of antebellum American racism on its West African protagonists. From the opening scene to the last, the mutineers’ struggle to comprehend and resist their racialization is made a central thematic focus. This is not to say that Haffner and de’Souza George ignore the effects of racism and racialization on the mutineers but rather that Maddy highlights to a much greater extent the traumas they induce. At a moment of what is perhaps his most acute despondency, Maddy’s Sengbe accuses even his supporters of viewing him as “an unwelcome nigger, to be disposed of in any way as soon as possible.” The greater focus on racism and subjectivity stems in part from the influence of Chase-Riboud’s novel. Maddy borrows the Braithwaites, her fictional African American father and daughter, using them in much the same way Chase-Riboud does to root the Amistads’ legal battle, which grew increasingly focused on esoteric questions of international trade law and executive power, in the cultures of American race relations. In the play as in the novel, the Braithwaites help Sengbe Pieh and the other Amistads understand the racial dynamics of their ordeal, naming the Amistads’ humiliations as racism and historicizing that racism as one of the foundational contradictions of American society. In return, the Amistads offer the African Americans a glimpse of a life and subjectivity untainted by the daily degradations that define Black experience in the United States. Each ultimately helps the other resist the pressures to internalize Western racial ideologies. The extensive focus on race is also very much of a piece with Maddy’s oeuvre. From his earliest plays, to his novel No Past, No Present, No Future (1973), and to his coauthored scholarly study of children’s literature, colonial racism and its internalization by Africans on the African continent and in the diaspora was central to his writing. The Amistad Revolt is especially fascinating in this respect not only because it offers one of Maddy’s most nuanced psychological portraits of the racialization of Africans displaced to England or America, but also because it represents a rare direct transatlantic dialogue between Sierra Leonean and African American writers on race, the meanings of enslavement, and resistance.

       The Broken Handcuff

      The final play in this collection is Reverend Raymond E. D. de’Souza George’s The Broken Handcuff. Like Haffner, de’Souza George credits Joseph Opala, his colleague at Fourah Bay College, for sparking his fascination with the 1839 revolt, and in the play’s treatment of heroic struggle and Sierra Leone’s geopolitical impact, it echoes Opala’s lectures and Haffner’s earlier rendition. And like Amistad Kata-Kata, it debuted at the British Council auditorium in Freetown. De’Souza George staged it one more time, with a reduced cast, at the 1994 Victoria Canadian fringe theater festival. It has not been performed since. The Broken Handcuff ultimately shies away from Amistad Kata-Kata’s celebratory air, cloaking the rebellion narrative instead with a bleaker, more dystopic vision. The play comes to its climatic close in the U.S. Supreme Court chambers with the announcement of the Amistads’ legal victory, but any triumph is undercut in the same scene by a slip-of-the-tongue reference to Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, whose Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision just a few years later, and by a reminder of Sengbe Pieh’s discovery upon his return to Mendeland of the likely enslavement of his entire family. De’Souza George also devotes significantly more stage time to the Mende-speaking Africans who collaborated with the coastal slave dealers, depicting them not so much as one-dimensional craven monsters than as individuals motivated by the all-too-recognizably human qualities of jealousy, grievance, and ego. And, moreover, instead of emphasizing the civic well-being to be gained by celebrating forgotten resistance heroes, The Broken Handcuff dwells more on “how much of our history and culture were swept away” because of the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of enslavement.

      A significant measure of the difference from Haffner’s play must be attributed to the changed historical context. In 1991, three years after Amistad Kata-Kata’s debut, Sierra Leone suffered the first wave of armed raids by a rebel militia calling itself the Revolutionary United Front/Sierra Leone (RUF/SL). After remaining relatively contained in the south and east of the country for a year and a half, the RUF/SL launched a major offensive in September 1992 that culminated in the capture of a large diamond-mining concession. From that point on, the already weakly equipped government forces found it increasingly difficult to check the rebel militia’s spread. In contrast to Haffner, writing only six years earlier, de’Souza George offers a narrative about the Amistad rebellion that functions much less to will into being a more civic-minded future than to question how Sierra Leone could have fallen so far from its modest prosperity at the point of political independence and let its ambitious postcolonial dreams slip away in such violent fashion.

      Born in 1947, Raymond de’Souza George has played a leading role as a writer, director, actor, and mentor for young theater professionals coming up through the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College, where he spent his professional career. As a founding member of the influential drama company Tabule Theater, de’Souza George acted in a leading role in Dele Charley’s Blood of a Stranger, the best original drama award winner at FESTAC ’77, the festival of black arts held in Lagos, Nigeria, which saw the staging of now-canonical plays like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii’s critique of neocolonialism I Will Marry When I Want. De’Souza George’s own scripts include the Krio-language play Bobo Lef, which was performed at the London International Theater Festival in 1983, and the English-language work On Trial for a Will, plays that take aim at the corruption of Sierra Leone’s political leaders and the failure of the country’s citizens to stop it. Like other Sierra Leonean playwrights of his generation, de’Souza George has refused to assign external figures such as Euro-American slave traders and British colonizers sole blame for the country’s ills, preferring instead to lay a portion of the responsibility in the hands of the country’s own precolonial and postindependence elite. De’Souza George does not, however, propose that Africa has met the West on equal footing. Suggesting that Euro-American slave traders would not have been able to purchase slaves if there were not Africans willing to sell their fellow Africans, de’Souza George asks, “If the West came to Sierra Leone and wanted to buy [slaves] and the Sierra Leoneans didn’t sell, who would they have bought?” At the same time, he nevertheless insists that slavery is only possible when transatlantic economic conditions are defined by a stark “difference in levels of opportunity.”¹¹ One of the tensions giving his writing its richness stems from the challenge of representing that local culpability without losing sight of the relative socioeconomic disadvantage structuring it.

      In a significant departure from Haffner’s earlier staging of the Amistad history, de’Souza George develops The Broken Handcuff’s thematics through its sophisticated aesthetic architecture as much as through plot and character. Readers and theater companies interested in staging the play thus need to pay close attention to its use of allegory and metaphor, its interplay of languages (English, Krio, and Mende), and its Brechtian theatricality. Before we are ever even introduced to the Amistad revolt protagonists, for example, part 1, scene 3 stages an allegorical encounter set in the ancestral world of the nation-state to suggest that Sierra Leone’s common historical narrative of itself has blinded its citizens to the root sources of the avariciousness and exploitation plaguing the country. As the scene begins, the lights come up to reveal a confrontation between the first colonial governor and six anticolonial nationalists from Sierra Leone’s colonial and early independence past. In their cataloguing of the physical and epistemological violence done by colonialism, the anticolonial nationalists end up unable to escape the binary relation of colonizer-colonized or to produce a useful critique of the root causes of the contemporary exploitation depicted in the play’s opening frame. At the point when the anticolonialists’ tactics appear to have reached their discursive limits, Sengbe Pieh, standing all the while in richly metaphoric shadow at the edge of the stage, steps into the light to authoritatively assert that the country’s myopic focus on its colonial history has blinded it to other equally significant genealogies, including, most obviously, the transatlantic slave trade. Similarly, in a second example, de’Souza