The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone

Chapter Five. National Identity: The Dramatic Return of Memory in Sierra Leone

CHAPTER FIVE National Identity: The Dramatic Return of Memory in Sierra Leone The literature on collective memory suggests that a society's selection and ascription of significance to a historical event is not an arbitrary process.1 In public discourse, memory is constructed and deployed to achieve a number of strategic ends. How a particular society understands its past is significant to how that society constructs its present values. The past is "a social construction shaped by the concerns and needs of the present."2 In other words, because the past helps us interpret our present-day reality, we are careful to select material that will in fact serve the purpose of interpreting the present. Past events are commemorated "only when the contemporary society is motivated to define them as such."3 Many collective memory scholars believe that the nature and interpretation of present-day reality significantly determine the direction that reconstruction of the past takes. To be sure, both the past and the future exist in present time because our activation of "the events that constitute the referents of the past and future" are based on our interpretation of the present.4 The past is not "final and irrevocable" as so often believed ; rather, it is "as hypothetical as the future." So, whether the past is mythical or implied, its validity lies in the position it occupies in society's shared consciousness or collective memory; a past action must have occurred for the present to be what it is.5 By extension, the Amistad events are believable because they happened in fact and led to the establishment of the mission in Kaw Mende, Sierra Leone. The Mende mission was the result of abolitionists' desire both to continue the work of Christianizing the Amistad Africans and to initiate NATIONAL IDENTITY 99 mission activities throughout Africa. The evidence of the Mende mission and its contributions to the nation are still very much evident today. Nevertheless, the Amistad events of 1839-1842 hardly registered on the consciousness of the nation of Sierra Leone or on that of later generations of Americans. Although the result of the revolt and trials in the Americas played itself out in Sierra Leone, it left no impression on the collective memory of the nation. Why did the nation forget this story? More important, why does the nation only now remember? The Amistad event was an incident that Sierra Leoneans, before the 19805, never identified with as part of their national history, but the validity of this past has recently taken its place in the shared consciousness of the people. As Clifton Johnson has noted, it is mainly artists and writers in the United States, who have kept the "drama of the Amistad incident" alive in the American imagination.6 For Sierra Leoneans, unfortunately, ignorance of the grand events of the Amistad story has largely robbed them of a victorious national identity. In recent years, however, the Amistad story has been birthed in the imagination of Sierra Leonean artists. It would seem that up until 1992., the Amistad was only an inherited past, that is, an implied objective past. The Amistad's factual existence in the past did not necessarily lend itself to an inherited memory. Although the Amistad Africans evidently talked a great deal about their experiences in the West, there is no evidence that their story received national attention. It would seem that Sierra Leoneans actually forgot the Amistad story. What, then, does it take to remember the collective past? Constructionists , or theorists of the past, see tradition and commemorative rites as transmitted through a "guiding pattern" to "subsequent generations ." This transmission is important because, as Barry Schwartz has stated, "Stable memories ... creat[e] links between the living and the dead and promot[e] consensus over time."7 Apparently, the Amistad account entered into history but not memory. Although the mnemonic structure of the oral tradition—the guiding pattern common to the Sierra Leonean people—was in place when the Amistad Africans returned home, other structures necessary for the story's transmission seem to have been displaced. Most of what we recall today about the Amistad is culled from written history about the events in the United States. Those that followed in Sierra Leone were largely transmitted through the letters of missionaries to their home base in the United States. Given that even today a large percentage of the Sierra IOO REINVENTING THE PRESENT...