Rebellious Histories

The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism

Matthew J. Christensen

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438439716
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and prison writers from Sierra Leone and the United States brought a new attention to the events of the 1839 Amistad shipboard slave rebellion. As a testament of the human will to freedom, the story of the Amistad mutineers also describes the wide arc of the international circuits of capital, commerce, juridical power, and diplomacy that structured and reproduced the Atlantic slave trade for nearly four centuries. In Rebellious Histories, Matthew J. Christensen argues that for creative artists struggling to comprehend—and survive—pernicious manifestations of globalization like Sierra Leone's civil war, the Amistad rebellion's narrative of exploitative resource extraction, transatlantic migrations, armed rebellion, and American judicial intervention offers both a historical antecedent and allegory for contemporary global capitalism's reconfiguration of culture and subjectivity. At the same time, he shows how the mutineers' example provides a model for imagining utopian forms of transnationalism. With its wide-ranging comparative approach, Rebellious Histories brings a unique perspective to the study of the cultural histories of both slave resistance and globalization.

1

Cinque/Sengbe

Naming the Transnational Subject

With an agenda to destroy all institutions of incarceration, dismantle the nation-state, and form a new transnational race, the Symbionese Liberation Army was nothing less than the United States' radical Left's most spectacular failure, bringing both unparalleled media focus and public derision for its idealistic and bizarrely contradictory revolutionary agenda. Introducing itself to the San Francisco Bay area in November 1973 with a bold gesture that can only be taken as emblematic of its contradictory politics, the SLA assassinated the Oakland Schools superintendent, Dr. Marcus Foster, who was the only African American in the country at the time to occupy the helm of a major urban school district. Widely condemned as irresponsible and adventurist by the likes of Angela Davis and Huey Newton, Foster's assassination would prove to be only a tame precursor to the SLA's most spectacular action.¹ In the spring of 1974 the SLA jolted to life middle America's nightmarish fantasies about revolution, black power, and the moral decay of white suburban youth when it kidnapped media heiress Patty Hearst, ransomed several million dollars in food donations from the Hearst family for California's poor, magically transformed Patty into a revolutionary, and, only four months later, died a real-time televised death in a massive firefight with the Los Angeles Police Department. Only Hearst and two other core members escaped the shootout. Said to be “more whoopticians than theorists” by one leftist would-be sympathizer (Hinckle 12), the SLA repeatedly demonstrated a penchant for carrying out its revolution as a “guerrilla theater” that was equal parts militant and absurd but wholly televisable.² In a manner sure to draw widespread attention, its actions were often carried out by white revolutionaries in blackface and under the threat of death by cyanide-tipped bullets. As an almost exclusively white terrorist cell led by a black male exconvict that mixed its quasi-Marxist antiprison rhetoric with messianic mysticism, the SLA became a caricature of the revolutionary Left and magnified the movement's problems of masculine privilege and charismatic leadership to epic proportions. For the group and its observers, the name Cinque Mtume, taken by SLA leader Donald David DeFreeze and modeled on Amistad leader Joseph Cinque, became a focal point around which many of these challenges were debated.

By way of an extended introduction to this chapter on the use of the Amistad rebellion on both sides of the Atlantic to name the material conditions and racialized effects of global capitalism, I sketch out in these opening paragraphs how DeFreeze's choice of Cinque Mtume as his nom de guerre opened a space for outside observers and members of the SLA alike to contend with the group's, and its leader's, problematic political identity. For social commentators, the uneasiness over and oftentimes grudging recognition of the SLA's revolutionary leadership were repeatedly expressed through attempts to explicate DeFreeze's choice of ‘Cinque’ as a name. These observers sought clues in the history of the Amistad revolt that might reveal something about the SLA's political goals and agenda but that could also be used to contest its revolutionary credentials. For the SLA, explicating the symbolism of the name offered yet one more opportunity to display the outlandish and fundamentally patriarchal revolutionary sensibility that undermined its own inchoate agenda. Where it advocated an egalitarian, nonhierarchical revolution, it managed also to identify a messianic meaning in the name ‘Cinque,’ thereby turning its bearer, DeFreeze, into the Fifth Prophet, a modern-day messiah and heroic patriarch quite at odds with the group's vision of a communitarian utopia.

That Donald David DeFreeze's nom de guerre, ‘Cinque Mtume,’ would become an important signifier in the contest over the SLA's meaning to American culture and politics should come as little surprise considering that for each SLA novice, the revolution began with personal rebirth, a process that saw initiates renounce their prior identities and names. Members Emily Harris and Joe Remiro emerged as “Yolanda” and “Bo,” for example, and Patty Hearst as “Tania.” These new names were intended to capture the revolutionary spirit of past anti-imperialist militants. Patty-as-Tania would write, “I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia for the people of Bolivia. I embrace the name with the determination to continue fighting in her spirit” (“SLA Communiqué, April 3, 1970” qtd. in Avery and McLellan 301). It appears that Cinque Mtume brought the renaming practice to the SLA from California's Vacaville prison, where, as a member of the Black Cultural Association (BCA), he shed his “slave” name Donald David DeFreeze (Avery and McLellan 20). Founded in 1968, the BCA aimed to help black prisoners take control of their own rehabilitation through education in literacy, math, African culture, and radical politics (Cheevers 1, 5). Members of the BCA were encouraged to shed the names that they had inherited from the white men and women who had enslaved their ancestors. Implicit in the choice to rename themselves was the recognition that one of the most powerful acts carried out by slave masters was to deny an enslaved African's identity by giving him or her a new name, a violent practice of erasure that, according to Orlando Patterson, functioned as one of the constitutive elements of enslavement (Patterson 55). To reject one's “slave” name and adopt a new self-fashioned name, as innumerable African Americans did during the 1960s and 1970s, was thus far more than a means of expressing one's individuality. By adopting a new name, one's moniker was made a contested signifier in the fiercely fought battles over race and power and signaled in no uncertain terms one's political opposition to hegemonic power. Consequently, Donald David DeFreeze, the chronically underemployed petty criminal and repeat inmate, was reinvented as an embodiment of Joseph Cinque's proud resistant spirit and the Swahili word for “disciple” or “apostle.”

Names played a central part in the SLA's agenda, and because they did, observers seeking to comprehend the SLA's extravagant political performativity focused on them. To say that the popular media had a field day with Hearst's transformation into the bank-robbing, machine-gun-toting Tania would be an understatement; but in a more restrained manner, the press also sought to construct an explanatory narrative for the SLA's revolution by unpacking the historical meanings embedded in DeFreeze's revolutionary name. Voicing ambivalence about the SLA's contribution to racial politics and about the contradictions in its revolutionary agenda, at least two publications would latch onto the persistent, though now discredited, claim that Amistad leader Joseph Cinque became a slave trader upon his return to West Africa.³ Dawn Magazine, the national periodical supplement included with such venerable middle-class African American newspapers as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Afro-American, signaled its anxiety about how to characterize Cinque Mtume's legacy as an African American leader by running an article shortly after the May 1974 shootout with the LAPD that simultaneously eulogized the slain black SLA field marshal and recollected Joseph Cinque's legacy as an ironic hero who had bravely challenged the institution of slavery while personally benefiting from it (Henegan, “There Was Another Cinque” 15). Without linking the slave-trading legacy to DeFreeze directly, the article nevertheless associates the original Cinque's taint with the slain SLA leader's character.⁴ Likewise, in an effort to make sense of the SLA's rampant contradictions of leftist theory and its routine political faux pas, Warren Hinkle repeats the slave-trading rumor in a 1974 San Francisco Phoenix article. Hinckle queries:

Donald DeFreeze adopts the name Cinque, an African chief who took control of a slave ship but lost his abolitionist brownie points when he became a slave trader himself … What obtains with these names? Is the SLA perverse? Or uninstructed? Such questions bait the theory recently propounded by conspiracy theorists on the left that the SLA is a creature of the CIA. The Ivy League delinquents in the Agency's dirty tricks department are known to do their communist homework and it is unlikely that even the lads who brought us the Bay of Pigs would make a boo-boo such as giving so obviously less than 24-karat left wing handles. As to whether the SLA is being perverse or dumb, the smart money is with the former. The leftist double entendre in the names Cinque and Tania⁵ served to further provoke the left, already near to spitting teeth over the lumpen brazenness of the SLA. I believe or half believe that the SLA gets its kicks out of jerking off the left. (1)

For Hinckle, then, DeFreeze's choice of the name ‘Cinque’ reveals less a series of contradictions rooted in ignorance than a calculated pattern of manipulating expectations. Hinckle takes a bemused pleasure in the SLA's thumb nosing but nevertheless remains apprehensive about the group's politics. For each of these journalists, DeFreeze's revolutionary sobriquet opens a space to both explain and contest the SLA's revolutionary program.

In turn, the SLA made its own exegesis of the name the source of one of its most troublingly problematic contradictions. Against the backdrop of its egalitarian rhetoric, the SLA produced a document in which Cinque Mtume is cast as a patriarchal messiah come to deliver the oppressed masses from exploitation. As one might expect from a group whose leader took his name as part of a cultural nationalist organization, the SLA initially associates Cinque Mtume with the symbolism of rebellion against tyranny so clearly identified with the Amistad revolt. The SLA communiqué dated April 4, 1974, proclaims, “Cinque Mtume is the name that was bestowed upon him by his imprisoned sisters and brothers. It is the name of an ancient African chief who led the fight of his people for freedom” (“SLA Communiqué, April 4, 1974,” qtd. in Avery and McLellan 521). But what begins as a move to refashion the Amistad revolt narrative for the contemporary struggle quickly turns into a nightmare of gender, race, and class fetishism. While Cinque Mtume is shown initially to embody the original Cinque's freedom-loving resistant spirit, he comes to represent less a man of the people than the new patriarchal messiah: “The name means Fifth Prophet, and Cin was many years ago given this name because of his keen instinct and sense, his spiritual consciousness, and his deep love of all the people and children of this earth” (521). Congnizant of the Left's widespread distrust of messianic rhetoric, the statement clumsily backtracks to assure that Cinque was in no way inflicted with an “ego problem” (521). Ultimately, however, it reaffirms his God-like status: “He has ONE WORD to the children of the oppressed and the children of the oppressor: COME” (523). Cinque Mtume, then, is revealed to his people as the patriarch who gathers up his children to lead them to salvation. The black male excon becomes the new messiah and the only true leader of the people.

Clearly, a whole host of factors contributed to DeFreeze's cultish veneration, not least of which is the misapprehension of how the original Cinque received his name. Apparently unaware that ‘Cinque’ was a slave name imposed on Sengbe Pieh by a Spanish plantation owner, the SLA interprets the name as the Spanish number 5, turning DeFreeze into the Fifth Prophet. Already encumbered with a penchant for mystical interpretation, the SLA emphasizes this quasinumerological exegesis rather than link its revolution against incarceration and imperialism to the Amistad revolt and Sengbe Pieh's own battle to protect and preserve his African identity. The history of the Amistad revolt could easily have given the SLA a more materialist narrative for explaining the structural bases of domination and resistance and for articulating a theory of transnational oppositional identity. The SLA's critique of incarceration, after all, often included the language of enslavement, and the group was adamant about the culpability of multinational corporations for race, gender, and class oppression (Pearsall et. al., “Communiqué addressed to the San Francisco Phoenix April 4, 1974;” “Communiqué #3, February 4, 1974”). However, belying Hinckle's faith in the SLA's historical acumen, the group eschews the materialist historical narrative for the cultish, mystical, and messianic. By deifying its sole black male member, by turning DeFreeze into the prophetic father figure of the oppressed masses, the SLA repudiates its own rhetoric of gender equality and nonhierarchical social organization. The shortsighted interpretation of what the name ‘Cinque’ could signify and the hagiographic romanticization of DeFreeze that resulted quite clearly emblematize the SLA's inchoate revolutionary agenda.

Its celebrity status notwithstanding, the SLA ultimately not only ensured its own downfall, but, in the analysis of at least one later observer, contributed significantly to the dissolution of the revolutionary Left as a whole.⁶ Yet even in this apparent failure, we see a glimmer of how critical the Amistad revolt history could be to the United States' radical leftist movements of the 1970s and to subsequent critiques of global capitalism in the 1980s and '90s. Despite the SLA's troubling hermeneutics, Joseph Cinque's armed revolt against enslavement offered precisely the narrative structure that the revolutionary left of the 1970s required. At a moment when the state was ascribed little legitimacy and incarceration was defined as nothing more than a new brand of enslavement, the Amistad revolt's imagery of bold, bloody, and legally legitimated violence symbolized the direction toward militancy in which the revolutionary Left believed it ought to move. As we shall see, another self-fashioned Cinque—Ruchell “Cinque” Magee—in fact, had already used the Amistad revolt four years earlier to redefine the hegemonic definitions of tyranny and enslavement in much this way, and, as it would turn out, Cinque's name would remain a compelling—and deeply contested—signifier in the United States even after militant black power gave way to an era of racialized neoliberal Reaganomics, as it would also in Sierra Leone where the failures of postcolonial political independence fueled trenchant poverty, civil war, and large-scale migration. On both sides of the Atlantic, the names ‘Cinque(z)’ and ‘Sengbe’ would tell powerful stories about the place of continental and diasporic Africans in the larger structures of global capitalist geopolitics, and they would locate people of African descent in a longer history of global trade, exploitation, and violence.

Because self-given names reveal so much about an individual's conception of his or her place in society, and because the names ‘Cinque’ and ‘Sengbe’ contain such rich historical significations, I focus this chapter on African American and Sierra Leonean acts of claiming revolt leader Cinque/Sengbe's name as a discursive process of naming the material conditions and racialized effects of global capitalism. The following analysis examines African American texts by Ruchell “Cinque” Magee and Clifford Mason in which the author or his fictional character inhabits the name and persona of Amistad slave revolt leader Joseph Cinque(z). Alongside these American texts, I explicate a Sierra Leonean visual arts movement that aimed to reclaim Cinque's birth name, ‘Sengbe Pieh.’ Certainly, the cultural logic of shedding slave names is at work in the act of taking Cinque's name and in asserting his birth name, but I argue that such acts also discursively locate the self or selves historically in specific material conditions. Reclaiming the name ‘Cinque/Sengbe,’ I argue, charts the recognition of how the neoliberal denationalization of “legitimate” capital and the expansion of “phantom” global economies trading clandestinely in diamonds, drugs, and arms have disproportionately impacted material security and practices of self-representation. However, I show that juxtaposing Magee's writings with Mason's novels, and their U.S.-based works with the Sierra Leonean paintings, reveals both the productive possibilities and the limits of formulating a transnational black subjectivity vis-à-vis the differential privileges afforded Africans and African Americans under global capitalism.

In the first part of this chapter, I look to the Amistad-informed rhetoric of California inmate activist Ruchell Magee, who adopted the name ‘Cinque’ in 1970, to consider how the original rebel leader's name and the historical narrative of his 1839 slave revolt were deployed to designate the ontological status of incarcerated people of color under the regime of U.S. imperialism and the attendant rise of multinational capitalism. An improbable hero and inmate intellectual in an era of best-selling prison manifestos and larger-than-life celebrity revolutionaries, the seventh-gradeeducated, Louisiana-born, folksy jailhouse lawyer Ruchell Magee scored his radical credentials with antiprison leftists and his fifteen minutes in the national limelight almost by accident. On August 7, 1970, four years before Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the SLA, a firestorm of bullets rained down on the occupants of a getaway van in the parking lot of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Civic Center in San Francisco's wealthy white suburban Marin County, leaving four dead, two wounded, and three, including Magee, miraculously uninjured. Minutes earlier, while testifying on behalf of a fellow San Quentin inmate that day in the Marin County Courthouse, Ruchell Magee took the gun and the opportunity for freedom offered to him by the seventeen-year-old Jonathon Jackson, and joined two other San Quentin inmates in the courtroom in taking Judge Harold Haley, the district attorney, and three jurors hostage. In an apparent attempt to move the captives to a nearby radio station where Jackson likely intended to demand that his brother, the famed prison radical George Jackson, be released from San Quentin, they came under a barrage of fire from prison guards and police in the parking lot. As the only survivor among the would-be revolutionaries, Magee was charged with kidnapping and murder, and soon after he would see a conspiracy charge added in conjunction with Angela Davis's arrest. Davis was implicated because the guns used were registered in her name and because of her rumored romantic attachment to Jonathon's brother. As much as the events in Marin County themselves catapulted Magee into the public's eye, Davis' high-profile defense campaign lent him a broader audience for his analyses of race and incarceration.⁷ Largely forgotten today by the canonizing activist machine that deifies figures such as George Jackson and Mumia Abu Jamal, Magee remains incarcerated on the Marin conviction in California's Corcoran State Corrections Facility, extending a life behind bars that began in 1955 at the age of fifteen when he was charged with the attempted rape of a white woman in his Louisiana hometown and sent to the infamous Angola State Prison. Magee would be free only a few months of his adult life between his release from Angola and an arrest in 1963 in Los Angeles on a marijuana-related kidnapping charge (Thiel, chapter 3, 6).⁸

Because Jonathon Jackson's goals for the courtroom takeover were erased with the bullets that took his life, both the Left, which lauded the Marin County action, and the Nixon-Reagan Right, which stepped up its law-and-order rhetoric as a consequence, ascribed dense layers of meaning to the events of Aug...