Abducted in Africa, detained in Cuba, the slaves aboard the Amistad ship organised a rebellion in 1839, before reaching the United States where they were subsequently imprisoned. The survivors were ultimately taken back to Sierra Leone, following a long publicity tour set up to pay for their homeward journey.

Marcus Rediker provides us with an excellent study on the Amistad revolt, a supposedly well-known event. This new analysis appears even better to me than his previous work that was translated into French in 2013. [1] The latter was remarkable; however the theory defended by the author was somewhat biased: according to him, the racial violence that still persists nowadays in the United States takes its roots in the revolts and the scandalously repressed mutinies on slave trading ships.

One may partially agree with this theory. Yet the intrinsic violence of slavery appeared well before that time, in Africa, with the abductions, the lootings, the detention of people in barracoons, the slave forts on the coast and with the fact that enslaved Africans had already been very much aware of their own servile condition on the African continent for several months, sometimes years. Marcus Rediker’s previous book also partly made an emotional plea aimed at emphatically convincing the white American readership of the horrifying condition of African slaves. There is nothing of the sort in this present work, and that makes it more powerful: the facts that are stated and the analysis revealing their complexity are properly fascinating.

The rebellion

The author has collected an impressive range of documents from written and oral sources in Cuba, the United States and Sierra Leone. His detailed narrative relies on the constant analysis of his sources, of their reliability, their interpretation, and their impact on their contemporaries, both of Western and African origin. As a very well written work, this book reads like a novel, while manifestly not being one: every detail is backed up by reliable information and the story, although it has a “happy ending”, is terrifying.

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