CINEMA-USA: Amistad Awash in Stereotypes

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 16 1997 (IPS) - ‘Amistad’, U.S. Director Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, is a powerful and compelling account of a 19th century slave mutiny. But, unfortunately, it falls far short of hopes that it would provide an African-American parallel to ‘Schindler’s List’ – the award-winning blockbuster about the Jewish Holocaust olf World War II.

While some of the drama, especially the flashbacks to the ‘Middle Passage,’ the trans-Atlantic voyage of slaves from Africa to Cuba, is as intense and horrific as the concentration camp scenes of ‘Schindler’s List,’ the movie is far more focused on the legal and political developments affecting the mutineers’ fate.

In fact, the actual perspective of slavery and the slave trade presented by this 35-million-dollar production does not differ much from what most U.S. children learned in primary school when the Spanish ship “Amistad” was seized off the coast of New England in 1839. And the subtexts of the movie – Iberian cruelty, African deference to “big men,” and the superiority of Anglo- American government and justice – amount to stereotypes long familiar to North Americans.

The story is based on a true incident. Shortly after weighing anchor in Havana, all but two of the Amistad crew was slaughtered by some of the 53 slaves it was transporting to the eastern part of the island. Led by Joseph Cinque (portrayed in the movie by Djimon Hounsou), these new arrivals from West Africa spared the crew members to navigate the ship back home.

But the Spaniards piloted the boat northward until its capture. The slaves – both men and women – were put in prison in New Haven Connecticut to stand trial for piracy and murder, but the case was mostly about jurisdiction. The US government under President Martin Van Buren claimed that a treaty with Spain required that the cargo be returned to Cuba, while the two Spanish crew members claimed the slaves as their own property.

Backed by the abolitionist movement, the defence argued that, because the defendants were not born slaves, they had been illegally acquired. Along with Britain, the United States outlawed the slave trade in 1807, so people taken from Africa after that date could not be slaves under US law.

The case took place against a backdrop of rising tension over slavery between the North and South that was to plunge the United States into bloody civil war 22 years later. Southerners, led by Sen. John Calhoun, put strong pressure on Van Buren to keep appealing the case to higher courts lest an acquittal provoke secessionist forces.

Tried twice in New Haven, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court which ruled in favour of the defence, then led by former president John Quincy Adams (played by Anthony Hopkins), and ordered the mutineers set free and returned to Africa if they so wished.

These events are covered in the film reasonably realistically, although the presence of a black abolitionist leader (Morgan Freeman) on the defence team is fictional, as is the depiction of a supposed visit by Cinque to Adams’ home. And the main defence attorney, Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), was actually a New England aristocrat, rather than the scruffy, uncertain lawyer shown in the movie.

Those quibbles apart, the movie is a powerful drama, dominated by the superb performance of Hounsou, a novice actor originally from Benin, and Hopkins, as well as stunning cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, who also worked under Spielberg in Schindler’s List.

But given the high expectations surrounding the movie and its pre-release comparisons to Schindler’s List, Amistad ultimately disappoints. Schindler’s List, after all, pulled few punches when it addressed German responsibility for the Holocaust against the Jews. By contrast, Amistad pulls its punches almost everywhere it can to ignore U.S. complicity in what is called the “black Holocaust.”

In this movie, the bad guys are all foreigners. It’s other Africans who capture Cinque in his native village, and it’s the Spanish pilots who trick the Africans by sailing the boat to the United States and then make a claim to their ownership. The 11- year-old Queen Isabella of Spain (Anna Paquin) insists that Washington turn over the slaves.

The movie’s core – 10 minutes out of a movie of more than two- and-a-half hours- consistsd of flashbacks to the Middle Passage aboard a Portuguese slaver – it is the Iberians once again who are responsible for the horrific cruelty inflicted on the captives.

These depictions are remarkably consistent with the way U.S. schoolchildren were taught in the 1800s. Geography texts of the time invariably described Iberians as deceitful, avaricious and, above all, cruel. The same texts often stressed that Africans enslaved each other long before Europeans arrived in Africa.

Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, are depicted in the movie as either the slaves’ champions or, at worst, as indifferent to their plight. Aside from Calhoun’s threatening mutterings and the baleful looks of abolitionists outside the courtroom, slavery in the United States, which continued until 1863, is quite simply off the screen. This movie is about the slave trade in which, by then supposedly, the United States had no role.

Remarkably, this portrayal is also consistent with texts of the period. By the 1830s, the slave trade in US schools books was described as “shameful,” “unmerciful,” or “abominable,” according to the 1964 study by Ruth Elson, ‘Guardians of Tradition.’

“I trust that the stories we hear of the cruel treatment of slaves are exaggerated; but the slave trade is clearly founded on injustice and oppression,” recounted one 1833 reader.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of the movie, however, is the depiction of the Africans themselves. Other than Cinque (whose Mende name was Sengbe Pieh), none of the Africans is presented as a distinctpersonality, least of all the women who are given no real role whatsoever. From virtually the first scene, all of the mutineers follow Cinque without question or consultation.

His voice is theirs. He is the African “big man” with whom Washington as a matter of policy has always preferred to deal.

As noted by one newspaper columnist here, when Cinque and his fellow-captives speak Mende to one another in white people’s presence, their remarks are subtitled; but when they are by themselves, their words usually go untranslated. “When blacks are among their own, the film seems to say, what’s in their hearts and minds is just not worth knowing,” he wrote.

The message is: Africans may be noble and courageous, but they lack the arts of self-government.

When first introduced to their lawyers, they quarrel over which clan should host the interview; Cinque can’t seem to understand how Adams, the ex-president, could have ceased to be the “big man” of his nation; and, on his return at last to Africa, he finds that civil war has swept his land and that his family was – yes – sold into slavery by other Africans.