This study discusses the varied cultural reactions in the United States and Sierra Leone created by the slave ship revolt in 1839. The author, Iyunolu Osagie, is from Sierra Leone where the slave ship "Amistad" took slaves. She said in most of the time that she's been in Sierra Leone she has not heard of the slave ship revolt. She studies the Amistad story to show us the historic and modern significance of the slave ship revolt and its following trials. She also shows us how the slave ship revolt has contributed to the formation of national and cultural identity in very different ways both in Africa and the African communities in the United States.
The book has to main themes, "Remembering the Past" and "Reinventing the Present." In the introduction the author guides us through her history of Sierra Leone and how she never really heard the story of the Amistad revolt, as she would have liked too. Since the incident is a successful story against slave trading the author thinks it is something to be proud of and told more frequently to the communities of Sierra Leone. She connects the Amistad revolt to Charles Johnson's novel "Middle Passage" and Melvin Tolson's poem that has the same name.
In "Remembering the Past," Iyunolu Osagie studies the Amistad story as a literary trope in African American prose, poetry, and drama, and as an historical event that influenced the political and racial landscape of the United States. Her understanding of the Saint Domingue and the Haitian revolts against Melville's Benito Cereno demonstrate that these events united the doubts of African identity. By connecting the Amistad revolt with other major slave revolts led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, Iyunolu Osagie reminds us that these actions symbolized the "unthinkable" for a European and American structure that had no place for African support or humanity. Iyunolu Osagie also discusses the nonstop responsibility of Sierra Leoneans in the educational development of Africans after emancipation and in the development of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
