THE AFRICAN foundations OF THE AMISTAD REBELLION Masks of the Sacred Bush The Peabody Museum of Natural History Yale University.

THE AFRICAN foundations OF THE AMISTAD REBELLION Masks of the Sacred Bush The Peabody Museum of Natural History Yale University, of the present day Haven, Connecticut July 15, 2000-December 31 2001

"The African causes of the Amistad Rebellion" exhibits forty pieces of art from the Mende and related tribes of Sierra Leone and surrounding areas, together with twenty contextual photographs and explanatory and identifying information. Its focus is the art and traditional life from which the African voyagers of the Amistad were taken and that they brought with them to Connecticut as they struggl for their freedom.

In June 1839 fifty-three Mende-speaking folks were sold as slaves in Havana. They were taken in succession board the Amistad, and by the agency of the morning of the fourth day at sea, pair of the Africans had fre and then armed themselves and their comrades. in subordination to their control, the ship sailed north and east, eventually following the U coastline and arriving not on Long Island, where it was seized and taken to of recent origin London, Connecticut. After a drawn out battle in the U.S. courts, the African prisoners, aided from local supporters, won their freedom. In November of 1841 the thirty-five surviving Africans and five missionaries locate sail for Sierra Leone.

The journey of the Amistad is well documented, moreover its complexity is perhaps still to be understood. fresh commemoration of these events has stimulated a great deal of activity in the popular and scholarly agricultures of the United States and particularly Connecticut. This effort at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is an example. The notion of presenting a view of the cultural underpinnings that shaped and carried the personal and public lives of the Africans aboard the Amistad is compelling. As Michelle Gilbert, the exhibition's visitor curator, said at the opening: "This exhibit is about the part of memory and the importance of place. It is about for what reason the past instructed the at hand It is about how the rebellion of the young men and women upon the Amistad was informed by means of their past in West Africa and where their ideas of identity, inflection for sex and ethnicity were molded, and their ideas of in what way people are supposed to behave were formed." It is not an overstatement to say that like ambition for a small exhibition quickly reaches the interest of the resources at hand. The efforts of the curators, Gilbert and the Peabody's Frank lair the consultant, William Siegmann, and the designer, Ingvild Horn, were fiercely constrained by the space allotted. They were happy in harnessing a large idea, synthesizing a mountain of ethnographic data, selecting a cluster of superb objects, and installing those marks in a very modest gallery.

A museum of natural history is an effective setting for like an undertaking. The Peabody is a small, active museum where undivided finds parents, grandparents, and a raft of children viewing specimens and a decent collection of ethnographic material in cleverly built environments. It is an animated and welcoming space. The museum generally exhibits no Africana save these Amistad-related materials. The choice to not absent a serious corpus of African ethnography that predates and in part explains a piece of Connecticut history is daring and intellectually the resulting exhibition is commendable.

The installation fills approximately single in kind quarter to one third of the first of three ethnographic galleries just against the foyer of the museum. Looking past a half wall that sections opposite to the gallery, one sees a magnificent nonwooden men's Gbini mask that announces the exhibition. A major portion of the indicate describes Poro and Sande, the men's and women's societies, and their place at the center of traditional life. Opening with men's society masks, the space is punctuated through a combination of didactic panels, photographs, and labels that explain the uses The thumbnail photos, grouped in fours and located near didactic panels, are engaging and put forward a truly animated view of daily life in Sierra Leone

The panels are quite thick presenting descriptions of both male and female associations and the actions and affairs of their members regarding socialization, sex education, and authority. For scholars of Africa and particularly west African art, these notions are hardly just discovered However, this presentation is far more balanced than usual in names of the two organizations, and it contains correlates that are unique and more thoroughly documented than is the case in frequently of the literature, not to mention exhibitions.

The quality and variety of known and unknown percepts assembled at the Peabody may be on a level more interesting than the attempt to interpret them. Anyone transactioned with African history, non-Western art, masking, or personal adornment--even those without a tremendous familiarity with the work of the Mende and their neighbors--will be engaged by the agency of this selection. Wooden male masks are ofttimes erroneously associated with the women's Sande society. This exhibition provides stout examples of the wooden Sande masks as well as the unpliable and nonwooden masks of Poro and present to views the differences among the three forms and their uses.