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Penn State faculty and guests focus on African American traditions Institute creates environment for discussing research By Deborah A. Benedetti
While researching slave revolts of the 18th and 19th centuries, Dr. Iyunolu M. Osagie, assistant professor of English, rediscovered a forgotten event in her country’s history: the mutiny by Sengbe Pieh and fellow captives from Sierra Leone on board the Spanish slave ship Amistad and their eventual freedom and return to Sierra Leone. Dick Ackley—University Photo/Graphics	In 1839, a group of Africans was captured in Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa and placed aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad. The captives mutinied while the ship was in Caribbean waters, killing the captain and his cook. Led by Sengbe Pieh, the charismatic leader of the revolt, the captives attempted to sail back to Africa. They had spared the lives of their Spanish owners and forced them to navigate the ship, since they had no navigational skills themselves. Tricked by the two Spanish slave dealers, they followed an erratic course and ended up near Long Island, where they were arrested by an American naval patrol. With the help of abolitionists, they won their freedom at the Supreme Court in 1841 and eventually returned to Sierra Leone. Pieh discovered on his return that his village had been burned to the ground and that his wife and children had disappeared, probably sold into slavery or killed. In spite of the struggles they encountered back in Sierra Leone, the victory they had won in America was a major victory for the antislavery movement. The group’s struggles against slavery contributed to the downfall of slavery, according to Dr. Iyunolu M. Osagie, assistant professor of English at Penn State.   These events are portrayed in the 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad.   Osagie, who grew up in Sierra Leone, did not learn about this part of her nation’s history until she arrived at Penn State and began researching the slave revolts of the 18th and 19th centuries. The history of slavery was not taught in school, even though Sierra Leone served as a destination for many freed slaves in the late 1700s through the mid-1800s.   “This first civil rights triumph inspired the abolitionists to consolidate their forces in the fight against slavery. The Amistad case helped to precipitate the American Civil War,” Osagie said. “The impact of the slave revolt on the Amistad has been felt for more than 150 years. An event of this magnitude should have been celebrated.”   It wasn’t until 1992, when a military coup toppled the government of Sierra Leone, that the heroism of Pieh and his countrymen was acknowledged by the people of Sierra Leone, Osagie said.
Dr. Thomas A. Hale, professor of African, French and comparative literature, shared his research on griots, the historians for villages and families in some West African nations. University Photo/Graphics	“In the 1980s, the Freetown Players, a theatrical troupe, began performing a play about the Amistad revolt. People were shocked to learn about this event, and many continued to deny it,” she said. “But during the coup, when soldiers carried a model of the Amistad ship through the streets of the nation’s capital, Freetown, shouting ‘Sengbe Pieh,’ this knowledge finally became usable in the present.”   Osagie presented her research on the Amistad slave revolt and other slave rebellions of the 18th and 19th centuries during the first African American Traditions seminar held at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel last summer. Fifty Penn State faculty members and invited guests participated in the seminar, which focused on W.E.B DuBois and other social thinkers, African and other international linkages to America and African American representations in the arts.   During the same session with Osagie: Dr. Thomas A. Hale, professor of African, French and comparative literature at Penn State, spoke about his research on “West African Griots and the African American Tradition.” Griots and their female counterparts, griottes, are the historians for villages and families. He is the author and editor of several books on griots, including Scribe, Griot and Novelist, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, and Oral Epics from Africa—Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent, with John William Johnson and Stephen Belcher. Hale is interested in discovering if griots had an influence on the United States. They might have arrived in the United States as slaves, he said. If they did, did they have an impact on African American culture and to a larger extent on America? The evidence from the past is slender, Hale said, but there are points of interest relating to the interment of griots, who were buried inside baobab trees, to the call-and-response tradition found in some West African epics and to musical instruments. The American folk song “Wake Nicodemus” talks about Nicodemus being laid away in an old hollow tree, and the molo, a two- to three-stringed lute played by griots, is similar in some ways to the American banjo.
Dr. Wilson J. Moses, professor of history and Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, talked about his new book, Liberian Dreams, 1853, published by Penn State Press, which focuses on issues of colonization and emigration facing freed American slaves in the 19th century. Dave Shelly—University Photo/Graphics	Dr. Wilson J. Moses, professor of history and Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at Penn State, discussed “Back to Africa: 1853.” He is editor of the book Liberian Dreams, 1853, published by Penn State Press. Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, was founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society as a place for freed American slaves to resettle. “In 1776, Thomas Jefferson headed a Virginia Committee recommending gradual emancipation of the slaves, which process was to be accompanied by African colonization. . . . Jefferson held it as self-evident that black and white populations could not live together on an equal basis in America,” Moses wrote in his chapter for the book. He also noted, “In the early days of the Republic, African American attitudes towards colonization and emigration were varied and complicated, fluctuating according to time and place.” Not all African Americans agreed with Jefferson’s view. Many hoped that eventually African Americans could attain all the rights of citizenship, Moses said.   The 1997 African American Traditions seminar is the first of five planned for summers through 2001. The Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies developed the interdisciplinary research series with extensive collaboration from the University academic community, according to Dr. Robert R. Edwards, director and Fellow of the institute and professor of English and comparative literature.   “We wanted to create an environment in which research questions about African American culture would migrate back and forth between the arts and humanities,” he said. “Most academic training tends to put us on one side of the line or the other. For example, a scholar of literature will be well-versed in the literature of a particular era, but may not know much about the music of that era and perhaps only a little about the art of the era. What’s distinctive about African American culture is that these boundaries don’t hold at all. Black poetry, for instance, deals with a definite literary tradition that includes Shakespeare and the Bible, but it also incorporates jazz, the blues and other art forms.”
Dr. Robert R. Edwards, director and Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies and professor of English and comparative literature, believes the African American Traditions seminar series “provides great possibilities for interdisciplinary research and creative work.” Dwain Harbst—University Photo/Graphics	The institute was guided in planning the first seminar by an advisory board comprised of Deborah F. Atwater, head, Department of African and African American Studies, and associate professor of speech communication; Blannie Bowen, C. Lee Rumberger and Family Professor of Agriculture; Grace Hampton, professor of art and art education and executive assistant to the provost for development of the arts; Lewis Jillings, acting director, Office of Summer Sessions; James B. Stewart, professor of labor studies and industrial relations, professor of African and African American studies and vice provost for educational equity; and Lawrence Young, director, Paul Robeson Cultural Center.   The seminar format involved dissemination of research materials to participants in advance of the meetings so presenters and participants could discuss topics during morning sessions. Afternoons were for independent work, research and consultation. Evenings involved public performances, film screenings and readings.   Like the first seminar, future seminars will focus on specific topics, Edwards said. Penn State scholars and artists are currently working in three broad categories: African American social thought, international connections of African American culture and the African American experience as represented in literature, art, film, music and drama.   The Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies is sponsoring the seminars in collaboration with the colleges of Arts and Architecture and the Liberal Arts. Other sponsors are the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost of the University; College of Communications; Office of Summer Sessions; Outreach and Cooperative Extension; Commonwealth Colleges; International Partnerships and Academic Linkages; departments of African and African American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, French and History; Equal Opportunity Planning Committee; Scholars in Residence Summer Program for Minority Faculty; Paul Robeson Cultural Center; Palmer Museum of Art; and the Penn State Bookstore. an outreach program of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies and the colleges of Arts and Architecture and the Liberal Arts