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Shame

Vaishali Honawar in Washington DC

Steven Spielberg

This may not be the best time to remind white America about its original sin, slavery. Racism is far from dead in the country, a debate over a national apology to its African-American subjects continues, and affirmative action is raising more hackles than ever.

But this is also a time when today's African-Americans need to remember their ancestors's terrible beginnings in this country. Lost in a world of crime and drugs, they need, more than ever before, to learn the importance of their inheritance of freedom and success in America.

In such an atmosphere comes Steven Spielberg's latest film, Amistad which was released nationwide on December 10. From the history of slavery originating in the 16th century to its abolition in the 19th century, Spielberg chooses to film a largely forgotten episode that occurred in 1839, after slavery had been abolished in several northern American states, including New York.

Amistad is the story of Sengbe Pieh, a native of Mende near present-day Sierra Leone in Africa, and 52 others who were kidnapped in 1839 and taken to Cuba where they were fraudulently classified as Cuban slaves and sold to two Spaniards, Don Jose Ruiz and Don Pedro Montez. The Spaniards then set sail for Spain with the black men on board the schooner, Amistad.

In one particular scene halfway through the film, Spielberg brings home the entire horror of slavery when he films the middle passage -- the shipping of the slaves from Africa to the West. Hundreds of slaves were piled into the cargo holds like so many sardines and were fed on a handful of yams thrown at them every day. Thus they lay for the several months it took to reach America, throwing up and excreting on one another. Many committed suicide along the way, preferring death to a life of humiliation.

The men aboard Amistad (the word means 'friendship' in Spanish) also refused to accept slavery as their fate. Instead of death, however, they chose revolt as their means to freedom. On board Amistad, the 53 captured men, under Sengbe Pieh (called Cinque by the Spanish), killed the ship's cook and captain and forced Ruiz and Montez to take them back to Africa.

A still from Amistad. Click for bigger pic!

However, the Spaniards tricked them by redirecting the ship which ended up in the waters off Connecticut and was brought into Long Island, New York, by an American naval vessel. The blacks were captured and charged with murder and treason, starting a long-drawn courtroom battle in which two giants of American history were pitted against each other.

President Martin Van Buren, the pro-slavery president of America (played by Sir Nigel Hawthorne), and former president John Quincy Adams (played by Anthony Hopkins) fought the slaves's case and won them their freedom after an eight-and-a-half-hour harangue in the supreme court. The black men then returned to their country where they set up the first missionary schools that were to spearhead anti-colonial revolts in later years.

Spielberg's Sengbe Pieh is actor Djimon Hounsou who makes his US film debut. Hounsou, originally from the Republic of Benin, came to America after being discovered living on the streets of Paris by an American fashion photographer. He speaks only three words of English in the film when he screams in the courtroom, "Give us free! Give us free!" His performance in Amistad was described by talk show queen Oprah Winfrey as "the best screen performance ever by a black actor."

Academy award-winning actor Hopkins gives a stunning performance as John Adams. "Nothing is more useless than an ex-president," he says in the movie -- a line that brought guffaws from President Clinton when he attended the movie's world premiere in Washington on December 4.

The premiere was attended by Spielberg, Hopkins and Matthew McConaughey who plays an inexperienced lawyer keen on fighting for the rights of the slaves. The film also stars Morgan Freeman as an abolitionist editor and Anna Paquin as Queen Isabella of Spain.

A still from Amistad. Click for bigger pic!

But it's not been smooth sailing for Amistad so far. Even before its nationwide release, Spielberg is being sued for $ 10 million by writer Barbara Chase-Riboud who claims he stole portions of Amistad from her 1989 book, Echo of Lions.

She has a strong case against the director, who was recently named by Entertainment Weekly as Hollywood's most powerful man. There are, says Chase-Riboud, at least 40 striking similarities between her book and the Amistad script, including the creation of the fictional character played by Freeman.

Some African-American intellectuals, meanwhile, believe that Spielberg, a white man, should never have been allowed to make a movie on slavery. African-Americans, they say, should have the first shot at telling African-American history.

But to the film's producer Debbie Allen, the African-American woman who came across the Amistad story in college in 1984 and who has since burned with a desire to tell it to the world, the director of Schindler's List was the ideal choice after a wait of over a decade.

"What kept me going was belief," Allen says today. "I believed in the power and the truth of this story. I believed that the enormous tapestry upon which it occurred related to all our ancestors -- the Africans, the abolitionists, the pro-slavers, the Spanish, the Cubans, the British... It tells us all a lot about our history."

Her enthusiasm spurred Spielberg who says he had only a passing knowledge of the Amistad incident before he met Allen. "I was inspired by her passion for the story. She had a remarkable ability to make me see it through her eyes," he says. Incidentally, one of Spielberg's seven children, some of them adopted, is African-American and he wanted his son to know about this part of his history, says the director.

Hopefully he will, and many others too. Though it strikes a sombre note in the midst of the Christmas holiday season, Amistad is bound to attract viewers like any Spielberg film does. Many are hoping it will help black and white Americans come to terms with a shameful past that is often ignored but refuses to go away. After all, Hollywood and Spielberg have often before proved better teachers than schools.