On Cinqué and the Historians

Paul Finkelman

Howard Jones ends his eloquent essay about the supposition that Cinqué participated in the African slave trade with the pronouncement that "Justice presumes innocence" and the demand that the "time has come to grant Cinqué an acquittal." This is the English common-law rule. After reviewing Jones's own evidence, it seems that the more proper conclusion is the Scottish verdict: "not proven."	1
Jones's argument rests on four prongs. First, that William A. Owens, without any serious research, popularized the notion that Cinqué was involved in the African slave trade after his return to West Africa. Second, that no documentary evidence links Cinqué to the slave trade, and what little evidence there might be is based on oral traditions, which Jones rejects. Third, that numerous historians, including the three scholars commenting here, have not been sufficiently diligent in our research and writing and have repeated the alleged misinformation set out in Owens's book. Fourth, that the character of Cinqué makes the allegation impossible to accept: "My study of Cinqué," Jones writes, "leads me to believe that he could never have participated in a practice that had already destroyed his life." Thus Jones concludes that the suggestion of Cinqué's involvement in either the African slave trade or in domestic slavery in West Africa raises "serious questions about the integrity not only of the movie but also of the Amistad heritage."1	2
What is most fascinating and what Jones highlights is how little we know about Cinqué after he returned to Africa. He apparently renounced Christianity and ceased to have much contact with the American Missionary Association (AMA), the organization that had facilitated his return to Africa. Rumors spread: He was rich; he was a slave trader; he went to Jamaica. Owens claimed to have seen letters, written by AMA missionaries, suggesting that Cinqué was a slave trader, but those letters cannot be found. Jones implies that Owens fabricated the claim of evidence to cover his poor research. But the transient nature of the Amistad collection (which has been housed in three different institutions in the past six decades) makes it possible that evidence that Owens saw has long ago been mislaid, lost, destroyed, or even stolen. The Amistad collection is apparently missing correspondence from 1879, which might include what Owens saw. Jones relies on the Africanist Arthur Abraham to argue that Cinqué was not a slave trader. But, tantalizingly, Abraham found that "numerous such oral accounts" of Cinqué being involved in slavery and the African trade "had reached the Mende mission." The same claim, as Jones notes, was made by Fred L. Brownlee, the AMA historian, whose work preceded that of Owens. Thus the oral tradition of Africa and the historical memory within the AMA support Owens. Jones rejects the oral tradition, condemning history based on "rumor, gossip, hearsay, or any other types of unsubstantiated information." However, many historians, particularly those who work on African topics, rely heavily on oral tradition as a legitimate source.2	3
The evidence seems more complex than Jones admits. Oral tradition may suggest one thing; the lack of documentary history, another. Even some of the evidence in Jones's essay seems to obscure as much as it illuminates. For example, many years ago a graduate student working at the Amistad Research Center wrote, "Materials in the American Missionary Association Archives regarding Cinqué contain no information that can either uphold or deny stories that Cinqué engaged in slave trading after his return to Africa from the United States."3 What does this mean? Should we read this graduate student as saying "there is no information at all connecting Cinqué to the slave trade" or as saying "we have evidence that is ambiguous or inconclusive and cannot answer the question to anyone's satisfaction"? Was there ambiguous or inconclusive evidence? Might a scholar who knows the literature of the period, the nuances of language, and the nature of the sources draw different conclusions? We cannot know what is in the AMA Archives on the basis of this letter. The bottom line is that we do not know where Cinqué was in the last three and a half decades of his life nor what he was doing. Thus the assertion that he was or was not a slave trader remains unproved.	. . .