Samuel Hingha Pieh grew up in Sierra Leone along with his fivebrothers; and sisters in a small city on the West African country’scoastal plains called Taiama.
As a youth, Pieh, who is now an assistant biology professor at theState Technical Institute at Memphis, remembers hearing tantalizingtales about long dead relatives. His father and the village paramountchief (whose role is akin to a village historian) would speak ofancestors who had been snatched away, disappearing into the sea, neverto return again.
It wasn’t until years later when Pieh came to live in the UnitedStates, that he discovered one of his ancestors was a hero — a heromany people are talking about these days.
Pieh’s progenitor, Sengbe Pieh, is the central character in theground-breaking movie epic, Amistad. In it, director Steven Spielbergand producer Debbie Allen tell the story of fifty-three Africans whowere kidnapped from their homeland, shipped to the Americas for sale,and then transported from one end of Cuba to the other by the crew ofthe Spanish schooner, La Amistad, in 1839.
During transport along the Cuban coast, the Africans, led by Sengbe– or Cinque, as he was called by the Spaniards — broke free of theirshackles, slaughtered most of their captors, and took control of theship. They ordered the remaining crew to return them to Africa, butwere tricked and eventually captured by an American ship off the coastof southern New England, where they were imprisoned and put on trialfor the murder of the crew.
The Spielberg/Allen movie depicts their plight as the court casemoves through a stubbornly political American judicial system.
“The Amistad is a name that was not in my vocabulary,” Samuel Piehacknowledges. “But we did know something about a captured vessel.”
