Ghosts of Amistad by Tony Buba is based on Marcus Rediker's The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Penguin, 2012). It chronicles a journey to Sierra Leone in 2013 to visit the home villages of the rebels who captured the slave schooner Amistad, to interview elders about local memory of the incident, and to search for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory where their cruel transatlantic voyage began. The filmmakers rely on the knowledge of villagers, fishermen, and truck drivers to recover a lost history from below in the struggle against slavery, and to explore the African origins of the heroes of the Amistad incident.
Direction
Buba lets villagers speak, never talks over them.
Writing
Rediker's framework, but the story belongs to Sierra Leone.
Director
Tony Buba
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Lomboko's location was so successfully hidden that even UNESCO couldn't find it—local fishermen finally led Buba's team there using generational memory.
The film inverts the 'white savior' abolition narrative entirely: American abolitionists appear only as distant recipients of African resistance, not its authors.
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