Sufferings of Captured Africans - Essay Example

Before getting onto the ship La Amistad, the Africans were first kept in Havana, Cuba slave market where buyers and sellers make a bid for the price of the slaves. This is a heartbreaking scene because the people who guarded the Africans were also Africans.

Their conditions were horrible and inhumane. In La Amistad, the Africans made a successful mutiny and killed every one of their captors except for two who dupe them into going to America instead of Africa. Their conditions however in that ship that transported them to Havana, Cuba, and La Amistad were terrible. Probably, the security in La Amistad is a little lenient because Cinque was able to free himself from the shackles and took over the ship. But before that, they were treated worse than animals.

It began when they first boarded the ship that abducted them from their homes in West Africa. Upon boarding, a whip greeted them and when they got restless, one of the officers of the ship took out his pistol and randomly shot the Africans and hit a woman dead. But that is not the most horrific sight of death. Before arriving in Havana, Cuba, some undesirable slaves were tied to a rope that has rocks as an anchor. The idea was to throw the rock anchor at the bottom of the sea and with it are the slaves who are tied to the rope. It was a heart-wrenching scene where actual human beings struggled not to go down with the rope.

There was also this dramatic scene where a woman held a baby whose mother died the night before. At its backdrop were African women being molested and raped by the crew of the ship where some of the men were whipped to death. Seeing this, the woman was not able to take it anymore and fell off the ship together with the baby.

The starvation also that the Africans endured was heartbreaking as they scrambled for the ration that was given to them. Their rations would not even qualify as food because they looked like those feeds given to the pigs. Yet they scrambled for it and guarded their food against each other for the fear that it will be taken away from them and not be able to eat.