Joseph Cinque (ca. 1813-ca. 1879) was a West African who led a slave mutiny on the Cuban Amistad ship in 1839. It led to a celebrated trial in United States courts, which held that slaves escaping from illegal bondage should be treated as free men.

Joseph Cinque was born the son of a Mende headman in the village of Mani, in modern Sierra Leone. A rice farmer and trader, he was enslaved for debt and sold to the notorious Spanish slaver Pedro Blanco, on Lomboko Island at the mouth of the Gallinas River, in April 1839. Cinque was then carried to Havana, where he was resold with 51 others, many of them Mendians, and shipped aboard the coasting schooner Amistad bound for the Cuban sugar plantations near the port of Guanaja, Puerto Principe.

On June 30 Cinque incited the slaves to revolt at sea, killing the captain and cook and taking prisoner their...