MA Thesis in History, 2008, York University

Chapter One: Introduction:

 

Between 1655 and 1808, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans entered the British colony of Jamaica. These Africans came from different parts of West and West- Central Africa and found themselves as slaves in a new and hostile environment. Some might have belonged to the Mande cultural group from Senegambia; others might have been Akan coming from the Gold Coast; others still could have originated from the Niger Delta or the Kingdom of Kongo. What was the significance of this diversity for cultural formation among the enslaved in Jamaica during the period of the British Slave Trade?

Were the religious practices that emerged among the enslaved “new” constructs? Or, did they represent a “continuity” from Africa? Were the religious opinions of the enslaved so diverse that they had trouble assembling coherent religious practices in Jamaica? Did a particular African cultural group rise to prominence in Jamaica and influence the other enslaved Africans around them? Did the coming of Christian missionaries into Jamaica, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, effectively disrupt the religious lives of the enslaved? Such questions introduce the ultra-complex issue of cultural formation for Jamaica in particular and for the Americas in general.

. Ever since the debate between Franklin Frazier and Melville Herskovits in the 1940s, over the possible “survival” of African cultural forms in the Americas, scholars, in many disciplines, have spent a great deal of effort trying to determine what enslaved Africans brought with and what they could not bring with them across the Atlantic.¹ Before the work of Herskovits, sharks and their ferocious appetite was an appropriate metaphor to describe how many scholars viewed the potential retention of African cultural forms in the Americas. Slavery, for these scholars, was like a shark eagerly devouring the personhoods of enslaved Africans; so much so, that they became culturally and socially “dead” in the Americas. Since Herskovits problematized that “myth,” scholars have given greater attention to the results of the historical interplay between Europeans and Africans in a given New World setting. In some areas, this interaction was further complicated by the presence of Natives, Indians, and Asians. This complexity has generated many schools of thought on the process of cultural interaction in the New World which I attempt to outline and analyze below. Terms such as “creolization,” “Pan- Africanization,” “creativity,” and “continuity,” will be considered and explained.

In this paper, I adhere to the “continuity” approach to cultural formation in the Americas but with reservations. Indeed, the enslaved in Jamaica had the ability to recall memories and worldviews from Africa to help orient them in this new environment.

There were several salient features of Jamaican slave society that facilitated the retention of African cultural principles during the period of British Slave Trade. These included: an unstable white population, a low slave fertility rate and an only partially successful missionary project. Moreover, even with the full onslaught of missionaries in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the end of the British Slave Trade and the coming of Emancipation in 1838, these cultural practices did not simply vanish in Jamaica.

In terms of the crux of my paper, I argue that a Pan-Africanized religious experience took hold in the slave-holding context of Jamaica. Many religious commonalities existed in West and West-Central Africa, during the period of the British Slave Trade, which only aided the formation of Pan-African religious practices in Jamaica. My framework, which I borrow from Lorand Matory and Dianne Stewart, essentially posits that African cultural forms can change drastically under the context of slavery in the New World, without making those same practices un-African.² Because of the religious similarities existing among Africans in West Africa, slaves in Jamaica were able to fashion practices and worldviews that borrowed heavily from their continental cosmologies. Under slavery in Jamaica, therefore, African ethnicities (and their particular religious outlooks) eventually succumbed to the acculturating influences of Pan- Africanization and these religious practices were collapsed under more general categories, including burial practices, Obeah and Myal. This framework is hospitable to both continuity and change but focuses primarily on the interaction between enslaved Africans– an Africanized creolization.

Throughout my paper, I dedicate most of my efforts to delineating the possible Akan contribution to these Pan-Africanized religious practices. In hoping to illustrate such a contribution, I utilize various European travel accounts during the period of the British Slave Trade and twentieth-century ethnographic reports. Though my emphasis is on the Akan of the Gold Coast, I do not ignore the possible contribution of other African cultural groups. Where possible, there will also be an examination of the religious practices/worldviews in other parts of West and West-Central Africa. The religious experience in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Dahomey, the Niger Delta, and the Kingdom of Kongo will all be considered at various points in this paper. This will hopefully reveal that there were several foundational religious beliefs in West Africa that united people over various locales. Indeed, the old anthropological tendency to see each African “tribe” as separate and isolated from each other has obscured these similarities. However, religious worldviews that differed from traditional African ones, like Islam and Christianity, were at play in Africa during the period of the British Slave Trade. Thus some of those Africans that were enslaved and brought to Jamaica might have been Muslims and Christians. It will be illustrated, however, that Islam and Christianity (the variety found in the Kongo region) played a marginal role in the development of the cultural practices of the enslaved in Jamaica.

I outline briefly the religious and historical experience of the Akan in Africa, followed by an attempt to trace their movement as slaves, across the Atlantic, into Jamaica. The use of the curious “Coromantin” moniker to label these individuals from the Gold Coast is investigated and problematized. Indeed, “New World” labels seldom accurately described an ethnicity or cultural group in Africa. In any event, Jamaican authorities believed that these “Coromantin” individuals came from the Gold Coast and they were mentioned with great frequency in the sources because of their proclivity towards rebellion. I, therefore, cautiously use the term “Coromantin” to designate individuals from the Gold Coast. Often scholars attempt to demonstrate the relative prominence of an African cultural group in the Americas through the use of numbers and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database. This paper, however, does not delve into the “numbers game” and problematizes the use of the Database to uncover the possible African origins of a particular cultural practice in the Americas.

The rest of the paper is dedicated to delineating the possible Akan contribution to the three major Pan-Africanized religious practices of the enslaved in Jamaica: burial practices, Obeah and Myal. I outline the importance of death and burial ceremonies for the Akan, including the remarkable “Carrying the Corpse” practice. Similar practices and beliefs were found in other parts of West and West-Central Africa and those too will be explored. Most of the time, however, will be spent revealing the importance of these practices for Akan religious thought. In Jamaica, these practices, including “Carrying the Corpse,” had similar functions but, of course, underwent transformations as well. In the end, however, these similar burial practices and beliefs, from various parts of West Africa, were simply coalesced into a Pan-African burial experience on Jamaica soil.

The religious phenomenon of Obeah in Jamaica has had a turbulent history. Often portrayed as a form of “evil magic,” the practice was, for the most part, a benevolent force that sought to aid (and, unfortunately, sometimes hurt) members of the enslaved community. Scholars have also invested a lot of energy in trying to determine the African origins of the practice. For the longest time, it was assumed, because of its misrepresented label of malevolent magic, to have been a transplanted form of Asante witchcraft. More recently, scholars, stressing its more benevolent role, argue that practice originated from the Niger Delta. I attempt to illustrate the Akan okomfo (priest) had a salient role in the formation of Obeah. The okomfo was a positive force in Akan societies who attempted to cure the sick, detect criminals and offer guidance through the consultation of the gods. Obeah practitioners played a similar role on Jamaican soil. Of course, other African priests had similar functions and I examine the role of priests in other African societies, though, in less detail. The role of the priest, obviously, underwent transformations on Jamaican soil and I argue that this could have included a liberalization of esoteric mystical knowledge. Obeah, in the end though, was surely an amalgamation of various African priestly roles; the Akan okomfo was surely one of these.

The religious practice of Myal, in the historiography, has often been presented as antagonistic towards Obeah. This trend, however, did not develop until the Myal Revivalism of the 1840s and prior to that they were, in fact, complementary forces.

 

Indeed, Myal allowed the more positive attributes of Obeah to be distributed to a wider audience; it was more communal in formation. In looking for the African origins of this practice, there should be an attempt, as I argue, to look for a ceremony that facilitated the democratization of a religious experience. It is with these concerns in mind that I argue the Akan Akom ceremony played a similar role as it too attempted to distribute mystical knowledge to a larger audience. However, I also provide the example of “cult-houses” from Dahomey to illustrate that such ceremonies were not restricted to the Akan. African ceremonies, like these, on Jamaican soil, served as a meeting place for diverse Africans to come together and discuss and share religious ideas; a meeting place for intra-African syncretism.

I should offer a few more words on my “Pan-African” framework. Over thirty years ago, Leonard Barrett wrote that,

It would be a formidable task for one to provide a detailed study of the various African traditional religions which have come down to the present day these religious systems were so well established that despite the onslaught of the European ruling class with their numerous laws aimed at eradicating them, and despite the onslaught of Christian missionaries who spent their lives and their financial resources in attempt to convert the slaves to Christianity, these New World African religions have remained to this day as the psychic monitors of the vast majority of New World blacks.³

It is my goal to illustrate that it was the task, in Jamaica, of all the “various African traditional religions” to come together and work towards a coherent religiosity that suited their needs under the condition of slavery. In slave-holding Jamaica, continental African worldviews had a great deal of time and space to mutate and transform so to meet the collective needs of the enslaved. The missionary intrusion into Jamaica did not truly begin until the first half of the nineteenth-century and even that, as we shall see, was only partially successful. Thus the interplay among enslaved Africans with different yet closely related religious beliefs fostered the development of Pan-African religious experience in Jamaica. These Pan-African practices were “new” in the sense that they required the input of a variety of African religious viewpoints but “old” in the sense that they employed indisputably African religious principles. Therefore, the transformation that these African religious principles and practices underwent in Jamaica did not make them any-less African. It is my attempt to uncover how the Akan provided a piece of the Pan-African puzzle. To begin, I offer a brief sketch of two individuals, one from the Gold Coast and the other from Jamaica, to illustrate the connections between these regions. Moreover, I hope to illustrate that African cultural practices proved quite durable in the face of slavery and attempts at cultural imperialism.

Chapter Two: Philip Quaque and Thomas Thistlewood: Two Lives at the Opposite Ends of the Atlantic

 

Phillip Quaque⁴, nee Kweku, was born in the Cape Coast community on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in 1741. This settlement was on the outskirts of the Cape Coast Castle, one of the largest British slave castles on the West African coast. The date of his birth must have been a Wednesday as Kweku was a common Fante name given to a boy born on that day of the week.⁵ The Fante were a coastal people who belonged to the larger Akan cultural group and, by the mid-eighteenth century, diligently served as middlemen between the Europeans on the coast and African merchants further into the interior. Exchanging guns and other exotic European goods for human cargo, the Fante found themselves operating along a steep cultural divide. Indeed, these forts served as a site for the transaction of humans and goods (although that distinction was seldom made), but also as a place of cultural exchange; a meeting place between two alien cultures, one Akan and the other, European. As the Fante and other Akan groups eagerly vied with each other for the newest European import, some segments of the European population, in this case the British, saw the Gold Coast as an ideal choice site for the advancement of European culture, notably Christianity, into the African continent. In 1754, at the tender and impressionable age of thirteen, young Kewku was sent to England for education as part of a treaty made between the Fante and British. Sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G), Kweku spent eleven years in England and returned Philip Quaque, the new and first African chaplain of Cape Coast Castle.⁶ His goal was to proselytize his former countrymen and introduce European culture to an area, apparently, in desperate need of it.

Kweku was greatly influenced by the eleven years he spent in London and by the education he received there. He was baptized in Islington Parish Church in 1759 where his tutor was Mr. Hickman, the local schoolmaster. Afterwards, he came under the tutelage of Reverend John Moore of St Sepulchre’s Church. Moore was so impressed by the advancement of young Kweku’s learning that he wrote that his pupil had improved “in every branch of knowledge necessary to the station for which he was designed, and it is hoped will prove a worthy missionary.”⁷ On March 25^th 1764, Quaque was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Exeter, and on May 1 of the same year, he was ordained priest by the Bishop of London. Now a full-fledged Christian and sufficiently indoctrinated in European culture, Phillip Quaque confidently returned to Cape Coast Cast in February 1766 prepared to eradicate the culture that gave birth to him. His confidence was to be short-lived.

He returned a changed man; he lived in European fashion, with books and mahogany furniture and his first wife was an Englishwoman. Like many others at the fort, he engaged in trade including that lucrative one in humans.⁸ And it soon became apparent that a large rife was growing between him and his traditional origins: he ceased to be fluent in Fante or any African language, relied on an interpreter and mercilessly attacked traditional Akan religious practices. Perhaps his supposed ignorance was only a guise to distance himself from his original roots; an attempt to illustrate his newly-found culture’s superiority over that of his countrymen. Indeed, it seems evident that Quaque possessed a layered persona: he was by birth an Akan who was acculturated by the British and returned to a changed homeland. Although he spent a great deal of time resisting and attacking aspects of his original Akan culture, it was, undoubtedly, still there within him in some form (perhaps repressed, but still there). In any event, he soon realized that it would take a lot more than the words and work of one man to dislodge these traditional Akan practices which included the worship of a Supreme Being, widespread ancestor veneration and the investment of natural objects with spiritual qualities. The state of the mission was in such disarray that it led Quaque to write “. . . no argument can move their obdulent hearts to a better mode of thinking; it therefore seems to me that the justice of God’s proceedings with impenitent sinners still pursues this race of men, if I may be allowed this expression, for their unjust dealings and practices.”⁹ Quaque was, indeed, facing an uphill battle. He had to divorce himself from his original culture, namely himself, and behave as if he was now “civilized.”

One of the traditional practices that particularly irked Phillip was their funerary rites. On October 20^th 1778, the funeral of Caboceer (chief or big man) Cudjo (an Akan day name for a boy born on a Monday) was displayed. This event was characterized by firing of muskets, shouting of songs, an abundance of drinking, exuberant dancing, the visitation of several other coastal Caboceers and the sacrifice of many individuals. This occasion had such a joyous feeling to it that it prompted Quaque to write that the scene appeared to him “more like their harvest feats than that of mourning or sorrow.”¹⁰ The sight of individuals being sacrificed greatly alarmed Quaque but he was unaware (or refused to acknowledge) of the significance of these events for Akan religious beliefs. Because the Akan held that both the living and the dead were linked together and the dead influenced the course of events for the living, the departed had to be constantly placated to ensure a favourable outcome. For chiefs and other “big men,” this included sacrificing individuals, usually their slaves or servants, who would then serve them in the next life. The Englishman Thomas Thompson, the predecessor to Quaque and often called the first missionary to the Gold Coast, appeared to understand this better than Quaque. Arguably Thompson, because of his cultural distance, was in a better position to understand those cultural practices that Quaque was hesitant or refused to acknowledge. In the early 1750s Thompson wrote,

They rather think that the soul, after Death, keeps Haunt of the Body, and is latent in, or near its Repository; and it must be grounded upon the Imagination, that they have a Custom of setting Pots and Basons, with other such Furniture and Utensils, at the Graves of their Kindred; there to stand and remain for the Uses of the Dead.¹¹

Nevertheless, Quaque simply found these practices a hindrance to his work.

 

Towards the end of Quaque’s life, a profound, it seems, spiritual and moral crisis enveloped him. After being a victim of European cultural imperialism and then an agent of that very same system, Philip Quaque reverted to his ancestral culture and religion.¹² It seems clear, therefore, that Quaque understood more than he was willing to admit about traditional Akan religiosity. By the 1790s he left the castle walls and built a family house in the Cape Coast town. Moreover, his second and third wives were both African women and the Western concept of individualism seemed to have conflicted with his new found duties to his extended family. Although Quaque’s return to his Akan roots is well attested in the sources, his cotemporaries steadfastly denied it and attributed his transformation to senile dementia. Quaque was the S.P.G’s pride and joy and it would not behoove them to promote, or acknowledge, his choice of a return to Akan practices and beliefs. Having been forcibly straddled across the cultural divide from the day in 1753, when his relatives had pledged him to the British, Quaque decided to opt for the customs of his childhood.¹³ In 1811, on his death bed, he wrote, “The state of this unsuccessful mission, I formerly had some hopes of its growth, but at present on the face of things bears but an indifferent aspect.”¹⁴ Death was quickly approaching and Quaque was once again born anew – he was Kweku again.

In 1750, just prior to the time that Quaque was being taken to England, Thomas Thistlewood¹⁵ was departing; hoping to make his fortune in the British colony of Jamaica. On July 3^rd 1766, he purchased a half-share of a 300-acre property a few kilometers northeast of Savanna-la-Mar in the parish of Westmoreland. On September 3^rd 1767, he moved to this pen, which he named Breadnut Island. In his fascinating and equally disturbing diaries, Thistlewood provided some details of the personal lives of his slaves as well as the events surrounding him. He had very close interaction with his slaves and sometimes would not see another white person for months. He began to learn about different African cultural traits and was taught that to drink “grave water” was the most solemn oath among the enslaved Africans.¹⁶ Thistlewood was somewhat tolerant of these new cultural practices. He provided rum for the funeral of a deceased slave; allowed his slaves to visit other slaves on Sundays at neighboring estates; and condoned their festive singing and dancing. For example, on Saturday October 21^st 1775, Thistlewood’s slaves buried Chub and he gave them a bottle of rum.¹⁷ His diaries, though, are frustratingly silent on any precise details about what exactly transpired at these gatherings.

What his diaries do shed light on were the multifaceted ways in which slaves were able to retain and experiment with their own African worldviews. He did not wholeheartedly attempt to disrupt or alter his slaves’ devotion to African culture and cosmology. Because of this laxity towards African cultural practices, at least on the part of Thistlewood, African cultural traits were allowed to emerge on his pen and, as we shall see, on Jamaican soil in general. On the morning of February 3^rd 1756, John Cope Sr died at the age of 56. Cope was deeply implicated in the Atlantic Slave Trade as he served as governor of Cape Coast Castle. After that he turned to slaving himself, owning and operating slave ships out of London, before moving to Jamaica and setting himself up as a plantation owner. Thistlewood related, in his diary entry for the day of Cope’s death, that “A Negroe Man about 24 years of age, so soon as he heard his old master was dead went to the Negroe house privately and shot himself, to Accompany him into the Otherword and there wait upon him (his name was Roger and was Learned to be a Mason).”¹⁸ This is a peculiar incident as it is hard to believe that a slave would voluntarily surrender his life to follow his master into the next world. However, it is important to remember that Cope undoubtedly had some role in bringing Roger to Jamaica and because of Cope’s connections in the Gold Cold region, he more than likely came from there. And just as Quaque witnessed, slaves were routinely sacrificed at the funerals of chiefs and “big men” so that they could serve their masters in the next world. Roger could have been a slave in the Gold Coast or hinterland and might have been fulfilling the duties he thought went with the death of a master even if it was on Jamaican soil.¹⁹ Many European observers often remarked that slaves were sacrificed in the Gold Coast with smiling faces because they believed they were to be reunited with their masters. A.B Ellis, commenting on the historical significance of human sacrifices for the Akan at the turn of the twentieth century, noted,

The practice of sacrificing human beings at funerals arises from a feeling of affection, respect, and awe for the dead. It is done so that the departed may suffer no discomfort in his new abode, but find himself surrounded by those attentions and ministrations to which he had been accustomed. So far from being due to any inherent bloodthirstiness in the Tshi-speking peoples, it is really due to an exaggerated regard for the dead.²⁰

In any event, this episode illustrates that cultural beliefs and/or practices were not as easily destroyed by the constraints of slavery.

One of the most detailed descriptions of a funeral provided by Thistlewood was not of a slave but a white man, his long-time friend Florentius Vassal. On Wednesday June 17^th 1778, Thistlewood set out to Salt River to pay respects to his departed friend and in his words, “to attend Mr. Vassal’s remains to Paradise barcadier.”²¹ Vassal’s remains were brought out and placed in the hall and the service was read over by Dr. Bartholomew. What happened next greatly alarmed Thistlewood: “Then carried (the corpse) on Negroes shoulders to the seaside, with great difficulty and very slowly, though often spelled with fresh hands, and was twice, or oftener, thrown down in the road.”²² It took an inexplicably long time for Vassal’s body to reach the water as the party “stopped in the road almost every minute.” This episode is difficult to explain; perhaps the “Negroes” who carried Vassal’s remains had been his slaves and this behaviour served as a means of revenge for a lifetime of toil and ill-treatment. Or was it that the spirit of Vassal was restless? Thirty years earlier, the traveler Charles Leslie, noted that at slave funerals,

“When one is carried out to his Grave, he is attended with a vast Multitude, who conduct his Corps in something of a ludicrous Manner: They sing all the Way, and they who bear it on their shoulders, make a Feint of stopping at every Door they pass, and pretend, that if the deceast Person has received any Injury, the Corps moves toward the House, and that they can’t avoid letting it fall to the Ground when before the Door.²³

 

Was the spirit of Vassal trying to detect the wrong-doers responsible for his death? Phillip Quauqe surely must have witnessed similar events during his stay at Cape Coast. Thomas Thistlewood easily dismissed this extraordinary episode as buffoonery. It might have been so much more. It might as easily been a rare example of an African burial rite performed on a European slave-master. More importantly, it provides further evidence of the survival of an African cultural practice in Jamaica.

Avoiding the Sharks in the Atlantic

 

According to Marcus Rediker, schools of sharks were accustomed to follow a Guinea ship across the Atlantic, patiently waiting for a dead slave or crew-members to be thrown overboard. Out of fear, crews tried to outwit the sharks by sewing a dead sailor into a hammock or an old canvass sail and enclosing a cannonball to drag the body to the bottom – this rarely worked.²⁴ Moreover, slaving captains insidiously used sharks to foster terror throughout the voyage. They relied on the hungry creatures to prevent the desertion of their seamen and the escape of their enslaved cargo. One captain, when faced with a rash of slave suicides upon his ship, decided to use the aid of sharks to put a stop to them. He tied rope under the armpits of one woman and lowered her into the water.

The woman was said to have a given a terrible cry which was first thought to be caused by her fear of drowning. But when the water turned red around her, it was soon realized that the cry was due to a shark ripping into her torso.²⁵

What separated Philip Quaque and Thomas Thistlewood, and the slaves that surrounded him, was the Atlantic Ocean²⁶; that immense site of cultural exchange and “dialogue” but also that bloody highway that led millions of innocent Africans to New World plantations, as well as other sites of labour, and provided ample nourishment for hungry sharks. I chose to begin my study of the religious lives of enslaved Africans in Jamaica by highlighting the lives of two individuals, on both sides of the Atlantic, for numerous reasons. To begin with, it aptly demonstrates the resiliency of traditional cultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic. Quaque received his education in London and came home to Cape Coast with the intention of spreading Christianity and European values. After his life work proved to be an abysmal failure, Quaque decided to again embrace the culture of his roots; the Europeanization of him and his fellow Fante, in the end, failed. Similarly, the diaries of Thistlewood provide sufficient evidence that Jamaican masters were helpless to eradicate African cultural principles. So much so, that, arguably, they were subject to those very same practices. Another reason that I have juxtaposed these two lives is to demonstrate that life did not simply stop on either side of the Atlantic during the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Atlantic System was a highway (albeit a horrifying one) not a road block and the lives and cultures of enslaved Africans did not end when they boarded those ships for the dreadful Middle Passage nor did they simply begin anew once ashore in their new homes. And finally, I started with this comparison to provide an introduction to Akan religious practices in the Gold Coast and the hinterland during the slave trade while providing a coeval picture of some of the facets of the religious lives of enslaved Africans in Jamaica.

What was the relationship between the two areas? Would Quaque recognize the same customs at work at the funeral of a slave at Breadnut Island? Likewise, would Thistlewood recognize the funerary procedures of Cape Coast? Maybe he would see more similarities at an Igbo funeral in the Niger Delta or a Kongolese funeral on the outskirts of Luanda. For far too long, questions like these, simplistic as they are, were not even asked by scholars. For many, sharks and their ferocious appetite was an appropriate enough metaphor to address the issue of African culture in the Americas; Africans were simply helpless to sustain any resemblance of an African way of life in the oppressive shadow of slavery. Slavery was like a shark eagerly devouring every human being in its path.²⁷ Ever since the publication of Melville Herskovits’ The Myth of the Negro Past in 1941, the question of the African contribution to the development of culture in the Americas has taken on a new urgency. Herskovits effectively problematized and dismantled the popular interpretation that the “Negro Man” was a man without a past.²⁸ According to him, many African cultural forms “survived” the Middle Passage and greatly contributed to evolution of culture in the Americas. Following this seminal study, scholars in many diverse disciplines have pondered what happens when a large number of enslaved individuals are taken from different parts in Africa and placed together with a handful of European settlers on a Caribbean island.

Kamau Brathwaite, in 1971, responded that with these ingredients a “creole” culture/society emerges. Against the shadow of the dehumanizing institution of slavery in Jamaica, were the cultures of two sets of people having to adjust themselves to a new environment and to each other. The friction created by this confrontation was cruel, but it was also creative:

The scope and quality of this response and interaction were dictated by the circumstances of the soceity’s foundation and composition – a ‘new’ construct, made up of newcomers to the landscape and cultural strangers each to the other; one group dominant, the other legally and subordinately slaves. This cultural action or social process had been defined within the context of this work as creolization.²⁹

For slaves, creolization began with “seasoning” – a period of one to three years, when the slaves were branded, given a new name and put under apprenticeship to creolized slaves. During this period the slave would learn the rudiments of his new language and be initiated into the work routines that awaited him. But Brathwaite is quick to caution that creolization was a two way street and it was inevitable that certain vestiges of the slaves “folk culture” would rub off on the colonial whites.³⁰ This interaction created a “new” society that differed substantially from continental Europe and Africa but bore the markers of both.

Brathwaite brilliantly outlines the complexity of the creolization phenomenon by delineating a “historically affected socio-cultural continuum” which contains four interrelated and overlapping orientations: European, Euro-creole, Afro-Creole (or folk) and West Indian.³¹ Among these, the potential identities one could claim allegiance to are simply overwhelming which further emphasizes the complexity of cultural interaction in Jamaica. Brathwaite’s “Afro-Creole” orientation is one that I pay particular attention to throughout my paper. This African-influenced creole form is described by Braitwaite as such,

. . . the habits, customs, and ways of life of the slaves in Jamaica, derived from West Africa, will be seen in this context as a “folk” culture – the culture of the mass of ex-Africans who found themselves in a new environment and who were successfully adapting to it.³²

I will, therefore, attempt to delve into more detail about this “Afro-Creole” phenomenon by exploring, in Jamaica, the collaboration (primarily in terms of religion) among geographically diverse African slaves rather than solely examining the interaction between African slaves and Europeans. Indeed, as it will be illustrated below, African slaves had a great deal of space and autonomy to rework their classical African cosmologies to meet their collective needs under slavery in Jamaica.

The anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price weighed in on this emerging cultural-formation debate in 1976 with their hugely influential An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past (republished in 1992 as The Birth of African- American Culture). These scholars confront and prolematize the assertion that many contemporary social and cultural forms represent direct continuities from Africa. Indeed, they argue that cursory similarities between the cultural practices of various African- American peoples and that of some West African peoples are not evidence of static “survivals” but rather “products of independent development within historically related and overlapping sets of broad aesthetic ideas.”³³ They stress the importance of heterogeneity on both sides of the Atlantic, borrowing, creativity, individual expressiveness and the quick formation of African American cultural systems soon after arrival. Indeed, African immigrants were not a group consisting of a homogenous culture but a heterogeneous “crowd” that needed to create new social structures.³⁴ They effectively deny the possibility of enslaved Africans forming communities oriented around a shared African culture; rather, they concentrate on how social relations are carried through culture which facilitates its rapid transformation. As Mintz would later postulate in his Caribbean Transformations, “the resulting cultural heterogeneity of most slave groups limited that which could be shared culturally. It was not, after all, some single ‘African culture’ that was available for transfer.”³⁵ Though these scholars argue for the agency of slaves in formulating “new” cultures, they deny that their African past had any concrete role in their “birth.” For this reason, the argument put forth by Mintz and Price has often been called the “creativity” model.

This focus on New World settings and heterogeneous Africans was effectively taken to task by a new crop of scholars who argued that more attention was needed to the African past of enslaved individuals in developing “creole” models. Marvyn Alleyne, in his study of the roots of Jamaican culture, cannot accept that in order to understand the culture of Jamaicans or any of its elements, we must study it only as working in its actual setting, by its own mechanisms, under drives and incentives not from the past or borrowed, but engendered by new institutions.³⁶ When a displaced people attempt to construct social relationship in an alien and hostile environment, Alleyne argues, they will undoubtedly recall memories, habits and predispositions from their ancestral culture which constitutes a “base.” As Alleyne writes, “It is best to begin with a description of the base, then to determine which aspects of the base did not ‘migrate’ along with the displaced persons, and finally to examine how the base persists, is transformed, or generates ‘new’ institutions in the new setting.”³⁷ For Alleyne, therefore, there were some direct continuity from Africa to Jamaica and any discussion of creolization begins in Africa.

Other scholars have supported this “continuity” approach and added some helpful nuances to the argument. These scholars shift the focus away from the explicit study of creolization toward an emphasis on placing Africans and their descendants at the center of their own histories.³⁸ They posit that Africa must be the starting point for any study of Africans in the diaspora and have emphasized that these enslaved and transported Africans were not as diverse as one thought; that some ethnicities were “clustered”³⁹ in certain areas; and that slave-owners preferred certain ethnicities. As John Thornton writes, “Randomization did not occur with the Middle Passage. Slave ships drew their entire cargo from only one or perhaps two ports in Africa and unloaded them in large lots of as many as 200 – 1000 in their new Atlantic homes.”⁴⁰ These revisionist scholars, also, critique the Mintz and Price thesis in being too Euro-centric and American-centric.

Indeed, they argue that too little attention has been paid to the role Africans played within the creolization process. By tracking continuities between Africa and the Americas, they argue, it is possible to move beyond identifying slaves as a monolithic group but as Africans who, at times, successfully re-established communities, reformulated their sense of identity and reinterpreted ethnicity under slavery and freedom in the Americas.

Operating between these two poles is Richard Burton who argues, in his Afro- Creole, that the predominantly African culture of the slave sector, in Jamaica, transformed into an Afro-Creole one (as in a mixture of African and European cultural principles – different from Brathwaite’s meaning) in four separate phases. These phases include the formation period (1655-1700), consolidation and expansion (1700-1750), the “fulcrum” period (1750-80), and finally the last fifty or so years of slavery (1780-1834- 38).⁴¹ At the centre of this transformation, Burton argues, were locally born slaves (creoles) who played a decisive role in transforming African-derived cultural norms to ones more resembling “creole.” As he writes,

“Throughout, I attribute a determining importance to the ever-growing proportion of creole (locally born slaves) slaves, who, much more than the whites themselves seem to have been the direct and decisive agents of cultural transformation on the plantation.”⁴²

Creolization, therefore, for Burton, was a struggle not so much between whites and Africans but rather between African-born slaves and locally born creole slaves who often imitated Europeans and their cultural practices. Although Burton argues that the majority of the transformation within the slave sector⁴³ occurred in his final phase (what he calls “Toward a Creole Synthesis”), he, curiously, claims that the demographic balance began to shift in favour of creole slaves during the “fulcrum period.” This is an untenable position as, outlined below, African born slaves dominated the Jamaican landscape throughout the British Slave Trade.

These demographic inconsistencies aside, Burton further argues, “that both ‘continuity’ and ‘creativity’ are involved in creolization . . . taking place at least as much within the slave community as between that community and whites.”⁴⁴ Unfortunately, by “within the slave community” he is, again, referring to the relationship between African and locally-born slaves and ignores the interaction between African born slaves themselves. Moreover, his assumption that the culture of the slave sector, during his final period, lost much of its “African-ness” is suspect.⁴⁵ Obviously, the abolition of the British Slave Trade in 1807 and the switch to locally-born slaves had an immeasurable impact on the slave sector as cultural renewal, in the form of African slaves, effectively stopped.

Likewise, the rise of a more stable “free coloured” population and the coming of Christian missionaries, during this period, also had large effects. However, other evidence suggests that the cultural lives of slaves (and newly freed after 1838), certainly in terms of religion, remained strongly African through Emancipation and beyond. This will be briefly outlined below. It seems to me that some scholars, like Burton, have spent too much time probing the potential “Europeanization” of the slave sector while ignoring the complex interactions between the African born slaves themselves which were largely free from European influence.

Factors that Facilitated the Retention of African Cultural Principles in Jamaica

 

African cultural practices were allowed to take root on Jamaican soil because of several salient factors: an unstable “creole” population (creole, here, meaning children born into slavery)⁴⁶; a fragile white population; and a somewhat unsuccessful missionary presence during the British Slave Trade and beyond. Between the years 1655 and 1808, approximately 915 000 Africans landed in Jamaica with 701 046 or just over three quarters remaining in the island with the rest being distributed to other locations.⁴⁷ The number of slaves more than doubled between 1700 and 1750 to 120 000 and multiplied, when the British Slave Trade intensified, a further two and a half times to more than 300 000 by the end of the century.⁴⁸ The enormous importation of Africans 18^th-century Jamaica resulted from the harsh reality that deaths constantly outnumbered births as the female fertility rate was exceptionally low. Enslaved Africans failed to reproduce themselves due to poor diet, horrendous work regimes and awful treatment resulting in a slave population that remained 75 – 85 percent African, as opposed to locally born, in the eighteenth-century.⁴⁹ Whites were fewer in rural areas where the ratio of slaves to whites was perhaps as high as 15:1. These whites tended to be recently arrived immigrants who were indifferent to regulating the cultural lives of their slaves. Hence, slaves were able to lead a somewhat autonomous existence, largely free from oppressive white surveillance, especially in their cultural and religious lives. ⁵⁰ Moreover, it allowed the enslaved the space and ability to experiment with their own continental African religious viewpoints.

Another factor, hinted at above, that facilitated the retention of African cultural principles was the unstable white population. The major problem facing white immigrants upon their arrival in Jamaica was sudden death. Many eighteenth-century commentators on Jamaican society felt it necessary to dispel the concerns of many potential immigrants that West Indian islands were killing fields for whites; in reality, though, the islands were just that. As Trevor Burnard remarks, “Of indentured servants arriving in the island between 1719 and 1758, thirty-six percent died within five years.”⁵¹ The mortality rate among whites was so devastating that it even surpassed that of African slaves. Although immigrants accounted for many of these deaths, even native born residents who had formed families did not prosper. Families, it seems, were not easy to maintain for whites under these harsh New World conditions; the average length of marriages between 1666 and 1744 was only eight years and four months.⁵² Unsurprisingly then, these unions produced relatively few children. Because of this tenuous white population, masters were powerless to usher in a full cultural imperialistic project which, in turn, only strengthened the possibility of African survivals on Jamaican soil. This lack of intrusion, on the part of Jamaican whites, into the cultural lives of the slaves, allowed them the “freedom” (if such an ironic use of the term can be used here) to experiment, re-fashion and re-engineer African religious worldviews so to meet their collective spiritual needs under slavery in Jamaica.

The low-level of missionary activity prior to the abolition of the British Slave Trade also facilitated the retention of African cultural principles, specifically in terms of religion. In December 1754 three brethren of the Moravian Church arrived in Jamaica from London. They were the very first missionaries to arrive on Jamaican soil and their mission was to evangelize the 130 000 African slaves on the island.⁵³ These missionaries were met by immediate difficulties. On Christmas Day of that year, Brother Caries hoped to preach at a Mesopotamian plantation but found that the slaves had been given rum to celebrate the holiday, and preferred to drink and dance. Indeed, few slaves showed a genuine interest in Christian life. With few recruits applying for baptism, the Mesopotamia slave congregation slowly declined. In 1768 membership was eighty-five but by 1798 it had fallen to thirty-two.⁵⁴ Disease was also a formidable foe; fifteen Moravian brothers and sisters were buried at Mesopotamia between 1760 and 1835.

Planters were skeptical to the intentions of the missionaries. They feared that conversion would imbue the slaves with a sort of humanity that did not resonate with their role as expendable labour units. Moreover, Sunday was the day allotted to slaves to work on their provision grounds. And because the planters were dependent on that food surplus, they frowned on them attending church. ⁵⁵

The established church on the island, the Church England, showed even less interest in converting slaves; Christianity, for them, was for whites only. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the French traveler Jean Barbot commented on the reluctance of Protestant churches to convert their slaves resulting in the continuation of their traditional religious beliefs. “The great incumbrance it would be to a planter,” remarked Barbot, who has a great number of slaves, some one, others two hundred and more, first to have them learn English, and afterwards to instruct every one of them in the principal article of the Protestant belief, those slaves being generally of a brutish temper, and prepossessed with fantastical superstitious practices of the grossest and most absurd paganism; which, in reality, most of them always adhere to, though they have lived ever so long among Protestants.⁵⁶

Barbot fervently believed that the inconvenience experienced by the planter in converting their slaves was worth it if it meant the end to those “pagan” beliefs. In reality, though, the Church of England in Jamaica was in no position to launch any sort of conversion campaign. It was a corrupt and poorly organized institution that held little sway with the general public. Edward Long lambasted several members of the clergy for “their addiction to lewdness, drinking, gambling, and iniquity.”⁵⁷ Moreover, since the Church of England was a state-sponsored church, it would not benefit them greatly to challenge the status-quo and attempt to Christianize slaves who were largely seen, by the slave-holding classes, as dispensable pieces of labour. However, the British Parliament, in 1789, was curious as to whether the slaves in Jamaica were receiving any religious instruction. Mr. Wedderburn, a resident of Jamaica, somberly replied, “There are a few properties on which there are Moravian persons; but in general there is no attention paid to religious instruction.”⁵⁸ Around the same time, the Wesleyan missionary Thomas Coke arrived in Jamaica and was struck by the lack of Christian teaching on the island: “When I arrived in Jamaica, the form of godliness was hardly visible; and its power, except in a few solitary instances, was totally unknown.”⁵⁹ Throughout the eighteenth-century, therefore, Christian teachings reached only a minority of the enslaved on the island.

The missionary project in Jamaica did not truly get underway until near the end of the British Slave Trade. In the first few decades of the nineteenth-century Jamaica was flooded by various missionary groups: the Wesleyans, Methodists, Baptists and Moravians all took turns trying to convert slaves to Christianity. The missionaries, from these non-“established” churches, though, met opposition on two fronts: one from the planters who suspected the missionaries of trying to undermine the institution of slavery and secondly, from the slaves themselves who were often resistant to conversion. Indeed, slaves were hesitant to surrender their traditional practices. The missionaries, attempting to recruit church members, gave full attention to fighting the slaves’ rival religious beliefs. Even the funeral service (such an integral part of the African-Jamaican religious experience, to be discussed below) the missionaries administered were “tainted” with the slaves’ traditional sense that death was festive.⁶⁰ Moreover, the morality that accompanied good Christian living required slaves to give up their own particular forms of singing and dancing. The musical creativity of the slaves did find there way into the mission churches and the missionaries were content with the way slaves gave old hymns new tunes. But the dancing, drumming and drinking that accompanied the musical activities of the enslaved were strictly forbidden as it reminded the missionaries too much of the Africans’ traditional religion and, simultaneously, challenged the supremacy of the missionaries’ own religion. In the end, missionaries made very few easy converts. As one missionary frustratingly concluded, “very few turn to God.” Perhaps it was due to the fact the slaves already had a tangible belief structure.⁶¹

It was hoped, by the missionaries, that full emancipation would facilitate the freed slaves’ conversion to Christianity. Indeed, if the slaves were freed from the back-breaking toil of slave-life, the missionaries believed they would have more opportunities to pursue a morally sound Christian life. This optimism, however, would prove short- lived. The Methodists, for example, were increasingly frustrated by the resiliency of the Myal practice and its influence among the newly freed. Prior to 1845, the Methodists tolerated the freed Jamaicans allegiance to both missionary Christianity and Myal; the latter they believed was only a superficial commitment.⁶² After 1845, however, Methodists began to realize that freed Jamaicans were openly choosing to practice Myal, fully cognizant that it meant their expulsion from the missionary congregation. The 1860s saw the second great Myal Revival on the island and caused the missionaries to renew their efforts against this African-derived practice.⁶³ This effort would too fail.

Missionaries throughout the nineteenth century were often dismayed to discover the continuity of African religious practices. In 1820 Mr. Radcliff, a white Christian preacher, wrote that, “The Africans in this colony retain many superstitious funeral rites, such as dancing round the grave, sacrificing poultry, pouring out libations, and affecting to hold conversation with the spirit of the deceased.”⁶⁴ The Wesleyan missionary Thomas Coke, around the same time, was also frustrated by the resilience of these cultural practices: “In the delirium of their passions (under possession), when abandoned by all restraint, they pretended to hold intercourse with their departed relatives, and to receive from them instructions, which they considered themselves religiously bound to obey.”⁶⁵ The Baptist missionary James Phillippo, in his 1843 work Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, spent a great deal of time discussing the advancement of Christian teachings in Jamaica; he applauded the increase of ministers and churches throughout the island.⁶⁶

Curiously, he also related a remarkable example of an indisputably African burial ceremony:

They (pallbearers) would sometimes make a sudden halt, put their ears in a listening attitude against the coffin, pretending that the corpse was endowed with the gift of speech – that he was angry and required to be appeased (the corpse) refused to proceed further towards the place of burial until some debts due to him were discharged   they would pretend to answer the questions of the deceased, echo his requirements, run back with the coffin upon the procession, or jerk with it from side to side of the road; not unfrequently they would leave the corpse at the door or in the house of a debtor…… until his pretended demands were satisfied.⁶⁷

This was the important “Carrying the Corpse” practice that contained undeniable West and West-Central African roots and had a important significance, despite Phillippo’s typical skepticism, for the enslaved (and newly freed in this example) in Jamaica. This will practice will be furthered explored below.

I mention this example here solely to provide evidence that the “African-ness” of the cultural practices of the enslaved, and the newly freed after 1838, did not simply wither away or become so interlocked with Christianity that they ceased to look at all African. As illustrated (albeit quickly) above, some of the slaves (and newly freed) chose to adhere to their African-derived practices throughout the nineteenth-century. Moreover, African cultural idioms continue to inform the African-derived religious practices of some Jamaicans to this day, including: Rastafarianism, Kumina, and Revival Zion.⁶⁸ Anthony Harriott, in the late 1980s, conducted an interview with an Obeah practitioner, named Mother Oakley. He asked her whether she had ever experienced “spiritual journeying” and, if so, where she had traveled to. She replied in the affirmative, “I travel out to Africa. I go to Africa. I travel under the sea. I met different peoples. Different nations, dressed in olden days clothing. But I can’t remember their names. I saw prophets who took me up to a land in the air, with pretty houses. It was very beautiful.”⁶⁹ Thus Africa, and its memory, continues to play a large role in the Jamaican religious experience.

My Conceptual Framework

 

Both the “continuity” and “creativity” models have their strengths and, at times, it seems that the discussion is hindered because of the polarizing tendencies of advocates on both sides of the debate. I approach the question of African derived religions from a continuity standpoint but with reservations. Indeed, I hope to trace, where possible, the Akan (present day Ghana, and Gold Coast during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; encompassing the ethnicities of Asante, Fante, Akwamu, Akyem and others) contribution to the three main religious practices of enslaved Africans in Jamaica during the period of the British Slave Trade: burial practices, Obeah and Myal. I do not contend, however, that these religious practices of enslaved Africans in Jamaica were drawn exclusively from the Akan religion alone. Indeed, scholars on both sides of the creolization debate realize the impossibility of transferring whole systems of belief into a New World setting especially under the conditions of slavery. To fully comprehend cultural “survivals” or “creations” there needs to be a solid grasp of the historiography on both sides of the Atlantic. Revisionist scholars in hoping to illustrate the African legacy of a particular cultural form cannot reduce the complex process of cultural interaction to matching certain fossilized cultural forms on both sides of the Atlantic over the course of the Atlantic Slave Trade. This is, obviously, a static approach to cultural formation and denies the reality of transformation on both sides of the Atlantic. With that being said, scholars who subscribe to the “creativity” school cannot ignore or diminish the reality of that “cultural base” that many revisionist scholars hold. Indeed, these were African systems of beliefs and frameworks that oriented the slaves’ understanding of the physical and spiritual worlds. What needs to be constructed, in my opinion, is a model that is hospitable to both continuity and change but approaches the issue with an emphasis on the African component; meaning, a succinct investigation into the interactions between the African-born (though not entirely) slaves themselves or what Braithwaite labels “Afro-Creole” on his cultural continuum (again, this is different from Burton’s interpretation outlined above). In terms of the religion of the enslaved in Jamaica then, how did continental Africans’ conception of the divine and sacred mutate once they arrived as slaves on Jamaican soil? Was there one particular African cultural group that gained religious prominence in Jamaica? How did African cosmology inform the slaves’ understanding of their new surroundings? And most critically, how did the enslaved Africans react to each other religiously? Were they, in fact, so religiously diverse that it was impossible for them to assemble tangible and coherent belief structures based on their own African cosmological understandings?

It is with these concerns in mind, that I offer a sort of quasi-combination of two important theories of cultural interaction to illustrate the Akan contribution to the Pan- Africanized religious practices of the enslaved in Jamaica during the British Slave Trade. Lorand Matory, in his study of Candomble in Brazil, posits that the underlying logics of African and African-American cultures can change drastically without making those cultures ostensibly un-African. He does not wish to trivialize discussions of “survivals,” “retentions,” “reinterpretations,” or “creolization;” rather, he wants to recognize the more encompassing geographical frames, political hierarchies and networks of long distance communication that have made it possible for cultures to reproduce themselves within the closure of a bounded, self defining set of social relationships and meanings.⁷⁰ Similarly, Dianne Stewart, in her brilliant study of African-derived religion in Jamaica, argues that a Pan-African synthesis of African religious and cultural practices was established in Jamaica very early on. As Stewart writes:

The starting point and paradigmatic religious framework for what we now identify as African-derived religions in the Caribbean and Americas is grounded upon an identifiable religious orientation, as expressed through the rituals and practices of African existence and essentially shaped within the horizon of continental and diasporic Africa.⁷¹

Such a base, orientation, or framework allows for continuity and change within an African setting; an Africanized creolization if you will.

This intra-African syncretism occurring among Africans with similar religious beliefs facilitated the emergence of a Pan-African religiosity in Jamaica. In the slaveholding context of Jamaica, where ethnic African identities ultimately succumbed to the acculturating influence of Pan-Africanization, these religious practices were thus collapsed under generic religious categories, including burial rites, Obeah and Myal. This conceptual framework essentially posits that African and African American cultures can transform and mutate, on both sides of the Atlantic, without making those cultures seemingly un-African. Moreover, the theory of “Pan-Africanization” caters to both change and continuity, but addresses them within an African context. Indeed, it focuses primarily on the interactions between enslaved Africans. These Pan-African religious practices were “new” in the sense that they required the contribution of a diverse group of Africans who shared different (yet closely related) religious practices and “old” in the sense, that they were, undoubtedly, African cultural principles being applied. In what follows there will be a brief introduction to Akan history and an introduction to their religious beliefs; a brief survey of the Akan presence in Jamaica during the period of the British Slave Trade; and finally the Akan contribution to the three major manifestations of the Jamaican religious experience – burial practices, Obeah, and Myal. I will also, where possible, endeavour to illustrate the religious commonalities between Africans living in West and West-Central Africa. To begin though, I offer a few words on the methodology of this paper; focusing on how I plan to illustrate the Akan contribution to the Pan-African religious practices of enslaved Africans in Jamaica during the British Slave Trade and a few words on African religion in general.

Methodology

 

The earnest exploration of Akan religiosity by Europeans did not truly begin until the turn of the twentieth-century. The work of the anthropologists A.B Ellis and Robert Rattray during early part of the twentieth-century ushered in a new paradigm of appreciation for Akan religious thought. These writers succinctly and objectively outlined the subtleties of Akan religiosity while keeping the euro-centrism to a minimum. Rattray, for example, spent years living among the Asante people trying to grasp their complex belief systems. Of course, these works were still coded with a European arrogance but this should not come as a surprise since they were sponsored by the British colonial government. But these works, especially those of Rattray, created a foundation which would be utilized by all African historians/anthropologists to follow. Before these pioneering efforts, historians attempting to grapple with the pre-colonial cultural history of the Akan and Gold Coast region had to rely on the travel reports of often unreliable and confused European travelers and merchants. Indeed, these reports offered by Europeans of varying nationalities (British, French, Danish, German, Dutch etc) over a long period of time often proved difficult to decipher. These reports were written in a highly Eurocentric tone as these authors spent more time trying to demonstrate the “absurdity” and “savageness” of these religious principles than attempting to understand their cosmological significance for the Akan people. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has proven difficult to separate the reality from the rhetoric in these accounts.

Because of the difficulty and scarcity of these accounts, historians and anthropologists alike, in trying to match up specific New and Old World cultural practices, have often fallen back on the colonial ethnographic reports because of their accessibility. It is problematic to compare a funeral ceremony in 1920s Ghana with one reported in the 1750s in Jamaica even if there are pronounced similarities. Such an approach extrapolates backwards in time and distorts and sometimes completely ignores change and transformation. Indeed, an over-reliance on anthropological material has the ability to “telescope history, establishing a static ethnographic past.”⁷² Similarly, for the study of African religions in general, Robert Baum, in his study of the pre-colonial religious practices of the Diola people of modern-day Senegal, cautions scholars against treating African traditional religions as static phenenomenons without their own history of development and transformation: “For most scholars, African traditional religions, to the extent that they were studied at all, were seen as relatively static entities that entered into history with their contact with Islam, Christianity, and world historical peoples.”⁷³ In the last thirty years or so, African historians and anthropologists, in attempting to overcome this paucity of written sources in the pre-colonial period, have turned their attention to oral traditions/histories of the group of people they were studying in hope of discovering a window into their past religious lives. Indeed, oral traditions provide information about the past that is beyond the life experience of the informant as they have been handed down for at least one generation.⁷⁴ These histories often gave a perspective that is far removed from the vantage point of European missionaries or travelers; they provide an insider’s perspective. Unfortunately, researching the oral histories of the various Akan groups is far beyond the scope of the present paper.

In any event, in this paper, I will use both traveler’s accounts from the period of the British Slave Trade as well as twentieth century ethnographic reports. The European accounts I utilize include but are not limited to: the German Lutheran priest Wilhelm Muller (1660s), the French Huguenot Jean Barbot (1690s), the Dutch factor William Bosman (1690s-1700s), the German Ludwig Romer (1740s), the English missionary Thomas Thompson (1750s), and the Dane Paul Isert (1780s). Because I also examine the religious practices of inhabitants of other areas of West Africa, I have also used the account of the English Lieutenant John Matthews (1780s) for the Sierra Leone region, and the memoirs of the English slave trader Hugh Crow (1800s) for the Niger Delta. In investigating the religious practices in other areas, I borrow from secondary sources.

Despite the rhetoric and tone, these European travel accounts still provide vivid descriptions of Akan (and other African groups) cultural and religious practices. By ardently documenting the “savageness” of the Akan people, these writers, despite their original intentions, left lucid portraits of cultural activities that were of the utmost importance for the Akan people. As well, those twentieth-century anthropological sources can still prove fruitful if approached with a keen sense of historical change and continuity; they provide us with a refracted image of cultural traditions found in earlier periods. In terms of ethnographic reports, I use the classic works of Robert Rattray (1920s) and J.H Nketia (1950s) for the Akan, the work of Margaret Field (1930s) for the Ga people and the multi-volume work of Melville Hersokovits (1930s) for Dahomey.

Scholars have to credit ethnic groups with a degree of cultural continuity and identity, especially when collaborative evidence illustrates that a religious practice existing in the eighteenth century is still, in similar form, in use in the twentieth century even with pronounced socio-political changes in the region. Christopher DeCorse argues the same, in his archeological study of the history of the Elmina fort and surrounding community (1400-1900) on the Gold Coast, when he writes, “The data available indicate that the Elmina people exhibited a great deal of continuity with an African, largely Akan, cultural tradition.”⁷⁵ In this regard, I will try to balance more contemporary reports of Akan religiosity with earlier descriptions given.

Another point of contention, in terms of approaches and methodology, is the study of African religion in general. Scholars who hold the “creativity” approach to African culture in the Americas maintain that a unified cultural base does not or did not ever exist in Africa as they posit that to homogenize or generalize African culture is to mask and belittle its great cultural diversity. Though their emphasize on cultural diversity is a laudable one, I think it speaks more to their misrepresentation of Africa than to the reality of stark cultural heterogeneity existing among Africans living in West and West-Central Africa. As Thornton, once again writes,

We must conclude that the degree of diversity in Africa can easily be exaggerated. The older anthropological tendency to see each ethnolinguistic group as a separate ‘tribe’ and to ignore such factors as multilingualism or nonlinguistic cultural sharing have tended to force the real diversity beyond its true limits.⁷⁶

This appeal to “exaggerated” diversity is especially true in regards to African religiosity. While broad generalizations about classical African religions often conflate and distort important distinctions about the peoples who claim allegiance to them, scholars of African religions have identified consistent pattern of thought, organization, purpose, and practice in the cultural traditions among diverse peoples in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, many religious commonalities and foundations existed and continue to exist among diverse groups of people on continental Africa: They include: a communotheistic (as opposed to monotheistic or polytheistic) understanding of the divine, which corresponds with a community of venerated deities and invisible beings; ancestral veneration; possession trance and mediumship; food offerings and animal sacrifice; divination and herbalism; an entrenched belief in neutral mystical power; and the belief of the continuation of life after death.⁷⁷ The belief of live after death is found in all African societies but this belief, it is important to note, does not translate into a hope for a better future or life. To live in the “here and now” is the most important of African religious activities as there is no line drawn between the physical and spiritual. These African religious orientations that connected various locals in West and West-Central Africa aided in the emergence of a Pan-African religious experience in Jamaica. Indeed, between 1655 and the early 1800s, the religious ideas being discussed and exchanged among slaves in Jamaica were largely centered on classical African cosmologies.

Because of these religious similarities found among continental Africans, the enslaved, in a highly pluralistic cultural context, were able to effectively communicate with one another and coherently attend to whatever religiously ailed them. The intrinsic problems of essentialising⁷⁸ and over-generalizing are part of any classification scheme. Thus we must move cautiously in trying to locate these foundational attributes of African religiosity in their affiliates in the Americas and in my case, Jamaica. Though my position, as outlined above, is grounded on the assumption that African cultural norms are not or were not as diverse as once thought, I do not present African religiosity as a static or fossilized phenomenon. Indeed, I will try to engage the discussion of change and continuity while being cognizant of the transformations taking place on the Gold coast and on Jamaican soil. There must be attempt to balance on the one hand, interpretations of African religions as primitive practices that produced nothing among the religious cultures of enslaved African communities besides pitiable superstition and magical beliefs and, on the other, attempts to present African-derived religions as neat and presentable packages which are driven by misguided impulses to categorize and totalize.⁷⁹ Another difficulty in exploring African religiosity and trying to undercover its influence in the Americas, is that there are no sacred scriptures. Religion in African societies is written not on paper but in people’s hearts; passed on through oral histories and lived in every minute of the day. As John Mbiti eloquently writes, “Wherever the African is, there is his religion: he carries it to the fields where he is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop; he takes it with to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony.”⁸⁰ Thus religion permeates every facet of life and often proves elusive to the eyes of an outsider.

Islam and Christianity in Africa

 

Of course, there were religious worldviews at work in West and West-Central Africa, during the period of the British Slave Trade, which differed from traditional African religious practices. Islam had been a reality in the Senegambian region and the western Sudan for centuries before the commencement of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Likewise, by the mid-fifteenth century the Portuguese had penetrated deep into the West- Central Africa region and had attempted to convert those inhabitants to Catholicism. This reality, obviously, meant that some of those individuals captured, and sold as slaves across the Atlantic, were, in fact, Muslims and Christians. Did this complicate the process of cultural interaction in the Americas? Does it problematize my assertion that a Pan- African religious experience emerged in Jamaica among slaves who shared similar traditional African religious beliefs? It will be, briefly, outlined below that, in fact, Muslims from West Africa and Christians from West-Central Africa played a marginal role in the cultural development of Jamaica.

Some enslaved Muslims did find themselves in Jamaica. One of these individuals was Muhammad Kaba who lived on the coffee estate of Spice Grove in the mountains of Manchester Parish in Jamaica. Kaba lived on this estate from his arrival as a slave in 1777 until his death in 1845. In 1813, he was baptized and entered in the Moravian church but this did not curb his allegiance to the Muslim faith.⁸¹ According to J.H Buchner, the historian of Moravians in Jamaica, Kaba was by birth a Mandingo and studied at the great Islamic learning centre of Timbuktu. He also wrote a manuscript while in Jamaica to serve as an Islamic learning guide for other enslaved Muslims.

Although Kaba kept true to his Muslim beliefs, his manuscript illustrates that he was beginning to lose touch with the instruction of West Africa; he was losing his memory of Islam.⁸² However, Kaba’s manuscript also reveals that there was, arguably, a community of Muslims who were aware of each other’s presence and lived in close proximity to one another.⁸³ Another famous Muslim who lived in Jamaica was Abu Bakr. He was born in Timbuktu in 1790 and was educated in both Timbuktu and Jenne. He was eventually captured by the Asante and sold to the British in 1805, due to the continuous wars in the region, and arrived in Jamaica that same year.⁸⁴ Between 1805 and 1834, Bakr was owned by three different people, the last of which being Alexander Anderson. Bakr then met Richard Madden who was a member of the British Civil Service. He was one of six special magistrates sent to Jamaica to oversee the eventual liberation of Jamaica’s enslaved population.⁸⁵ Bakr’s great knowledge of Arabic and his deep understanding of the Islamic tradition greatly impressed Madden. On the character of Bakr, Madden wrote, “I found him a person of excellent conduct, of great discernment and discretion.”⁸⁶ Madden even assisted Bakr in writing his autobiography in 1834, the first of three versions. Under the persistent pressure of Madden, Anderson eventually agreed to manumit Bakr without compensation. With the support of Madden, Bakr eventually returned to West Africa and arrived safely back in Jenne in 1841.⁸⁷ Bakr had actually used his deep erudition to his benefit.

It appears, at least from these two examples, that Jamaican Muslims enjoyed a privileged position. Michael Gomez, in his study of African Muslims in the Americas, outlines several reasons why enslaved Muslims might have enjoyed a more advantageous position than other slaves in Jamaica and in the Anglophone world in general. Both Kaba and Bakr were deeply learned individuals; both could read and write Arabic and had studied at the great Islamic learning centre of Timbuktu. This led white Jamaicans to view these Muslims as intellectually superior to other Africans, a conviction, Gomez argues, that was “internalized at times by Muslims themselves.”⁸⁸ Moreover, Muslims in Jamaica, especially around the time of emancipation, developed the reputation as loyalists among whites. Gomez speculates that during the “Baptist War” of 1831-32, the reason that a number of plantations of Manchester Parish did not participate in the revolt was because of Kaba’s influence there; he was, apparently, against the revolt.⁸⁹ As well, both Kaba and Bakr had owned slaves in West Africa and, despite themselves being slaves in Jamaica, there was no clear indication that they expressed any abolitionist sentiments.⁹⁰ It seems that these Muslims, especially Bakr, had more contact with whites than with other enslaved Africans. In the case of Bakr, he skillfully used his deep knowledge to impress various whites and win his freedom. Thus this suggests that Muslims, for the most part, in Jamaica were far removed from the mass of enslaved Africans. Through their internalized superiority complex, they distanced themselves from the lives and religion of the bulk of the slaves. They maintained their Islamic beliefs but often did so in isolation; only forming loosely-based communities that had difficulty sustaining themselves. Moreover, because of their relatively small numbers, these Islamic communities (if we can, in fact, call them such) were “engulfed by seas of African non- Muslim traditions.”⁹¹

The Kongo region of West-Central Africa was deeply influenced by its interaction with Christianity. Indeed, from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, the Portuguese were able to access the interior of Kongo and the neighboring states and attempted to infuse it (with some success) with their own brand of Catholicism. The result of this mixture, argues Thornton and Heywood, was a syncretic “Atlantic Creole” culture that combined vestiges of the Kongo traditional culture with that of the Portuguese. Throughout their study on Central Africans and their role in the foundation of the Americas, Heywood and Thornton borrow terms from Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone, like “Atlantic Creole,” “charter generation,” and “plantation generation,” but add their own nuances to them. By 1607, they argue, two areas in West-Central Africa formed the core areas of Atlantic Creole culture: Kongo, which had over the past century incorporated various European cultural norms into their culture, and Portuguese Angola, where European settlers had formed an outpost that in turn had been influenced by the African culture of the local residents.⁹² Thornton and Heywood then argue that many of these creolized slaves were the first to be brought to the English and Dutch American colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and South America. These creolized Kongo slaves encompassed a “charter generation” which was able to, according to the writers, set down their own cultural pattern in the Americas, “even where they were subsequently outnumbered by new arrivals with no Creole background.”⁹³ But in some parts of the Americas, where there was a substantially small number of creolized West-Central Africans, their Atlantic culture was overwhelmed numerically by other arriving Africans through the rapidly increasing Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. This group was labeled the “plantation generation” by Thornton and Heywood.

Thus in areas in the Americas where there was a minority of creolized slaves from West-Central Africa, the “plantation generation” was said to “re-Africanize” the Creole population. It seems clear, from the sources, that if a Kongo-derived Atlantic Creole culture existed early on in Jamaica (it would certainly have had to be under Spanish control) it quickly disappeared with the increasing number of Africans entering the colony during the eighteenth century. Thornton and Heywood, commenting on Jamaica, admit as much when they write, “By 1677, the African portion had reached half of the total population, and by 1739 the revolution (meaning the plantation revolution) was complete: 99 000 Africans lived on the island with just 10 000 Europeans.”⁹⁴ Thus it is fair to say that Islam and Christianity (in the form of a syncretic Atlantic Creole culture) played a marginal role in the development of the religious practices of the enslaved in Jamaica. As discussed earlier, Christianity, in the form brought by the missionaries, had a far more substantial impact. We now turn our attention to a people and an area of Africa that played an indelible role in the development of these same practices: the Akan of the Gold Coast.

The Akan in Africa: Religion and History

 

There are several components and varying levels of the Akan religious experience. They include an idea of a supreme God, Onyame, who created the earth but is considered to have largely withdrawn from the affairs of humans although household shrines are used for his veneration.⁹⁵ The most frequent expression of supernatural power in the Akan religious tradition manifest in degrees of embodiment below that of Onyame. Among these are abosom (sing. obosom), or lesser gods; supernatural powers that are said to live in rocks, rivers, groves or other natural features. The abosom were usually consulted during a possession ceremony called Akom where the obosom took possession of a priest (okomfo) and revealed themselves through him/her. The prognostications of the abosom were generally spiritually ambiguous; some proved helpful while others were fickle and vengeful. In brief, the abosom were capable of doing good and bad.⁹⁶ Below the abosom are the asuman (sing. suman) which were erroneously labeled “fetishes” by European commentators. This was due to their physical nature which often rendered them most the obvious feature of Akan cosmology to European eyes. A suman is an object which is the potential dwelling-place of a spirit or spirits of an inferior status; it is closely associated with the control of the powers of evil or black magic, for personal ends, but not necessarily to assist the owner to work evil, since it is used as much for defensive as for offensive purposes. They encompass household shrines, amulets, charms and anything that might serve as an effective repository for spiritual entities.⁹⁷ Also of great importance to Akan religious thought are asaman (sing. saman), the spirit of the ancestors. The asaman are thought to behave in human ways, requiring food and drink and expressing feelings. They are placated through offering and libations and their help is called upon in daily affairs.⁹⁸

During the period of the British Slave Trade, the Gold Coast was defined as that stretch of the Guinea Coast from Cape Appolonia in the west to the mouth of the river Volta in the east, a distance of about 300 miles.⁹⁹ Many people who lived in the Gold Coast region in this period belonged to the broad cultural group of the Akan (others were the Guan, Etsi and the Ga). The oral traditions of most of the Akan-speaking peoples reveal that their ancestors entered the forested areas from the north or north-west.

Akwamu, one of the strongest Akan states in the late seventeenth-century, migrated to the south-west from Kong, the Mande Dyula town on the medieval trade route between Begho and Bobo-Dioulasso. The legends of the Fante say they reached the coast from Teykyuman in the present day Borong-Ahafo region.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, movements and migrations were the norm before the arrival of European merchants. Moreover, commercial networks connected various peoples over tremendous distances. Before the arrival of Europeans, the peoples of the Gold Coast were in commercial contact with the peoples of the Western Sudan, Ivory Coast, modern Togo, Dahomey and Nigeria. The Gold Coast peoples exchanged their salt, gold, ivory and kola nuts for beads, cowrie shells and cloths. ¹⁰¹

It was the abundance of gold in the region (hence the name) that first lured enterprising Europeans (the Portuguese and Dutch primarily) to the coast.¹⁰² By the first two decades of the eighteenth-century, however, the Gold Coast was increasingly becoming identified with the slave trade. Two examples will suffice. In 1704, the Dutch at Elmina reported that over 30 000 slaves were sent annually to the Americas by the English, French, Danish and Portuguese. During the period of 1676-1731 the Dutch estimated that they exported 80 406 slaves from the Gold Coast to Europe and the Americas.¹⁰³ The increase of European commercial activity on the coast meant an increase in the amount of European products being imported into the region including firearms and ammunition. This had an immeasurable impact on the region. Before the arrival of Europeans, the political practice of Gold Coast peoples had been based on government by kindred groups. An Akan state, for example, was basically an association of semi-united family groups who shared a common ancestry. But the introduction of firearms and the increase of slave exports on a mass scale made possible the reorganization of states that transcended tribal, clan or families or, in other words, the creation of massive, large-scale states.¹⁰⁴ The political economy shifted from its town centered, artisanal emphasis to a system of dispersed settlement and payment of land rents to central authorities.¹⁰⁵ After 1650, for examples, Akyem, Denkyira, and Akwamu emerged as the most important Akan states in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. With European ammunition readily available these states vied with each other over the next fifty or so years actively contributing to the ever-increasing European demand for slaves.¹⁰⁶

At the turn of the eighteenth-century, the Asante emerged as force to be reckoned with and the landscape of the Gold Coast was irrevocably changed.¹⁰⁷ There is some consensus among Asante historians that the majority of the peoples who later made up the nucleus of the Asante Union, originally lived in the Adanse and Amanse districts.

Almost all of the oral traditions of the important Asante divisional states reveal that their founding ancestors migrated from these areas. The Mampon say that their ancestors ventured from Ahensan in Adanse. The Kumasi, Dwaben, Kumawu, Kokofu, Bekwai and the Nsuta believe that they “came out of a hole” at Asantemanso in Asumenya a few miles south of Kumasi.¹⁰⁸ These peoples were tied together by their common origins, similar customs and language but they recognized only a loose relationship with one another. The creation of common political and economic objectives was to emerge after the arrival of Osei Tutu and Okomfo Anonkye and the construction of the Asante state.

Tutu, with the help of the priest Anonkye, built a regional alliance of “big men,” slowly incorporating different groups under his central authority as “asantehene,” or ultimate ruler, symbolized by the golden stool.¹⁰⁹ The new Asante lords had superseded Denkyira as the major political power in the hinterland of the western Gold Coast and was also in control of the gold, slave and ivory resources in that area. By 1717, these skilled warriors had brought several of the coastal mini-states under their control (adding Accra and Adangme) and continued their expansion into the north. During the reign of Opoku Ware (1720-50), the Asante reached their widest territorial extent and more people became subject to their rule.¹¹⁰ By 1780, the powerful Asante army was said to consist of 80 000 men, half of them musketeers. The rise of the slave trade over the eighteenth century was assisted by this constant war-making and the Asante attempt at consolidation of power. ¹¹¹

The Akan/Coramantin in Jamaica

 

In Jamaica, the people who came from the Gold Coast region were collapsed under the single heading of “Coromantins” or “Coromantees.” The reason for this curious moniker was that an area of the Gold Coast was called Kormantin. The English built a rather small lodge there in the early seventeenth century which they gradually enlarged. In 1640 the fort was destroyed by a fire; the British blamed the Dutch who steadfastly denied the charge. After this, the British decided to build a stronger fort with the first slave-prison on the coast. At this point, it was primarily the English who were purchasing slaves from the Gold Coast especially after the conquest of Jamaica in 1655. It was remarkable that even after the Dutch took this site from the English, which was now called Fort Amsterdam, that the English continued to refer to slaves from the Gold Coast as “Coromantins” or “Coromantese.” ¹¹² The “Coromantins” were just one of several African cultural groups entering Jamaica during the British Slave Trade. But it important to note, that the “Coromantins’ arriving into Jamaica, and other American ports, did not represent the transfer of an African identity or ethnicity wholesale. What was labeled the “Coromantin Nation” in Jamaica was, in fact, a New World creation. It was a creation, however, that drew from an African past and was reworked in the settings of the Americas.¹¹³ Obviously individuals residing in Kumasi or Cape Coast, during the British Slave Trade, did not consider themselves members of the “Coromantin Nation.” But what is also clear is that the Jamaican contemporaries who wrote about this “Nation” noticed enough similarities among them to classify them as such. They were not necessary incorrect in their assertion as religious commonalities and multilingualism (Akan was the lingua franca on the Gold Coast but many knew more than one language) existed on the Gold Coast. Moreover, some Jamaican observers were astute enough to note that existing Akan cultural groups (Asante, Fante etc) actually encompassed what was mistakenly referred to as the “Coromantin Nation.”

The “Coromantins,” therefore, undoubtedly shared variants of an Akan cultural past but their beliefs were also shaped by New World realities.¹¹⁴ As it will be illustrated in more detail below, West and West-Central Africans shared many similar religious attitudes which allowed the fostering of, in Jamaica, social groups that focused on their useable and common African past. Whether labeled “Coromantin,” “Ebo,” or “Congo,” these African groups shared enough culturally to facilitate the formation of a Pan-African religious synthesis in Jamaica. Indeed, African ethnicity, whether on the continent or in the diaspora, was a fluid and flexible phenomenon. It was not something enclosed or exclusive; rather, it could encompass a variety of people and diverse perspectives. In the Americas, slavery forced enslaved Africans to drop the specifics of a particular religious or cultural viewpoint in favour of a more general African framework. This, in turn, fostered a sense of belonging among the enslaved. The “Coromantin” group was, indeed, a New World creation but that did not make it necessarily un-African (or un-Akan) in belief structure.¹¹⁵ Thus, I cautiously use the term “Coromantin” to designate Akan individuals from the Gold Coast. My focus on the following is the Akan/Coromantin contribution to African-derived religious practices in Jamaica while being fully cognizant of the degree to which other African cultural groups influenced and shaped those same practices.

Jamaican planters had an often contradictory view of, what they termed, their “Coromantin” slaves. They often applauded their physique but chided their aversion to work and their stubbornness. As Edward Long, the Jamaican planter and historian wrote, “The Coromantins, and many other of the Gold Coast slaves, are haughty, ferocious and stubborn . . . who are distinguished from their brethren by their aversion to husbandry, and the martial ferocity of their disposition.”¹¹⁶ Also, their proclivity towards rebellion was not lost on many of the contemporaries. “The circumstances which distinguish the Koromantyn, or Gold Coast, Negroes, from all others,” wrote Bryan Edwards, “are firmness both of body and mind; a ferociousness of disposition . . . which prompts them to enterprises of difficulty and danger; and enables them to meet death, in its most horrible shape, with fortitude or indifference.”¹¹⁷ Such was the ambivalent view that Jamaican planters held towards these individuals.

These Jamaican historians had great cause to write about the rebelliousness of the “Coromantin” people. Even before their arrival to their New World settlements, Gold Coast slaves were known for their rebelliousness. The English trader William Snellgrave, in 1721, documented the ferociousness of the slaves from the Gold Coast and remarked on their propensity to rebel upon the slave ship,

But sometimes we met with a stout stubborn people amongst them, who are never to be made easy; and these are generally some of the Cormantines, a nation of the Gold Coast (erroneously labeled). . . I went in the year 1721 to that part of the coast and bought a good many people. We were obliged to secure them very well in irons . . . Yet they nevertheless mutinied, tho’ they had little prospect of succeeding.¹¹⁸

Akan slaves also caused havoc in other parts of the Caribbean. Ray Kea argues that during the 1730s Akan-led slave rebellions in the Danish West Indies, the Akwamu slaves were trying to establish an Akwamu-like state system on New World soil; the rebellion ultimately failed.¹¹⁹ Jamaica, however, was the site of the greatest number of Akan led revolts¹²⁰ and they started quite early. We can be reasonably sure that the participants in many of these revolts were, in fact, Akan as many of their leaders had common Akan names. In 1673 about three hundred Akan slaves in the Parish of St. Ann rebelled and took to the woods. There they joined runaway slaves who had fled their Spanish masters during the English siege of the 1650s. The Spanish slaves were not likely Akan in origin so the St. Ann rebels formed the nucleus of the predominantly Akan Maroons. In July 1690, four hundred Akan slaves in the parish of Clarendon rose up on Sutton’s plantation. They grabbed all the ammunition they could and proceeded to the next estate where they killed the white overseer and set the house on fire. The troops were called in and a few of the rebels surrendered but 318 of them were still at large and eventually joined the Leeward Maroons already established in the mountains.¹²¹ By the 1720s, on the eve of the first Maroon war, there were two clearly defined groups of Maroons: the Leeward band, found in the centre of the island and the Windward, or northeastern, band. Around this time, as well, the Leeward band elected Cudjoe to be their leader. Under Cudjoe’s leadership were his two brothers Accompong and Johnny, and two other captains, Cuffee and Quoa.¹²² With the exception of Johnny, these were all common Akan names; Cudjoe was a male day name for a Monday born child while Cuffee was for a boy born on a Friday.¹²³

After the successful Maroon peace treaty of 1739, the next major Akan-led insurrection was Tacky’s Revolt in 1760. This was a massive insurrection that encompassed a large portion of the island; from plantations in St Mary and Westmoreland parishes to covert meetings in the streets of Kingston. The goal of the revolt was the extermination of all whites on the island and the insertion of an African monarchy. After the rebellion was quashed (ironically, Tacky was killed by a Maroon) it was revealed that a number of the slaves who were executed or banished had Akan day names: Kweku (male, Wednesday), Kofi (male, Friday), and Abena (female, Tuesday).¹²⁴ Abena was a curious figure in the revolt. She was an Akan slave belonging to a Kingston Jewess. She presided over the secret meetings of the Akan conspirators in Kingston and was said to dress in a robe while adorned with a crown and sat under a canopy. Was Abena perpetuating the role of the traditional Queen Mother?¹²⁵ We will never know for sure but it is undeniable the salient role the Akan played in this major uprising.

Akan-led rebellions continued unabated towards the abolition of the British Slave Trade. Following the 1765 “Coromantin” rebellion, the Jamaican Assembly began to debate whether a higher duty should be placed Africans originating from the Gold Coast. Long noted that they proposed “that a bill should be brought in for laying additional higher duty upon all Fantin, Akim, and Ashantee Negroes, and all others commonly called Coromantins, that should, after a certain time, be imported, and sold in the island.”¹²⁶ The bill, however, was dropped. Despite all their reported rebelliousness, slaves from the Gold Coast still remained popular in Jamaica. In a letter dated July 23^rd 1770 Simon Taylor, one of the most important landowners in Jamaica, told Chaloner Arecedekne, an absentee proprietor living in England, that “the Negroes I purchased lately are well, and if you will let me go on in my way of purchasing, which is buying of the best Negro Men of Corromantee Country out of each ship, will in time establish a Gang of fine People for the Estate.”¹²⁷ This is ample proof that slave purchasers were not completely powerless to select their preferred ethnicities or what they understood to be ethnicities; at times, it seems, they had a direct say in what Africans they wished to purchase.

The Numbers Game

 

In truth, just because the Akan, labeled the “Coromantins,” were mentioned with great frequency by contemporaries because of their rebelliousness is not proof enough that they were the culturally dominant group in Jamaica. The reports of contemporaries (a notable exception was Bryan Edwards) often provided very little information on the number of slaves arriving in a given year and where exactly they came from. With the publication of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database, scholars have attempted to overcome this lack of numerical evidence. The Database is a blessing and a curse all wrapped into one. On the one hand, it offers invaluable information on the long term trends and directions of the trade as it provides data on 27 000 slave voyages. For example, after only a simple search, the database reveals that between the years 1726-1750, 60, 208 Africans from the Gold Coast arrived in Jamaica.¹²⁸ Indeed, Eltis and Richardson confirm that the major single destination of Gold Coast slaves was Jamaica which accounted for 36 percent of arrivals. Jamaica only took about a quarter of the total British slaves delivered in the New World but it brought about 80 percent of those from the Gold Coast. As Eltis and Richardson conclude, “Akan cultural prominence in Jamaica (including Ahanta, Fanti, Akim and Asante peoples among others) is well rooted in the slave trade according to the data set.”¹²⁹ However, Eltis, in his essay on the Yoruba disapora, argues that although the Yoruba were a demographic minority in some parts of the Americas, they seemed to still have had a large cultural influence there. As Eltis writes,

“Historians should perhaps pay more attention to where migrants, or at least coerced Africans, came from, but ultimately – and perhaps ironically, given the nature of this essay – the size of a group is not necessarily a reliable indicator of the impact of that group.”¹³⁰

 

Thus if demographic majorities and minorities can, arguably, both be culturally dominant in a given setting, can an emphasis on the “number” or “volume” of a given cultural group, in order to demonstrate its cultural prominence in a New World locale, still prove academically sound?

Moreover, in terms of Jamaica, the database reveals that, overall, Igbo peoples from the Niger Delta were imported at a higher number than those from the Gold Coast. Due to the sometimes sporadic nature of the trade, Africans arrived in shifting patterns of importance over a period of time not in one single flow. Indeed, in the late-seventeenth century the Gold Coast was the prominent site for Africans arriving to Jamaica. For fifty years after the 1760s, however, African departures from the Bight of Biafra exceeded those from the Gold Coast. This is not to say that Akan Africans stopped entering Jamaica during this time. On the contrary, from 1751 to 1790, British exports from the Gold Coast came to about 138, 300 slaves, and Jamaica took about 111 500 of the total. It was only in the 1790s that the British slave exports from the Gold Coast began to drop.¹³¹

According to the “numbers game” then should not the prominent culture of Jamaica during the British Slave Trade be that of the Igbos of the hinterland of the Niger Delta? Or was it possible for a less prominent cultural group to have a disproportionate cultural influence? This is one of the major flaws of the Database as it only looks at Africans in terms of economic numbers and not in their human potential. Numbers can only be helpful if they serve to illuminate, not if they exist solely in of themselves. Eltis et al. will surely uncover more shipping records as the forthcoming new Database has information on 35 000 slave voyages.

Another important problem with the Database is that it assumes that people departing from a particular coastal region were from that region originally. Indeed, the Database ignores the extensive trade networks that connected the coastal forts with the far interior. Indeed, an individual could have started their march to the coast thousands of kilometers away. Olaudah Equiano¹³² noted the variety of people he met on his long journey to the coast: “All the nations and people I had hitherto passed through resembled our own in their manners, customs and language: but I came at length to a country, the inhabitants of which differed from us in all those particulars.”¹³³ In terms of the Gold Coast, Akosua Perbi, in her study of indigenous slavery in Ghana, identifies nine main slave routes in the area that became Ghana during the period of the British Slave Trade. All routes went through Kumasi, the Asante capital, but there were also other important slave markets including the notorious Salaga market in the north-east. These extensive networks brought a variety of people to the coast not all of whom shared the particulars of Akan religiosity.¹³⁴ It is with these concerns in mind that I hope to track the Akan contribution to the slaves’ religion in Jamaica, not through abstract numbers, but by a rigorous examination of Akan (and other African groups) religious belief (in the past and more present), and the potentially similar beliefs of enslaved Africans in Jamaica. We begin, ominously, with an examination of the importance of death and the funerary rites performed at such occasions. We will try to uncover the connection between the Akan view of death, and other African cultural groups, and the importance of burial and those same beliefs and practices in Jamaica. It will be demonstrated that Akan views of death, along with the opinions of other Africans, facilitated the growth of a Pan-Africanized burial experience on Jamaican soil.

Chapter Three: Death and Burial

 

Death, in its finality and its threat, was ubiquitous in Jamaica. As much of a graveyard for Europeans as it was for enslaved Africans, the social fabric of Jamaica was indelibly shaped by the lingering threat of death. For enslaved Jamaicans, however, death was a festival tempered by mourning and grieving. Everywhere in Jamaica, one could hear and, more than likely see, the pulsating rhythms and palpitating sounds of a black funeral procession. The resident planter, William Beckford, characterized their burial processions as “their principal festivals” and noted the far-reaching social functions they performed, “upon which occasions they call forth all their magnificence, and display all their taste.”¹³⁵ Indeed, funerals allowed enslaved Africans to come together in groups, which could number in the hundreds, in order to weep collectively, share stories, dance and sing. White observers eagerly denounced these ceremonies by employing an array of recyclable spiteful epithets such as “wild,” “frantic,” and “ludicrous.” Such demeaning characterizations should not be that surprising; but by ardently documenting these outlandishly “savage” practices of the African “other” these observers, despite their original intentions, left vivid accounts of a cultural practice that was of vital sustenance for the enslaved community.

One interesting attribute of the Jamaican funeral experience was, what Vincent Brown calls, the “supernatural inquest.” Before burial, while the corpse was being transported to the burial site, the dead person could “accuse” people potentially responsible for his or her death. Death was seldom understood to be natural as malevolent forces were always suspected to be at play. So much so, that the pallbearers became mediums for the departing spirits to execute some sort of post-mortem justice. Brown, in study of death in Jamaica, puts it this way, “They were directed one way or another by the spirit, which made a point of stopping at nearly every home in the slave quarters to demand reparations and atonement from debtors and enemies.”¹³⁶ This practice seems to have remained fairly consistent in character from the first half of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.¹³⁷

“When one is carried out to his Grave,” observed Leslie in 1740, he is attended with a vast Multitude, who conduct his Corps in something of a ludicrous Manner: They sing all the Way, and they who bear it on their shoulders, make a Feint of stopping at every Door they pass, and pretend, that if the deceast Person has received any Injury, the Corps moves toward the House, and that they can’t avoid letting it fall to the Ground when before the Door.¹³⁸

Roughly eighty years later, in the 1820s, the Scot John Stewart also wrote that a corpse, during a burial ceremony, could potentially detect individuals who had committed wrongs against him during his life. If the pallbearers passed a house where it was believed the resident owed money to the deceased, the coffin was said to “make a full stop, and no persuasion nor strength can induce the deceased to go forward peaceably to his grave till his money is paid.”¹³⁹ Stewart noted that the corpse could also accuse people of “treachery,” “ingratitude,” “injustice,” and “slander.”¹⁴⁰ Unsurprisingly, the author saw this practice as nothing more than an example of “fraudulent extortion.”¹⁴¹ The Danish missionary Oldendorp, upon viewing this rite in the Danish West Indies, claimed that the practice was exclusive to the “Amina” Africans from the Gold Coast. Brown dismisses

Oldendorp’s claim and instead argues that the practice was common to many West African societies.¹⁴² Indeed, this burial practice was not restricted to the Akan of the Gold Coast.

Among the Diola, who resided on the southern banks of the Casamance River in modern-day Senegal, there existed (and continues to exist) a burial ceremony, called the casop, that sought to uncover the reasons behind the individual’s demise. Father Lacombe, living in the Diola settlement of Carabane in the 1860s, wrote about this procedure:

The remains of a canoe, attached to four stakes, lengthwise and widthwise, served as a coffin. The entirety was elevated by six cows’ skulls with intact horns. At a certain time, starting with a number of gun shits, six men take this type of bier and place the deceased upon it. . . . The widow … takes a calabash used by him (probably filled with palm oil wine which she pours over the cattle skulls). Several times, in a loud voice, she asks her dear spouse to reveal the cause of the death. Several times, they carried the coffin near her and several times she pushed it back, continuing her questioning. Finally, when her husband responded that it was a witch who had eaten his soul, she broke the calabash against the cattle horns attached to the coffin and pointed her finger the route to the cemetery. The six men who carried the deceased left at full speed.¹⁴³

For the Diola, pouring palm wine over the coffin horns while questioning the deceased was the equivalent of an autopsy; the cause of death had to be established. The deceased was asked if he or she had perished because of a possible offense against a spirit shrine (ukine).¹⁴⁴ These shrines were ubiquitous in the Diola region and contained many different varieties. Some were important for healing while others were consulted for possible solutions to economic hardships. The shrines themselves, however, did not contain the spirit associated with them. Instead, they served as repositories for certain ritual objects, associated with the spirits, that aided in calling the spirits and that helped the worshippers concentrate on the particular spirits that were being summoned.¹⁴⁵ Thus these shrines served as intermediaries between humans and the Supreme God (Emitai). Moreover, these shrines had the ability to seize and sometimes kill wrongdoers.¹⁴⁶

At a funeral, therefore, it had to be established whether the shrines had caused the death of the individual. If the coffin, carried by the six men, dipped downward, it signified an affirmative answer; it if shifted to the side, it was a negative answer.¹⁴⁷ If the shrine had been responsible for the death, that specific shrine had to be identified so that proper propitiatory rituals could be performed. If the shrine had not been involved, then the questions to the deceased turned towards witchcraft. If witchcraft was identified as the cause of death, questions were then asked about the possible identity of the witch who was usually related to the victim by kinship or marriage.¹⁴⁸ If witchcraft had not been at play, the deceased was asked if his death was due to the will of the Supreme God, Emitai – a death not caused by human failings and, therefore, void of any serious repercussions. Once the cause of death had been determined, the body was hurried off to the cemetery so that his soul could leave his body and commence his journey to the afterlife.¹⁴⁹

The English Lieutenant John Matthews, in the 1780s, visited Sierra Leone and commented on similar burial practices. When someone died, the corpse was propped up on a bier that was used to carry the body to the burial site. It was understood that the corpse decided who was to carry him to the gravesite – whether males or females.¹⁵⁰ If the corpse was dissatisfied with the selection of the pallbearers, he refused to “move.” Once the carriers had been decided upon, the group proceeded towards the burial site. Matthews commented that it was believed by the inhabitants that every individual knew when he was to perish. Thus an unexpected death was treated with a great deal of suspicion and often poison and witchcraft were suspected to be at play. At the gravesite, therefore, a family member or close friend asked the corpse if these malicious forces had been the cause of his death. Matthews related the event as such, “If the corpse answers in the affirmative to any of the questions proposed, it is signified by forcibly impelling the bearers several paces forward, by a power they say they are unable to resist.”¹⁵¹ If poison was decided upon to be the cause of death, the friend or relative provided the corpse with a list of possible suspects which included family members but also individuals who the deceased had no contact with. When the corpse decided on a person, (Matthews, here, was particularly vague on how this was accomplished) the potential criminal was asked to step towards the pallbearers.¹⁵² The accused was then told to hold a tree branch or a bough in his/her hand. If the person was guilty, the corpse “immediately impeis the bier forwards and strikes the bough.”¹⁵³ This was done several times to convince the onlookers and eventually the culprit was seized.

Olaudah Equiano, remembering his Igbo childhood in the Niger Delta, related similar practices in his Interesting Narrative. He remembered one particular example when a young woman was poisoned but it was not known by whom. The “doctors” ordered that the corpse be lifted up by some individuals and carried to the grave. As soon as the bearers had placed the body of the young woman upon their shoulders, “they seemed seized with some sudden impulse, and ran to and fro’, unable to stop themselves.”¹⁵⁴ After much dizzying rushing and scrambling through brush and thorn patches, the corpse fell from the carriers close to a house and “defaced it in the fall.”¹⁵⁵ The owner, according to Equiano, immediately confessed to poisoning the woman. The “benevolent” English slave trader Hugh Crow, in his memoirs, also related similar burial practices at the slaving port of Bonny, in the Bight of Biafra, at the turn of the nineteenth century.¹⁵⁶ He wrote that once a person had died and his body was laid out, these “Eboes” would occasionally address questions to corpse, such as, “Why he died?’” and “What reason he had for leaving life?”¹⁵⁷ Crow further noted that at these funeral ceremonies he heard them, “address the corpse on family affairs, and shout and beat the coffin, giving it their final injunctions when it was about to be lowered into the grave.”¹⁵⁸ He did not mention whether criminal accusations, for the death of the individual, were made at this event.

Among the Ga of the far eastern Gold Coast, usually designated as the area from Accra to the river Volta, there too existed a burial ceremony that attempted to ease the departing spirit into the next life and possibly uncover those responsible for the death of the individual.¹⁵⁹ Margaret Field, during her 1930s anthropological work among various Ga communities, noted that when the time came for a burial, the deceased was placed within a coffin. Then, the “supernatural inquest” was understood to begin, “If anyone is responsible for the death either by witchcraft, poison, or bad medicine, the coffin will lurch and plunge towards the house of the offender and refuse to pass it.”¹⁶⁰ Curiously, even if there was no accusation to render, the coffin was still an unruly burden. Indeed, the deceased enjoyed directing the coffin around so that he could say “good-bye” to as many friends and family members as possible.¹⁶¹

In the Kongo region, there was an elaborate funeral ceremony, called the tambo, that sought to comfortably send the spirit of the dead person to the next world. For eight days, the body was displayed and friends and family members paid their final respects. On the evening of the eighth day, the body was soaked in a bath of roots and herbs. This was done so to prevent the deceased from returning to earth and causing misfortune and disease among the community.¹⁶² On the morning of the ninth day, the funeral party commenced and the deceased had the opportunity to accuse those potentially responsible for his death.¹⁶³ The Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonia Cavazzi, in the 1650s, documented a remarkable example of this tambo ceremony among the Kongolese. He wrote,

“Among such delirious ones (lamenters), there was one elected xinguila, this is the priest or minister of the funeral, coming close to the face of the dead one, he asks him repeatedly what was the cause of his death. But as the dead cannot speak, the xinguila responds in the name of the dead one, and with an altered voice.”¹⁶⁴

 

The utmost attention needed to be paid to the wishes of the deceased, as those who remained behind did not want a disgruntled spirit to harass them.

Vincent Brown is, therefore, correct in asserting that “supernatural inquests,” in various forms, were common to many West and West Central African societies which only aided the emergence of similar practices on Jamaican soil. My concern here is to astutely address the importance of this act, and death/burial in general, for the Akan of the Gold Coast. I hope to illustrate that the Akan greatly assisted in shaping a Pan- Africanized funeral experience in Jamaica.

The earliest account of this inquisition of the dead, in the Gold Coast region, comes from the German Lutheran priest Wilhelm Johann Muller. After entering the service of the Glucksadt (Danish) African Company, he set sail for Africa on December 31^st 1661 and reached the Danish fort of Frederiksborg, near Cape Coast castle, on December 13^th 1662.¹⁶⁵ He remained on the coast for nearly seven years before returning to Europe. He was sent to Africa as a chaplain for the servants of the company. Although not officially a missionary, Muller did attempt to convert the Africans he met and had visions of large scale evangelization projects. His harsh words for Akan religious practices were not surprising; yet he spent a great deal carefully studying Akan beliefs. Indeed, Muller was one of the more astute observers of Akan religiosity as he often entered into dialogue with Akan priests. At the time of Muller’s stay, this part of the Gold Coast was dominated by the Akan group Fetu. The Fetu remained prominent on the coast until they eventually succumbed to growing power of the Fante in the 1760s.¹⁶⁶

When someone died in Fetu country, Muller remarked that “a great shouting and pitiful wailing arises among those present and sounds across the whole village.”¹⁶⁷ In the room where the corpse lay, a temporary madness ensued whereby individuals began to break and toss around various pieces of furniture. Once this initial furor subsided, the closest relatives approached the deceased and asked what caused his death and whether he lacked proper nutrition. On the second or third day, after his death, the body was washed and wrapped in a linen cloth. It was then tied tightly to a bier and carried off by two men on their heads. The closest relatives followed the men and offered much shouting, wailing and lamentation. It was during this procession towards the burial site that the spiritual inquest usually commenced. As Muller observed, “When the corpse is being carried away, great deception and superstition are practiced. Sometimes the bearers run as fast they can, sometimes they go slowly, sometimes they remain standing still. In particular, they often come to a halt when they suspect someone of having disposed of the deceased with his summan or fetiso” (Muller understood these terms to signify evil spirits).¹⁶⁸ As the pallbearers – acting as a kind of medium for the departed and powered by the accusatory inclinations of the restless spirit – inched past each potential criminal, it served the advantageous purpose of abating social tensions. Crimes that had been committed against the departed had to be addressed before the spirit could hope to move on to the next plain of existence. Just on the outskirts of the village, the cemeteries were situated and the graves were dug about four or five feet deep. After the corpse was placed in the burial site, he was completely covered with dirt and a square mud table was erected over the grave. Upon the grave were placed large pots of palm wine, dishes of milie, palm oil and all kinds of local fruits on the grave, so that deceased had ample sustenance.¹⁶⁹

Similar burial ceremonies were reported by the Dutch merchant William Bosman. The Dutchman reached the African coast in 1688 at the tender age of sixteen. Before long he was appointed to the chief factorship at the Dutch fort at Elmina and became the second most important Dutch official on the coast of Guinea. His account consists of a number of letters, the last of which was dated 1702. In regards to his view of the “other,” Bosman displayed typical European arrogance and prejudice; his text is coated with an undercurrent of callous intolerance. He did, however, ardently document these “savage” practices and left some vivid accounts of various Akan cultural practices. Bosman noted that upon the expiration of an individual that it was seldom the case that the death was believed to be natural. Bosman noted that, “Immediately the priest and the relations must enquire whether the deceased was ever perjured in his life . . . whether he had any powerful enemies . . . which might occasion his death.”¹⁷⁰ After questioning his closet relatives and if the cause of the death was still unclear, the priest would ask the dead body why he died. Bosman was incredibly skeptical of this practice and believed it all to be nonsense, orchestrated by the priest to achieve some malicious ulterior motive. “But the true answerer is the Roguish priest himself only,” Bosman fumed, “who informs the relations as it best suits his interest that his god and the devil have made such answers; which to be sure, as before, are those which, agree best with their ends, and seem to have the greatest appearance of truth. This passes as truth.”¹⁷¹ The questions to the dead were put in several manners: some men took the dead body, in the presence of the priest, up on their shoulders and asked whether he died for a particular reason. If he, in fact, did, “the men who hold him . . . are obliged to incline the Body towards the Querent; which is taken for an affirmative answer: otherwise they stand still.”¹⁷²

After two or three days of great grief and anguish, the corpse was buried with the continuous sound of celebratory musket firings. Many men and women were present at the ceremony; some were silent, some uttered loud shrieks of remorse and some laughed. Bosman interpreted the laughing as evidence that the grief was merely an “appearance” and was surprised at the amount of merry-making that followed the ceremony; so surprised was he that he was inspired to write that “this part of the mourning looks more like a wedding than a funeral.”¹⁷³ Around the same time that Bosman was writing his letters, the French Huguenot Jean Barbot was documenting similar burial practices on the Gold Coast. Upon the death of a person, the inanimate body was asked what reason he had to depart this life, what he lacked in this world, who killed him and many other questions. This practice was vividly reconstructed by Barbot, “they lie stretched out on the dead person’s stomach and they take him by the nose and proceed to ask him . . . and they claim this lifeless person responds to their interrogation by the movement of his tongue, his teeth, his eyes or his lips.” ¹⁷⁴

This practice continued in similar fashion into the colonial period. By the 1920s, the colonial anthropologist Robert Rattray had discovered the name for the practice among the Asante; it was known as “Carrying the Corpse” or in Akan, “funu soa.”¹⁷⁵ The function of the procedure, as Rattray understood it, was to implore the spirit of the dead woman or man to aid the living in pointing out the ‘bayifo’ (witch) who had used black magic to cause the death. Rattray continued, “This the dead person does this by causing those who are carrying the body to push or knock against the guilty party.”¹⁷⁶ Rattray related a remarkable example¹⁷⁷ of this practice that was brought before English magistrates. The person who died was a woman called ‘M’ (letters were given to the names of individuals to protect their identities). The brother of the deceased decided to ‘carry the corpse’ in order to discover the assailant. The brother and two other men then asked the body who had caused her death; they proceeded to run with the body to ‘A’ ’s house. One of the carriers put it this way, “It was as if an obosom has possessed me. The corpse seemed to pull me. I could not see anything till people held me and I found I was at A’s house.” ‘A’ was naturally skeptical of this accusation and demanded to the chief that his own two sons carry the corpse in hoping to illustrate that the procedure was a scam. While his sons were holding the body, ‘A’ asked a series of questions to the corpse. He asked the body whether he was to be the first person to die in the village, the corpse was said to sway in assent. He then queried whether he had been the cause of her death through witchcraft whereupon the body rushed upon him and the beam of the doorway struck against his forehead. Upon further investigation, one of the sons of ‘A’ told the courts that, “When my father spoke to the body, my whole body shook and I felt weak as it a great weight was upon me. The body pulled me backwards and then suddenly pushed forward . . . I did try to stand firm on one place but could not help going forward. I knew if the body knocked my father, he would be killed. I could not prevent it.

I tried to, but could not.” After this disastrous turn of events, ‘A’ proceeded to lock himself up in his house and shot himself. There was no mention, in Rattray’s example, as to whether ‘A’ had actually admitted to killing the woman through witchcraft or if he was simply surrendering to the community’s pressure after the “accusation.” In any event, the practice of “Carrying the Corpse” was eventually banned by British law.

What was the significance of this practice for Akan understandings of the divine? Why were burial practices such an important part of their religious outlook? The practice of “Carrying the Corpse,” or “spiritual inquisition” had to do with the paradoxical meaning of death. Death, among the Akan, was accepted as part of the natural rhythm of life and yet, every human death was thought to have external causes making it both natural and unnatural. It was incumbent on the people involved to discover quickly the cause of death; the commonest causes were believed to be magic, sorcery and witchcraft. The curse was, and still is, something deeply feared in many African societies and was understood to bring death to the person concerned. Because death was believed to be unnatural and caused solely by external agents, it was, in fact, preventable. If that external agent did not cause it, that individual would not have died.¹⁷⁸ Thus it was critical for Akan belief (and for other African groups) that the cause of death or sickness be determined (even after death) so that agent could be identified, isolated and dealt with to prevent future occurrences.

Another reason that “Carrying the Corpse” was such a salient feature of Akan religion was that it highlighted the relationship between the living and the dead. Death was viewed as a departure not a total annihilation of a person. The spirit moved on to join the company of the departed, another state of existence. At the moment of physical death the person became a “living dead” and joined the realm of the ancestors (asaman); he was neither alive physically, nor dead, relative to the corporate group. For the Akan, therefore, the hereafter was only a continuation of life more or less as it was in its human form. This meant that personalities, sex distinctions, social and political statuses were all maintained. Indeed, the soul was believed to retain most of its human physical-social characteristics.¹⁷⁹ The Dane, Paul Isert, living on the Gold Coast in the 1780s, noted as much when he wrote,

They believe that, after death, a person simply moves over to another world in which he will be installed in the same position as he held here. This belief results in the barbaric custom, that, when a king or other prominent man dies, a number of wives and slaves are executed and buried with him, so that he will immediately have their services in the other world.¹⁸⁰

Death, therefore, was merely a transition from one form of life to another with possibly deadly consequences. But these spirits of ancestors or the “living dead” did not simply resign themselves to the land of the ancestors; rather they could, if they chose to do so, intervene into the world of living. People had somewhat of an ambivalent relationship with their departed ancestors. John Mbiti explains as such, “When the Living dead appears it is to those within his household or family, and rarely if ever, to people not immediately related to him But, however real the living dead may seem to those who see him, there is no affectionate warmth such as one witnesses when relatives or friends meet in this life.” ¹⁸¹ Indeed, people greatly respected and honoured their departed brethren but it was always done with a degree of caution. If the Akan did not adhere to family customs and traditions or strayed away from those established, ancestral spirits had the real potential to cause severe disruption in their personal lives and communities. In brief, ancestors were venerated with a degree of trepidation. Which brings us back to the salient role performed in “Carrying the Corpse” – the Akan, and other African groups, did not want the departing spirits of their brethren to hold any sort of grudge against them.

Placating potentially vengeful spirits was an important part of many West and West-Central African religious experiences not solely for the Akan. In the Mbundu area, located south of the Kingdom of Kongo, the Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi noted, in the 1650s, that the dead might be offended if they were not offered enough at their funerals and afterwards.¹⁸² Indeed, they had the ability to punish the living and some were known to go as far as to killing children. Cavazzi further elaborated that the dead were buried in deep forests, away from settled areas so that the dead could have maximum rest. But the dead were still called upon to assist the living. In the kingdom of Kongo a contemporary of Cavazzi, Serafino da Cortona, listed several practices he deemed were unacceptable for good Christian living. One such practice that particularly upset him was when the Kongolese visited the “tombs of the dead” to ask for good luck in war and other events.¹⁸³ Before departing for war, the Kongolese, Cortona noted, prostrated themselves at the tombs of their ancestors so to pray for their help in the ensuing battle.¹⁸⁴ In the first half of the twentieth century, the missionary Karl Laman documented a similar reverence for the ancestors in West-Central Africa religiosity. He wrote that,

The Deceased excels the living in the strength and power, because he is altogether otherwise. He has the spirit of the wind, a shape in the likeness of Nzambi (Supreme God) and his strength; for this reason many refer to the corpse as Nzambi . . . in all circumstances of life people must carefully meet the demands imposed upon them by their ancestors . . . and protect themselves with all caution against the evil powers surrounding them, both dead and living.¹⁸⁵

 

It was, therefore, critical to sufficiently pay tribute to those departed spiritual agents as they had the real potential to both aid and hurt individuals and communities.

A similar concern for the ancestors can be found in the Senegambian region during the period of the British Slave Trade. At death, humans were understood to become members of the spirit world where they could, if chosen to, intervene in the world of the living on behalf of their descendants. However, if neglected or angered, those same spirits were able to effectively deny them assistance or even inflict harm upon them. In the region that would become Guinea-Bissau, gravesites were marked by stones and posts while food was occasionally placed on the burial spot.¹⁸⁶ Families often communicated with and honoured their ancestors at important points during the year, including times of planting and harvesting when their assistance was especially needed. The Dutch mariner Dierick Ruiters, who traded in the Senegambian region in the early seventieth century, related what he understood about the inhabitants’ beliefs concerning burials and the afterlife:

They believe in another world ruled in its entirety by a great monarch . . . All sorts of things are buried with the dead. They put gold rings on the dead person’s fingers: Articles of iron, steel, copper and tin are all buried with the deceased. For the living friend does all he can to equip his dead friend generously so that when he arrives in the other world he will be respected and be of good position. Then, when the living pray to him, their wishes are more likely to be fulfilled. They firmly believe that friends buried with many treasures become great captains in the other world, so that when they appear before the monarch they obtain audience immediately, and speak to him, and their requests are readily accepted.¹⁸⁷

Thus it was thought necessary to honour their ancestors with many “treasures” so to ensure a favourable outcome in the realm of the living.

 

North of the Guinea-Bissau region, among the Diola on the banks of the Casamance River, there existed a similar respect for the ancestors. In fact, one of the ukine (spirit shrines, discussed above) shrines was dedicated solely to the spirits of benevolent ancestors. These ancestors were summoned to the shrine of the dead, called Kouhouloung, during all funeral rites.¹⁸⁸ These spirits served as intermediaries between the place of the dead (kahoeka) and their living descendants. They aided their kin by warning them about witches and instructing them about future occurrences. Likewise, they communicated important information through dreams and provided advice and warnings to their descendants among the living.¹⁸⁹ It was incumbent upon the Diola, therefore, to keep on good terms with their ancestors.

This was why burial practices were of the utmost importance for the Akan, and other West African groups, as nothing was spared to honour and placate the departing spirit sufficiently. Funeral ceremonies helped to separate the dead from the living, to sever the ties with this world and to aid the newly deceased in picking up the threads linking him or her with the land of spirits. Human beings kept the relationship going between them and their dead, mainly through libation, offerings of food and prayers – these practices began with the burial ceremony. Melville Herskovits, during his anthropological work in 1930’s Dahomey (modern day Benin), also emphasized the importance of the burial ceremony for the living. He noted that although no Dahomean welcomed death, its reality and importance in the life-cycle occasioned the need for an elaborate burial ritual. The death of an individual, who would eventually become deified, linked the living and the dead and reminded every of the power the ancestors held over them.¹⁹⁰ Herskovitz, in his description of the burial ceremony, went into some detail about the intricacies of the procession which only highlighted its sacred importance for the community. Friends, family members and distant relatives were all expected to make offerings to the dead. These items included a pair of breeches, a shirt, a clay pipe, a cap, a mat, a pot to hold water, soap, a sponge and water. A type of cloth, it seems, was the most important offering. As Herskovits wrote, “When this cloth is being presented, all shout approval, for the doner is redeeming the promise of the first friend not to come empty-handed to . . . his friend’s funeral.”¹⁹¹ One particular type of cloth was understood to carry the dead across the river of death. There seems to have been a fair amount of cultural continuity, on the “Slave Coast” and its hinterland, between earlier pre-colonial rites for the commemoration of the dead and those practices reported by Herskovits. The Englishman John Duncan, traveling through the kingdom of Dahomey in the mid- nineteenth century, noted that the tombs of the deceased were the focus for honouring the dead. He wrote that “anniversary offerings are made by all who can afford them, to commemorate the death of their parents.”¹⁹² These were ancestral ceremonies, called huetanu, “year-head-thing,” from being celebrated at the end (“head”) of the year.¹⁹³ Revering ancestors was, therefore, not only reserved for funerals but happened throughout the calendar year.

Burial ceremonies in the Gold Coast, and in other areas, usually encompassed pouring of alcohol, the placing of food on the gravesite and singing and wailing.¹⁹⁴ European observances paid little attention to this “wailing” and “singing” but undoubtedly it was the performance of funeral dirges. The funeral dirge played a significant role in the burial ceremony and, again, highlighted the relationship between the living and the ancestors. Herskovits outlined the importance of the dirge in Dahomean culture. He described it as such,

Now with death, the ritualized wailing ceremony, termed avidochio (“tears-give- dead”) is begun. All the women of the compound participate in the lament, and they are joined by the men and the children. The best friend of the dead gradually clams the wailing, and after a time, the family assemble in the house where the body lies to wash the corpse.¹⁹⁵

 

 

The dirge focused on the tremendous loss death inflicted. But it also highlighted the ways in which the living and the dead were perpetually connected:

I went to drink with my friend And I did not find him.

O death! Thou killest without a trial, One day I will see him again,

Yes, one day I will see him again For I, too, am going toward death.¹⁹⁶

 

 

Thus death was a painful separation between family and friends but it did not result in the complete annihilation of that person as he still had the potential to play an active role in the temporal realm while situated in the afterlife.

The funeral dirge played a similar role in the funerals of the Akan. One of the words that occurred most frequently in the dirges of cotemporary Akan was nana designating grandfather, grandmother and grandchild. This was due to the importance the Akan placed on ancestry and the tracing of descent and affiliations.¹⁹⁷ This importance was personified in the dual Akan systems of clan (abusua) and Ntoro (here defined as that spiritual essence relating groups of people) whereby the individual was identified with his maternal and paternal kingdom. Hence, when an Akan person died, a part of the dirge to be sung to her was predetermined by the clan or lineage she belonged to.

However, the dirge was not always content to focus on the person who died; rather, the long-deceased ancestor of the deceased’s lineage was often honoured.¹⁹⁸ Indeed, many dirges, particularly those of royal lineages, focused on the ancestor: her contribution to the group, her achievements or positive qualities. The funeral was an event where the living members of a lineage liked to remind themselves of their ancestors who were once ordinary living beings but now operated on a different plain of existence. Remembering and honouring the ancestors were of paramount importance to the Akan and this concern manifested itself through the funeral dirge.¹⁹⁹

The Akan dirge also, of course, paid tribute to the deceased – a future ancestor.

The deceased may have been introduced at convenient points in the dirge by his day name, praise appellations or by corresponding names. Praise appellations were utilized to describe quickly the laudable qualities and accomplishments of the deceased. These included but were not limited to: benevolence, wisdom, and generosity. For the Akan, a good deed of a departed soul always deserved to be praised at his funeral. Indeed, by mentioning the qualities or accomplishments or even the physical characteristics of the departed, attention was drawn to the impact of the loss to community and to the mourner in particular.²⁰⁰ The death of a benevolent person was a serious loss to those who had loved him and depended on his generosity. Moreover, honouring the generosity of the departing spirit ensured future good-will and benevolence on its part. Thus death, burial and all its attachments served, for the Akan, as a mechanism to honour and respect the departing souls of friends and relatives while, simultaneously, fostering compassion among their future ancestors.

How did the Akan (and the larger African) conception of death and burial play out under slavery in Jamaica? Are we able to see similar patterns of thought among the enslaved in Jamaica? How did Akan views on death transform under slavery and by the influence of other African cultural groups? These questions are, of course, impossible to answer with any concrete certainty. But by examining the descriptions given by several commentators we can begin to trace out continuities between the religious activities of the enslaved in Jamaica, the Akan of the Gold Coast and, of course, other West-African cultural groups. Indeed, I am not arguing that these burial ceremonies were exclusive to the Akan alone. As mentioned above, similar burial ceremonies were found in many African societies which only aided the development of a pan-Africanized burial experience in Jamaica. It was a religious experience, though, in which the Akan provided an enduring mark.

The practice of “Carrying of the Corpse” served a similar function in Jamaica as it did in the Gold Coast and in other African societies. In 1774, Long noted that,

Sometimes the coffin bearers, especially if they carry it on their heads, pretend that the corpse will not proceed to the grave, notwithstanding the exertion of their utmost strength to urge it forwards. They then move to different huts, till they come to one, the owner of which, they know, has done some injury to, or been much disliked by, the deceased in his life-time. Here they express some words of indignation on behalf of the dead man; they knock at the coffin, and try to sooth and pacify the corpse; at length, after much persuasion, it begins to grow more passive, and suffers them to carry it on, without further struggle, to the place of repose. At other times, the corpse takes a sudden and obstinate aversion to be supported on the head, preferring the arms; nor does it peaceably give up the dispute, until the bearers think proper to comply with its humour.²⁰¹

 

This account by Long is frustratingly silent on several salient issues. There is no mention as the whether these were slaves born in Africa or in Jamaica; the ethnicity of the individuals partaking in the ceremony is unclear; and it is not even obvious whether all of those involved are slaves. Much like the account given by Leslie above, we are forced to infer quite a bit in trying to extrapolate any sort of meaning from the description given.

What should be obvious is that not everyone involved in the practice were transported Akan from the Gold Coast. As shown above, many African societies shared common views on death which aided in the formation of practices in Jamaica which accommodated a wide range of ways that continental Africans said good-bye to friends and family members. Moreover, slavery effectively rearranged any notions of ethnicity.

Assembled together under the condition of chattel slavery, these Africans argued amongst themselves about the proper way to celebrate the passing of one life and the emergence of another. Olaudah Equiano commented that Africans in Jamaica retained many of their burial practices including burying the dead with pipes, tobacco and other grave goods.²⁰² Yet these were not the same people as they were in Africa, as they now identified categories of belonging in Jamaica that did contain the same meaning in the Old World. But what this cultural practice, so prevalent in the Gold Coast Region and in other West African societies, accomplished was the facilitation of a Pan-Africanized Jamaican burial experience. During the process of pacifying the dead person and sending the spirit along to the next realm, these “supernatural inquests” molded the social values among the slaves in important ways. As the pallbearers slowly moved past each house in the slave quarters they distinguished a slave community by reminding members of the important social roles they played; the corpse became a symbol for a group’s cohesiveness. Indeed, the carefully organized burial procession had the ability to evoke a kind of fellowship among the slaves that facilitated a perpetual sense of belonging in a transcendent moment.²⁰³

As the corpse tried to detect the wrongs committed against him from beyond the grave, or within the coffin, it invested communal principles and often alleviated social tensions. Crimes that had been committed against the departed had to be addressed before the spirit could hope to move on to the next plain of existence. Indeed, supernatural revenge was believed to be the utmost punishment against those who committed offenses against the slave community. These processions also acted as a quasi-valve pump that attempted to alleviate points of contestation and to restore a sense of harmony within the slave quarters. Many Europeans noted that friends and relatives not only made criminal accusations on behalf of the dead but also used these gatherings to make complaints about petty conflicts that jeopardized the peaceful existence of the slave community.

Indeed, for slaves in Jamaica fundamental sentiments (loyalty, gratitude, adulation) were forcefully articulated at that cross-road between life and death, vigorously dramatized at burial and funeral ceremonies. These moral codes of conduct were meant not only to govern the relations between the living and the dead but also among the living.²⁰⁴ Thus the practice of “Carrying the Corpse” or what the Akan termed “funu soa,” served as a framework that allowed enslaved Africans of different ethnicities to come together and discuss amongst themselves the most suitable way to deal with death and all of its attachments. As in the Gold Coast and other West-African societies, the practice still served the function of appeasing potentially harmful spirits but on Jamaican soil it also became a way for Africans to congregate and discuss important issues, a meeting place for intra-African syncretism.

It was noted above, in some detail, that one of the important attributes of the Akan burial ceremony, and African burial rites in general, was the transition from life to the land of the dead or the land of the ancestors. Placating the departing spirit was of critical importance to the Akan, and other Africans, so to ensure future friendly relations between the living and the dead. Ancestral veneration, as mentioned above, was not exclusive to the Akan as it was common phenomenon among many African cultural groups. But upon death in Jamaica where did the spirits of deceased Africans go? Did they remain in Jamaica or did they return to Africa? Was lineage, so important to the Akan and other African cultural groups, able to survive the horrifying Middle Passage or the dreadful plantation? From the sources it is clear that upon death it was universally believed that the spirit would return to the African continent. However, that is not to say that the spirit would suddenly divorce itself from the slaves’ life in Jamaica. Charles Leslie remarked that when “a Negro is about to expire, his fellow-slaves kiss him, wish him a good journey, and send their hearty recommendations to their relations in Guiney.”²⁰⁵ As well, John Taylor, traversing the island at the end of the 17^th century, noticed that the enslaved believed that their souls returned to Africa after their death. The slaves, according to Taylor, placed food and drinks upon the grave so the departing spirit would have all the sustenance it would need for the return journey home.²⁰⁶ These observations suggest that these African were performing, what Dianne Stewart calls, an “eschatology of repatriation.” Indeed, this entrenched belief in a reunification with Africa after death served to temper, albeit briefly, the brutal reality of chattel slavery. By investing worth in an African afterlife, these slaves were effectively refusing utter dehumanization and performing what numerous scholars have labeled “spiritual resistance.”²⁰⁷

Numerous other observers commented on this expectation of a reunification with Africa after death among the slaves. The great naturalist Hans Sloane, traveling through the island in the late seventeenth century, mentioned that some Africans, judging that they would return to Africa after death, were inclined to cut their own throats.²⁰⁸ A Jamaican planter, writing at the time of Leslie in the 1740s, noted that because suicides among the enslaved were so frequent, as a result of this belief in repatriation, planters attempted to prevent suicides by insidiously hanging up the dead from trees to illustrate that they remained in Jamaica.²⁰⁹ Of course, this did not deter the enslaved as it was their spirits not their physical bodies that were making the return journey to Africa. There was no mention of the spirits of deceased Africans returning exclusively to the Gold Coast, or Igboland or Angola; rather, specific ancestral lineage was collapsed to a generic Pan- African repatriation. In that sense, in Jamaica, Akan ancestral veneration and other specific manifestations of African ancestral reverence, was simply coalesced to a common African lineage. It was a survival, a transformation and an amalgamation all wrapped into one; placating departing spirits and ancestors became a hallmark of the African-Jamaican religious experience but it was hospital to all the different manifestations of ancestral veneration common in West and West-Central Africa.

With this belief in the posthumous return to Africa, the Akan (and larger African) conception of death itself underwent a transformation, of sorts, in Jamaica. Death was still viewed paradoxically in Jamaica. On the one hand, it was still understood to be caused by external malevolent forces (hence the “Carrying of the Corpse” practice) but on the other hand, it was also seen as a blessing. Charles Leslie was quite surprised to learn that the Africans “look on death as a blessing . . . they are quite transported to think their slavery is near an end, and that they shall revisit their . . . old friends and Acquaintances.”²¹⁰ It was no longer credible to assume that the hereafter was a simple continuation of this life; rather, death was now understood to be liberating. But it is important to note that this entrenched belief in the return the homeland after death was not simply a New World creation. Bosman noted that the Akan were fond of being buried in their own land. He reported that,

The Negroes are fond of being buried in their own country; so that if any person dies out of it, they frequently bring his corpse home to be buried, unless it be too far distant; in which case they bury him there; and if he have any Friends or Acquiantance there, they cut off his head, one arm and one leg, which they cleanse, boil and carry to his own country, where they are interred with fresh solemnity, as creditably as suits with the circumstances of the defunct.²¹¹

But in Jamaica, the longing to be free trumped any sort of allegiance to a specific religious belief. Indeed, death was no longer seen as something unnatural or avoidable; rather an alluring alternative to New World chattel slavery. As noted above suicide became widespread in Jamaica. Suicide was something frowned upon on the Gold Coast and if one killed himself it would impact on the type of funeral he received – often a less elaborate one.²¹² Thus the reality of New World slavery transfigured and transformed views of death. Akan beliefs on death were shaped by New World contexts and mutated into a general longing to return to Africa.

This longing to return “home” did not diminish the role of spirits in Jamaica. Indeed, spirits still played an active role in the world of the living in Jamaica and the funeral ceremony still served the purpose of honouring the departing spirits. As in the Gold Coast and other West-African locations, funerals in Jamaica took on an air of festivity. European observers, commenting on the communal production of dance and music never failed to associate these burial ceremonies with a type of festival. Long remarked that “every funeral is a kind of festival; at which the greater part of the company assume an air of joy and concern; and, together with their singing, dancing and musical instruments, conspire to drown all sense of affliction in the minds of the real mourners.”²¹³ Call and response singing followed burial parties to the grave site. Often labeled as “hideous,” “terrible,” or “horrible,” this singing facilitated the remembrance of ceremonial music in Africa and established a tenuous but vital unity among the enslaved. If these commentators actually tried to uncover the meaning of this “hideous noise,” they would have, undoubtedly, discovered a Pan-Africanized dirge formation; one hospitable to the different (yet similar) ways continental Africans said good-bye to departed friends and family members.

Singing also underscored the important ways that the dead continued to inform the lives of the slaves. Europeans, including Long in the above passage, were unable to understand how death could be seen as a joyous event and often callously remarked that this cheerful singing silenced the grieving of the “real mourners.” What they failed to understand was that death was never a final destination but only another step. As seen in case of the Akan, and other African groups, when people died they were positioned in the nearby world of spirits and they had the potential to do good or bad deeds. Thus a great deal of time was spent during these ceremonies, placating, revenging and celebrating (through singing) these departed spirits because their death did not signal the end of their influence on the living. Thus the Akan concern for placating departing spirits was simply placed within, on Jamaican soil, the larger rubric of the African concern for departing spirits. More than likely, it was not “authentic” Akan dirges being sung on at a Jamaican soil but such a concern was, undoubtedly, irrelevant to enslaved Africans. What mattered was a religious experience they could all understand; a ceremony that restored their common humanity and allowed them to honour and cry over departing friends. It was a ceremony that created an invaluable unity among the enslaved. The larger African concern for departing spirits supplied the general framework while the Akan contributed a piece of the puzzle. Let us now turn our attention to the Akan contribution to the phenomenons of Obeah and Myal.

Chapter Four: Obeah and Myal

 

In 1793 Bryan Edwards, the Jamaican historian and slave-holder par excellence, reported that an elderly woman was accused of using Obeah to cause deaths on his plantation; fellow slaves testified that the woman had carried out her business ever since her arrival from Africa. Various Obeah “contents” were found in her possession which only cemented her guilt in the eyes of the white authorities. These contents included: rags, feathers of all sorts, cat bones, egg-shells filled with a viscous substance and some glass beads of different colours. Edwards further elaborated that these Obeah men and women were consulted upon all occasions so to revenge injuries and insults, discover and punish thieves and adulterers, to predict the future, and for the conciliation of a favour.²¹⁴ In 1782 a slave named Neptune was tried (after the anti-Obeah legislation of 1760) for making use of rum, hair, chalk, stones and other materials, in accordance with the designation of the practice of Obeah as witchcraft.²¹⁵ This view of Obeah as malicious witchcraft or sorcery was further ingrained in the eyes of whites in 1817 when the plantation of the great Gothic writer Matthew Lewis became engulfed in rumours that an Obeah man was responsible for the “evil” occurrences transpiring. Indeed, one woman, according to Lewis, was reported to have lost nine out of her ten children to lockjaw.

When a group of slaves overheard their fellow slave Adam cautioning his daughter not to drink from the well, they came forward and accused him of being an Obeah man and poisoning the source. A string of beads, always a clear sign of guilt in an Obeah trial, was found in his room; he was found guilty and exiled to Cuba.²¹⁶

This interpretation of Obeah as poison or malevolent sorcery carried through the slavery period into the post-emancipation era and continues to dominate to this day.²¹⁷ During the slavery period in Jamaica, anti-Obeah provisions were passed in 1760, 1810, 1817, and 1833. In the post-emancipation era anti-Obeah provisions were included within several vagrancy acts in 1839, 1840, 1856, 1857, and 1892. The 1898 Obeah Act offered a typically vague definition of Obeah: “any person who, to effect any fraudulent or unlawful purpose, or for gain, or for the purposes of frightening any person, uses or pretends to use any occult means, or pretends to posses any supernatural power or knowledge.”²¹⁸ Persons found guilty of such practices could expect to be imprisoned for up to one year, with or without hard labour, or be whipped. This law was revised in 1973, but the penalty remained, for all extents and purposes, the same. What greatly facilitated this view of Obeah as evil was the rise of Christian missionary activity in the first half of the nineteenth century in Jamaica. Armed with the Bible and operating within their own Afro-phobic framework, these white (and some of African descent) missionaries eagerly emphasized the evil characteristics of the Obeah practice. The intensity of such diatribes effectively instilled anti-Obeah sentiments among descendants of the enslaved themselves. In 1895, the black Jamaican minister Thomas Banbury launched one of the most venomous attacks on Obeah calling it “immoral,” “wicked,” and “disgusting.”²¹⁹

Twentieth-century scholars, by and large, have corroborated this view of Obeah as deleterious anti-social behaviour. Many of the hostile assumptions about Obeah in scholarly works can be traced back to influential and highly racist works of the Jesuit missionary Joseph Williams from 1932. Williams believed that Obeah was a transplanted form of Asante/Akan witchcraft that had underlining negative connotations. Williams summed it up as follows,

The Obeah Man is any Negro who gauges the situation and makes it his business to work on the fears of his fellows . . . The Jamaican term Obeah is unquestionably derived from the Ashanti word Obayifo, which according to Captain Rattray signifies ‘a wizard, or more generally a witch’ . . . Dropping the suffix, then, from Obayifo, the resulting Obayi, as heard from the lips of the Koromantin slaves, was variously rendered by the Jamaican whites as obeah, obia, etc.²²⁰

This work greatly influenced scholarly interpretations of Obeah and the search for the etymological roots of the term. Orlando Patterson, in his groundbreaking Sociology of Slavery, argues that Obeah was a form of malicious magic: “Obeah was essentially a type of sorcery which largely involved harming others at the request of clients, by the use of charms, poisons, and shadow catching.”²²¹ It should not come as a surprise, then, that Obeah has gained a reputation for sinister witchcraft as, after all, it was filtered through a hostile colonist lens. Indeed, European interpretations of Obeah were shaped and molded by their ethnocentric religious beliefs, and their virulent and narrow understandings of “witchcraft.”

Given the ubiquity of this understanding of Obeah and the thin and often ambiguous primary sources, it has proven difficult for scholars to reconstruct a more objective understanding of Obeah. Recently some scholars have attempted to dislodge the practice from that ethnocentric and immensely Afro-phobic definition of Obeah as evil sorcery and have begun to emphasize its positive attributes such as its healing capabilities and ability to destabilize the control of the planter class during the slavery period. Indeed, Obeah dealt with having command of supernatural forces usually through material objects (beads, bones, egg-shells) and a preoccupation with divination (foretelling), the bringing of good fortune (sometimes for a fee), and protection from harm. Although Obeah could be used for malevolent purposes, the all-encompassing definition of Obeah as evil is misleading. Obeah, in essence, was the ability to use spiritual energy dynamically which required specialized knowledge only required through training.²²² More importantly this negotiation of mystical power was often used for socially beneficial goals which included: political and social solidarity (such as the Obeah oath, discussed in more detail below); divination/revelation (connection with ancestors and ancestral homeland at gravesites and identifying causes of social disruption); healing (recognizing and removing spells and curses); and protection (charms, medicine bags, spiritually “charged” religious objects).²²³

Scholars have also spent a considerable amount of time trying to identify the African etymology of Obeah. Bilby and Handler argue that because Obeah has long been exclusively seen as evil witchcraft, the etymological roots of the word have become distorted and confused. The entrenched view of Obeah as harmful power has led scholars and linguists to frequent African dictionaries to search for the African equivalent of “witchcraft,” “sorcery,” or “black magic.”²²⁴ As a result, the etymological argument for Obeah that has gained the most popularity is based on the flawed belief of Obeah as intrinsically sinister. This is the argument – pioneered by Williams and followed up by Patterson – that sees the word Obeah originating from the Asante-twi word obayi-fo which loosely translates to “evil witches.” This argument has influenced virtually all modern writers who uncritically accept that Obeah has Asante-Twi origins. Bilby and Handler, however, propose that a more fruitful starting point would be to search for the African equivalent of “healer,” a more appropriate label for Obeah. Using this as their frame of reference, these scholars argue that the term probably originated from Igbo or a related language, found in the Niger delta in modern Nigeria, such as Efik or Ibibio, where the term dibia refers to a “doctor” or “healer;” the individual in this case enjoys considerable respect and admiration in the communities he serves.²²⁵ As well, there is the term abia which describes various forms of esoteric knowledge, including knowledge of herbal healing. Douglas Chambers, also, postulates an Igbo origin for Obeah. He writes,

In historical Igboland, the dibia or obea was the person, usually a man, who could communicate directly with the spirits . . . powerful and dangerous, and thus both feared and respected everywhere, such ‘doctors’ provide the common link between the visible and invisible worlds . . . the dibia or ndi obea in historical Igboland and the ‘obeahmen’ of pre-modern Afro-Caribbean societies were responsible for ascertaining why things happened, remedying or influencing them, and punishing transgressors.²²⁶

Similarly, Hugh Crow, during his sojourn at Bonny, noted the various, “attempts of the Oboe doctors, or Dibbeah, to cure diseases by charms.”²²⁷ He further elaborated that these doctors had “a priestly character.”²²⁸ Bilby and Handler speculate that these terms were employed by early African arrivals in one of the older (Barbados, St. Kitts) English colonies and from there the word spread among whites and blacks of various groups, diffused to other parts of the West Indies and eventually transformed into the term Obeah.²²⁹

The consistent view of Obeah as witchcraft (specifically of the Akan variety) has, indeed, confused some scholars to the African origins of the practice. The starting point, as these scholars argue, for examining the African antecedents of the practice, should be, in fact, that of Obeah as a positive force in societies not solely a deleterious one.

However, this move away from the Asante-witchcraft-as-Obeah equation has also had the effect of silencing the potential role of Akan religiosity in the formation of the Obeah phenomenon in Jamaica. This is not to say that the Igbo dibia and other West African priests did not play a role in the formation of Obeah. Indeed, scholars are increasingly realizing that priests served similar functions in many African societies. The nganga or priest in West-Central Africa, for another example, was understood to be a physician, visionary, and prophet.²³⁰ The training of a Kongo nganga began when an nkisi (a spiritually-charged object) “would overtake (the individual) with a powerful ecstasy at a watercourse.”²³¹ This mesmerized individual isolated herself for approximately nine days, when she would return home with an nkisi in hand. Another way that an individual could be initiated into the role of an nganga was through an ancestral nkisi-spirit. Such a spirit was believed to reveal itself to a relative in a dream and encourage them to become an nganga.²³² In any event, no matter how one came to the position, the nganga was a positive force in Kongo society who aimed to cure, whether medically or religiously, what ailed them. The homogeneity found among many African religious personnel had the effect of formulating a sacred role in Jamaica that was accommodating to a host of priestly functions found in Africa. It facilitated the appearance of a Pan-Africanized group of religious counselors on Jamaican soil, labeled Obeah practitioners. It is my goal to succinctly delineate how the Akan okomfo aided in this formation. In what follows, therefore, there will be an attempt to illustrate the positive role that the okomfo or priest played in Akan society; an examination of the place of the okomfo in Akan religiosity; an investigation into the Akan understanding of witchcraft; and finally the transformation of the okomfo on Jamaican soil. It will also illustrated, where available, the similar functions of priests in other West and West-Central African societies.

From the primary sources, it is difficult to delineate the role of the okomfo in Akan society during the British Slave Trade. One problem with the European sources was that they all viewed the priest with a high level of skepticism and mistrust. Paul Isert, for example, wrote, “The fetish priests are great swindlers, keeping their people in ignorance, to the level of fanaticism.”²³³ Another problem was that European observers were often quite confused to what they were actually witnessing and historians have been frustrated by the somewhat contradictory nature of their reports. There was great confusion regarding the word “fetish.” Sometimes Europeans understood fetish to mean an inanimate object invested with spiritual powers. Jean Barbot, for example, wrote

It is true that it greatly distresses them if one insults the fetishes they wear . . . This Moor cried out at the top of his voice that his fetish was so enraged at having been desecrated by a white man that he had been very much ill used by it during the night . . . in company with the priest, the fetish had told him it must be given a bottle of brandy and two acuiers of gold to appease it.²³⁴

At others times, though, it appeared that the fetish was a god itself requiring the work of a priest to communicate with it. The German, yet employee of the Danish African Company, Ludwig Romer, in the 1740s, made this clear in his description of the Fante Fetish. As Romer related, “The fetish appears three times a year. At other times, if someone wishes to ask about something, he answers through the mouth of one of his priests or priestesses . . . At the beginning of every month the Negroes must sacrifice a human being and after he has accepted the human being, as an extra gift they sacrifice to him a pair of oxen.”²³⁵ Yet another way Europeans employed the term fetish was to describe the ritual of “eating fetish” which was the process of swearing an oath to determine innocence or guilt.

It was not until the work of the anthropologist Robert Rattray in the 1920s that outsiders began to get a clearer picture of the subtleties of Akan religiosity. Indeed, Rattray divided the European notion of fetish into several sub-parts. He argued that when an object was called a fetish by Europeans (as in the Barbot quote above) it was, in fact, a suman. He explained it as such, “A fetish (suman) is an object which is the potential dwelling-place of a spirit or spirits of an inferior status . . . The power or spirit in a suman comes from plants or trees, and sometimes, directly or indirectly, from fairies, forest monsters, witches, or from sort of unholy contact with the dead.”²³⁶ The power associated with the object could have been used for evil magic but not assuredly as it was used as much for defensive (protection) as for offensive purposes. Rattray also argued that when Europeans referred to a fetish as a god (as in the Romer quote above), they were in fact describing an obosom. As Rattray, again, explained, “ the main power, or the most important spirit in an obosom, comes directly or indirectly from Nyame, the Surpreme God.”²³⁷ This distinction between suman and obosom is further explained by T.C McCaskie in his study of pre-colonial Asante society. The abosom, according to McCaskie, were given an anthropomorphic identity as the “children” of the Supreme God Onyame; or, in other words, sub-gods. Their origins were outside human society and their appearances in the affairs of humans were unilateral and interventionist; they made their presence known voluntarily and could not be bought. The asuman (charms, amulets, talismans etc), on the other hand, were dedicated to a series of precise functions and encompassed only a small manifestation of a much larger embodiment of power.²³⁸ Asuman could also be bought. John Atkins, in the 1730s, noted as much when he wrote, “Fetishes are sold, from an experienced goodness in them, from two Accys to two Bendees a-piece, or as they are warranted to protect from this or that sort of evil, or better than another can do it.”²³⁹ The distinction is of such great importance because “although asuman were lesser or derived powers, highly specific, personalized, and often very temporarily in nature, they were visibly three dimensional and, in their many forms, ubiquitous throughout the whole of Asante society.”²⁴⁰ Because of a failure to note this distinction, Europeans often reported asuman as being the core of Akan belief when, in fact, they were only a small part of it. In what follows, I will endevour to distinguish asuman from the abosom when discussing their relationship to the okomfo.

One of the primary roles of the okomfo was the consultation of the abosom. Muller provided a lucid example of people trying to ascertain future events from an obosom through the work of the okomfo. The priest was said to erect a small hut under a green tree and enclose it with a straw mat so that it permitted no one to see inside. The priest then started to speak in a subtle voice and to the astonishment to the people outside the hut, a second voice entered into the conservation. Muller continued, “Then the people, who sit outside the hut, some distance away, bareheaded and deep in thought, present their problem. When the priest has spoken for a good while to fitiso (obosom), the imagined saint sometimes murmuring, sometimes in a voice which resounds loudly, he eventually reveals to the mob of seated people the answer he has received.”²⁴¹ Muller reported another interesting anecdote when people asked an obosom whether they would be victorious in battle. The priest poured water three times on a large stone and Cucu (an obosom) was said to appear in the form of a hunter. When Cucu was asked about the last battle which the Fetu people fought against the Abraham-Bu people in 1660, he answered that they would be victorious. When the two forces were about to meet, it was believed, that the Abraham-Bu army was struck by a great storm and the weapons of the Abraham- Bu army were rendered useless.²⁴²

William Bosman also noted that whenever somebody was undertaking something of importance, with an uncertain future, the first order of business was to consult the abosom through the okomfo. Bosman’s description, though, is somewhat different from Muller’s as he observed that each priest had his/her own idol to communicate with her/his own personal obosom. Thus the priest put the questions of the individual to the idol. This was done in two ways, according to Bosman. The first way was through a bundle of approximately twenty small bits of leather; in the middle of which was tied some trash.

Some of these ingredients assured good success while others threatened the wellbeing of the asker. The okomfo then shook these materials and from there new position was able to determine the answers to the questions put forward to him. The second way was a sort of divination through the use of wild nuts, “which they pretend to fake up by guesses and let fall again: after which they tell them and form their predictions from the numbers falling even or odd.”²⁴³

One of the important ways the okomfo consulted the akomfo was through the act of possession; “okomfo” literally means “one possessed.”²⁴⁴ Rattray went into some detail about how an okomfo in training learned the sacred art of possession. The instructing priest visited a forest and randomly collected various leaves and pieces of bark. These materials were placed in a pot and water was poured on it. The pot was then brought to a nearby cemetery. The novice had to bathe in this concoction three times a day, and three times a night, for several days. These various lustrations were intended to bring the nkomoa (spirit of possession) upon the pupil. The proximity of the cemetery was supposed to facilitate the novice’s contact with the samanfo (spirits of the dead men). During the course of possession, the okomfo allowed certain deities to posses them in order to give messages, guidance, perform healing; they took on the characteristics of the abosom when possessed. ²⁴⁵They acted like a radio transmitter, of sorts, delivering messages between two different worlds. The handling of the abosom, however, was no easy task. Indeed, the abosom had a reputation for being uncooperative, fickle and sometimes even vengeful. As McCaskie explains, “The expectation that they might prove cooperative and consoling when petitioned to assist in human affairs was tempered by recognition of their origin in an antagonism to culture.”²⁴⁶ Thus people had to be cautious about consulting the abosom as there was no guarantee that the response would be charitable.

The European commentators, however, also documented occasions where the help of the akomfo was called upon but there was no direct consultation with the abosom; or, in other words, no possession. Bosman noted that the akomfo were consulted to punish transgressors and detect criminals. If someone was injured by another, they were said to “make Fetiche (suman)” to destroy him. They brought some foodstuff and drinks to the okomfo who “exorcised” the materials. The hurt individual then proceeded to scatter the materials in an area where the enemy was known to pass, firmly believing that the individual would die when they came in contact with those spiritually charged items. Bosman also observed that, “If they are robbed they make use of much the same means for the discovery and consign punishment of the thief.”²⁴⁷ According to the German Romer, guilt was also determined by the use of a rented suman overseen by the okomfo. Romer understood that Europeans could force a suspected African to “eat fetish” to prove that he had not swindled them. The Danes would rent out a suman and the services of several old Africans to oversee the procedure. The suman was carried on a mat covered with an old cloth and it consisted of a stuffed snake skin, without a head or tail, the hair from an elephant’s tail, or a cow’s or wolf’s tail, mingled with the feathers from a rooster. By tradition, it was made like necklace, with threads at both ends, so that the person who was supposed to wear could tie it at the back of his/her neck. The suman was placed at the feet of the Europeans, who were the accusers, and after the details of the case were explained to all, the old cloth was taken from the suman and a crumb of dough was placed on it. The accused then came forward on his knees and uttered this oath: “If I have done that” or “If I have stolen this, then let the fetish kill me.” Romer explained the climax of the ceremony as follows, “With his mouth he takes the dough from the snake skin, hold it on his tongue, and by opening his mouth, proves that he really has it there. Then he swallows it.”²⁴⁸ His survival meant that he had been freed of all accusation.

The okomfo of the Gold Coast were not the only religious specialists who handled spiritually-charged objects in West and West Central Africa. In the area that would later encompass the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, in the Senegambian region, spirits were (and still are) known as irans.²⁴⁹ Individuals assembled statues and other material objects as temporary repositories for spirits. They were important in religious ceremonies and also served as sites of offerings. These objects, ironically, were also referred to as irans and were erroneously labeled “fetishes” or “idols” by European observers as in the Akan context mentioned above. It took the skilled hands of priests and other religious personnel to maneuver these objects to effectively utilize their spiritual potential.²⁵⁰

In the Kongo region, these spiritually charged objects were called nkisi (plural: minikisi). Many Kongo nkisi were wooden carvings which represented the power of a particular deity. Another example of a nkisi was a packet wrapped in burlap sacking or a kerchief.²⁵¹ Each nkisi was understood to contain medicines (bilongo) and a soul (mooyo) which combined to give it life and power. The positive attributes of the minikisi was described by Nesemi Isaki, himself a Mu-Kongo, in 1900. He characterized nkisi as:

The name of the thing we use to help a person when that person is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to leaves and medicines combined together . . . It is also called nkisi because there is one to protect the human soul and guard it against illness for whoever is sick and wishes to be healed. Thus an nkisi is also something which hunts down illness and chases it away from the body.²⁵²

However, other commentators noted the more potentially sinister aspects the minikisi could possess. An early twentieth-century Central African Christian convert wrote:

 

They (minkisi) receive . . . powers of composition, and consecration. They are composed of earths, ashes, herbs, and leaves, and of relics of the dead. They are composed in order to relieve and benefit people, and to make a profit . . . to visit consequences upon thieves, witches, those who steal be sorcery, and those who harbor witchcraft powers. Also to oppress people. They are the properties of minkisi, to cause sickness in a man, and also to remove it. To destroy, to kill, to benefit. To impose taboos on things and remove them. To look after their owners and to visit retribution upon them. The way of every nkisi is this: when you have composed it, observe its rules last it be annoyed and punish you. It knows no mercy.²⁵³

 

Much like the asuman described by Rattray, the Kongo minkisi were used for defensive as well as for offensive purposes. Such spiritually potent devices needed priests and other skilled specialists to handle them effectively.

To return to our discussion of the Akan okomfo, he was also deeply involved in any sort of military campaign. In terms of the Asante, their very first spiritual leader was, in fact, a warrior-okomfo: Komfo Anokye.²⁵⁴ Anokye was instrumental in helping Osei Tutu create a unified Asante nation and the assertion of their independence from Denkyira. For the union to last, some external symbols were needed to emphasize the new found unity of these people; Anokye was invaluable in accomplishing this. Oral tradition asserts that, one Friday, during a meeting of Asante chiefs, Anokye caused a stool to descend from the heavens. Then every one of the gathered rulers placed cuttings from his nails to be concocted into a “medicine” for the consecration of the stool. This stool became the famous “Golden Stool of Asante,” and came to be understood as the “soul of the Asante nation.”²⁵⁵ In the 1920s an informant told Rattray that “he (Anokye) had a special mission from Onyame, the God of the Sky, to make the Ashanti into a great powerful nation.”²⁵⁶ He was also the supreme codifier of custom and giver of laws. He was the author of the seventy-seven laws, a code binding prescriptions that enshrined fundamental notions of the nature of Asante state and society.²⁵⁷

The okomfo also played a role in curing the sick. Paul Isert, for example, noted that when someone fell ill they called upon the services of an okomfo. The okomfo proceeded to ask the obosom whether he was to get well again. If the obosom responded in the affirmative, then the sick individual had to make various animal (sheep, hen) sacrifices.²⁵⁸ Bosman reported a similar procedure. According the Dutchman, the okomfo recommended that the ill person make sacrifices to an obosom: “And they being strongly bent to superstition and immediately ready to follow the priest’s advice, accordingly desire him to enquire of their god what he would please to have.”²⁵⁹ Bosman also, curiously, noted that the okomfo would prescribe certain medical concoctions to ease the pain. Indeed, Bosman saw that lime and lemon juice and certain herbs were the chief medicines utilized by these akomfo. He was so impressed with these remedies that he recommended them being used on Europeans to cure their maladies.²⁶⁰ It is interesting because these European commentators did not seem to distinguish between the traditional Akan priest and the medicine-man. It seems that the akomfo could both aid sick individuals through consultation with the gods and through herbal remedies. Perhaps the Europeans did not notice these subtle differences but the work of Rattray clearly illustrates that the priest and the medicine men were two distinct occupations even if they sometimes overlapped. These medicine men or sumankwafo in Akan, were skilled botanists who underwent years of secret training learning esoteric and sacred knowledge. They had to know every tree and plant and fern by name, and the spiritual properties of each; knowledge of all animals was a requirement; and the sights and sounds of the forest had to become instinctual.²⁶¹

The akomfo themselves had to undergo a grueling training regime that took three years to complete. Indeed, not anyone could simply claim to be a okomfo and a charlatan could be easily spotted. The training involved learning about the abosom; the intricacies of possession; the various asuman and their meanings; memorizing the taboos of the various abosom; understanding the sounds of the spirits of the forests; and practicing the proper dance moves to various ceremonies.²⁶² The akomfo were respected and feared but they never, then and now, were free to operate with impunity. Europeans observers spent a great deal of time chastising these great frauds and deriding them for stealing from their “naïve” clients but they failed to notice the system the akomfo operated within.

Accusations of theft by the akomfo were taken seriously by the state. Minor cases of theft might well have been ignored but those guilty of serious cases of fraud were severely punished. The akomfo were subjected to forensic investigation and underwent “guilt tests” if there was great suspicion. If they were found guilty of conspiracy, they were immediately executed, and, most importantly, the abosom they served was identified as being uncooperative and hostile. In all similar cases, the rulings of the state took absolute precedence over the findings of the abosom. Thus the okomfo could not freely manipulate people for their own advantage without there being some repercussion.²⁶³

Like the okomfo, the witch in Akan society operated within certain parameters. The word for witchcraft in Akan is bay and for witch obayifo and bonsam, which are feminine and masculine respectively. Witchcraft involved tapping mystical power to do harm; it is often referred to as “evil magic.” It was only when this mystical power was used maliciously that it was deemed witchcraft. The witch would always try to obtain some object of the person they wished to kill by “draining their blood.” This was accomplished by a suman they carried, called atufa, which made a connection with their bodies and the body of the victim who was usually asleep at the time. Through this connection, the blood of the victim was said to drain; the person would complain of weakness and may have eventually died.²⁶⁴ While in Western culture good and evil have long been viewed as dialectal forces operating along two distinct poles continuously at war with one another, Akan cosmology (and African cosmology in general) centers largely on powers regarded as neither eternally good nor bad but potentially either and often complementary to one another. But these abayifo were simply not able to inflict suffering on whoever they chose; witches had to work within their own limitations. First, a non-adult could not have been a witch; and, secondly, a witch was powerless to use her or his powers against anyone outside his or her own clan. Witches also had to be constantly cognizant of who was trying to chase them as there were dire consequences if they were caught. Suspected witches underwent several tests and if they were found guilty, they were exiled or sometimes killed. Against the threat of the witch, the Akan also utilized the skills of the Bonsam ‘Komfo or a “witch doctor.” Witch doctors were men who had learned how to use and control black magic in order to nullify it. They hoped to cure someone sick from the activities of a witch by stamping out the cause of the disease at the source – the exposure of the witch. Thus neither the priest nor the witch was free to operate with impunity in Akan society. The priest used mystical power for the benefit (for the most part) of society while the witch used it for ill.²⁶⁵

Are we able to see similarities between the practices of the akomfo in Akan society, and other African priests, and Obeah men and women in Jamaica? To begin with, Obeah men and women, like their akomfo counterparts, were deeply infested in military action; or, in the case of slave-holding Jamaica, slave rebellions. Before 1760, white Jamaicans had paid very little attention to those African “superstitions” and approached them with a mild indifference. In 1760, however, Tacky’s revolt rocked the island and threatened British control of Jamaica for the first time since the Maroon wars in the 1730s. The brutal executions and repression that followed the failed revolt revealed several disturbing attributes of the rebellion: Tacky had planned and performed the uprising with Obeah practitioners as his closest advisors. Tacky and his followers summoned the Obeah practitioners to use their skills to protect the rebels from harm and to administer loyalty oaths which entailed drinking a cocktail of blood, rum, and grave dirt which they believed to have sacred significance.²⁶⁶ Charles Leslie, visiting the island in the 1740s, described the process of oath taking:

They range themselves in that spot of ground which is appropriate for the Negroes’ burying place, and one of them opens a grave. He who acts like a priest (Obeah-man) takes a little of the earth and puts it into every one of their mouths, they tell, that if any has been guilty (of breaking the oath), the belly swells and occasions their death.²⁶⁷

By incorporating the grave dirt into this concoction, these African (largely “Coramantin”) rebels were trying to call upon the dead to help them in the present. As it has already been noted, in Akan/African cosmology the dead or their spirits played a profound role in the present. And it was the task of the Obeah man/woman to negotiate this spiritual realm and apply the appropriate forces to the temporal realm.

Similarly Long noted, in his discussion of the history of Tacky’s revolt, that the Obeah practitioners persuaded Tacky and the other leaders that they had become invincible to the weapons of the Jamaican authorities. There was a famous Obeah man much respected among his countrymen and was well known in St. Mary’s Parish. Long wrote that “He was an old Coromantin, who had been a chief in instigating the credulous herd, to whom these priests administered a powder, which, being rubbed on their bodies, was to make them invulnerable,” Long continued that, “they persuaded them into a belief that Tacky could not be hurt by the white men, for that he caught all the bullets fired at home in his hand, and hurled them back with destruction to his foes.”²⁶⁸ This was not simply empty rhetoric as white observers were astonished by the emotionless reaction to the blinding torture inflicted upon rebellious African slaves after the revolt was successfully quashed. As Bryan Edwards wrote,

The wretch that was burnt was made to sit on the ground, and his body being chained to an iron stake, the fire was first applied to his feet. He uttered not a groan, and saw his legs reduced to ashes by some means getting loose, he snatched a brand from the fire that was consuming him, and flung it at the face of his executioner.²⁶⁹

Thus Obeah served as antidote to withstand brutal physical pain and offered a promise of invulnerability which was quite beneficial for slaves engaged in an armed conflict. Obeah practitioners, like the akomfo and other African priests, were instrumental in helping cure the sick. It appears that the Jamaican commentators made no distinction between Obeah practitioners and traditional medicine-men; Obeah men and women were called upon to use their vast knowledge of herbs to cure afflictions. Thistlewood, in his diaries, related a story where his mistress Phibbah sought out an Obeah woman to cure her headaches. The Obeah woman “sett” Phibbah’s head in what Thistlewood called a “performance” in which Phibbah’s temples were rubbed with a herb solution, her head was bound tightly with a band, and she was informed not to speak to anyone for several hours. Thistlewood was also fascinated by another African “who use to gather a few leaves of a plant, and Squeeze Some of the juice in the Eye” of a person inflicted with a fever, who would sweat profusely as the fever broke. His informant had “Seen this leaf, but does not know it,” but the Obeah man was a “Coramantee who said he used it in his Country.”²⁷⁰ These Obeah practitioners were, therefore, experts in the prevention, diagnosis, and cure of various types of misfortune.

Obeah practitioners also played an important role in curtailing the highly dangerous yaws disease. According to some statistics, about one-sixth of the enslaved population at any one time in 18^th century Jamaica was unable to work because of the yaws. The highly contagious and repulsive disease resulted in the construction of “hothouses” or hospitals on a secluded part of the plantation, where patients were kept away from white supervision. Most European physicians, because of the contagious nature of the disease, left the case of these patients to their black counterparts.²⁷¹ The beneficial aspects of the herbal medical knowledge were linked to Obeah as these “black doctors” used traditional herbal remedies in an attempt to stamp out this deadly disease. Unsurprisingly, many of these herbalists/Obeah practitioners also suffered the ravages of the disease. This reality partially explained the frightening appearance of many of the practitioners of Obeah. These “black doctors” represented an alternative medicine that competed with those European doctors working within the plantation system.²⁷² Indeed, due to the enforced quarantine, affected by the outbreak of yaws, patients and Obeah practitioners were often sequestered in the same hut together for a long period of time. As Benjamin Mosely noted in 1799, “Many of their wayward visitors were deeply skilled in magic, and what we call the black art, which they brought with them from Africa; and, in return for their accommodation, they usually taught their landlord the mysteries of spells and sorcery; and illuminated him in all the occult science of Obi.”²⁷³ Thus the sick and the Obeah men/women spent a great deal of time together exchanging ideas and working on potential medical remedies and solidifying the belief system.

It is interesting to note that in the Jamaican sources there are few reports of Obeah men or women ever undergoing possession in order to consult the gods (this was more reserved for the Myal ceremony to be discussed below). Perhaps, since individual possession was more private in nature, it escaped from the eyes of Jamaican commentators. In any event, the individual Obeah practitioner spent more time dealing with particular spiritually charged objects, or what the Akan would call the asuman and the Kongolese would label the minkisi. The amount and variety of these objects listed in the sources is extensive; here is but an abbreviated list: grave dirt, hair, shark teeth, blood, feathers, egg-shells, wax, hearts of animals, potent roots and weeds, bones, rusty nails and beads. Like their akomfo (and other African priests) counterparts, Obeah practitioners were quite skilled in using and reading these objects (with or without the help of a higher power) to help or harm individuals. Mosely also noted that individuals went to Obeah practitioners when they believed they were under the spell of Obeah from another expert in the practice. These practitioners would interrogate the patient and ascertain the part of the body that was in pain. This part they treated with pinching, drawing with gourds, or calabashes, beating and pressing. Then, according to Mosely, something miraculous happened, “When the patient is nearly exhausted with this rough magnetizing, OBI brings out an old rusty nail, or a piece of bone, or an ass’s tooth, or the jaw bone of a rat, or a fragment of a quart bottle, from the part.”²⁷⁴ The patient was said to recover by the following day.

These spiritually charged objects were also used in the undertaking of oaths which greatly resembled those reported from the Gold Coast and elsewhere. Indeed, they were often employed to determine the guilt or innocence of a suspected thief. Edward Long provided one of the best descriptions of the practice. Grave dirt was the most important material ingredient in their solemn oaths. A small quantity of this grave earth was mixed with water in a calabash. The person who oversaw the procedure (usually an Obeah practitioner) dipped his finger into the mixed and crossed various parts of the suspect’s naked body, after which, the suspect drank the residue of the mixture; he was said to literally swallow the oath; or in the African context, “eat fetish.” Long reported that the suspect had to utter these words, “If I have (stolen this hog, fowl, corn, or – as it may happen to be the case), may the grave dirt make my bowls rot! May they burst and tumble out before my face! May me head never cease to ach! Nor my joints to be tortured with pain!”²⁷⁵ As stated, the oath was usually performed by an Obeah practitioner but it was usually deemed authentic if it was performed by any elderly black man or woman.

Interestingly, the enslaved Africans did not fear breaking the oath if it was tendered by a white person. The use of these spiritually-charged objects by Obeah personnel, therefore, had the real ability to detect and apprehend potential criminals.

These sacred objects were also directed against whites. John Shipman (district chairman for the Weslyan Methodist Missionary Society), in 1820, described an illuminating account between a plantation overseer and a free black man armed with an Obeah charm. One night the overseer peered outside, after hearing a sound, and spotted a man he recognized digging a hole. Upon looking further, the overseer saw the man deposit something he knew to be an Obeah-spell charm into the hole. The next morning the overseer opened the hole and took out the deposit which consisted of a bottle filled with rainwater, feathers and cat teeth that was intended to kill him. There is no Obeah practitioner mentioned in this account, unless, of course, the freed man was a practitioner. Nevertheless, the object was undoubtedly purchased from an Obeah man or woman who taught this free black man how to work the charm. Such a use of Obeah knowledge could severely undercut the hegemonic power structures of the plantocracy, and because it could be harnessed at an individual level, its suppression proved daunting for authorities.²⁷⁶ In 1760, the Jamaican Assembly passed a law declaring that, “Negroes found with blood, feathers, parrots beaks, dog’s teeth, alligator’s teeth, broken bottles, grave dirt, rum, egg shells will be declared guilty of Obeah.”²⁷⁷ This was followed up in a 1783 act which stated: “That if any Negro or other slave shall mix or prepare, with an intent to give, any poison or poisonous drug, in the practice of Obeah or otherwise, although death may not ensue upon taking thereof, the said slave or slaves, being duly convicted thereof, shall suffer death, or transportation for life.”²⁷⁸ White authorities, therefore, were extremely anxious and concerned about the political potential embedded within the practice of Obeah.

In 1784, Judge John Grant rejected a master’s appeal to stop the deportation of a convicted Obeah man for the following reason: “If granted in this instance, application with equal reason might be made, while a rebellion might be raging throughout the country.”²⁷⁹ The judge clearly agonized about the potential subversion within Obeah yet he defined it as “pretended” witchcraft or sorcery. Such an ambivalent description characterized the colonial’s persecution of Obeah; it was real in its threat yet “pretend” or superficial in its belief structures. But as long as the enslaved (and freed for that matter) continued to recognize the tangible benefits ingrained within Obeah to combat the worldly power of whites, the colonial authorities had to prosecute it aggressively. Obeah as a source of politically subversive activity continued to terrify whites throughout the eighteenth century and inspired numerous other rebellions.

Obeah, of course, was not completely free of those sinister and malevolent aspects that have long characterized the practice. One of the more astute commentators on Obeah, John Shipman, noted in 1820 the wide-range of forms Obeah, both positive and negative, could undertake. Shipman observed that many enslaved individuals, referring to Obeah practitioners, had a wide knowledge of the uses of various plants and herbs. This knowledge was often used to create poisons and sometimes they were directed towards fellow slaves.²⁸⁰ Moreover, sometimes enslaved Africans succumbed to the spiritual power of Obeah. Dirt-eating was identified as a common symptom for someone under the spell of Obeah.²⁸¹ Many Jamaican planters explained the phenomenon of dirt eating rationally by pointing to a sudden change in routine, a new supervisor, or a move from a lowland home to the mountains. But when such factors were not present, planters increasing suspected the practice of witchcraft. According to the Jamaican physician Thomas Dancer, when a slave “conceives himself to be under Obeah” every accident or sudden misfortune is attributed to the “the effect of magic, and his existence becomes a misery.” To be under the “spell” of an Obeah practitioner was an incredibly traumatic ordeal for an individual and because of the condition of the sources, it is difficult to convey that “sense of the sudden power of a deadly sanction which, working invisibly, convinces healthy people that no matter what that they would soon die.”²⁸² Some writers even went as far as to argue that Obeah was the leading cause of death for enslaved Africans in Jamaica. Robert Renny, for example, in his history of Jamaica, wrote “From a consideration of the multitude of occasions which provoke the slaves to exercise the powers of obi against each other, and the astonishing influence of superstition upon their minds; to these causes a very considerable portion of the annual mortality of the Negroes was formerly attributed.²⁸³ In the 1830s, Richard Madden used similar hyperbole when he wrote, “Hundreds have died of the mere terror of being under the ban of obeah.”²⁸⁴ These writers, unsurprisingly, ignored the possibility that the brutal conditions of slavery might have contributed to the high mortality rate of enslaved Africans.

How did the role of the African priest, in my case the okomfo, change once he arrived on Jamaican soil? Obviously racialized chattel slavery was a new phenomenon that must have impacted on the practice. Indeed, the sources are surprisingly silent on the legal status of these Obeah practitioners. Were they for the most part slaves, or, perhaps, freed individuals? They seemed to have a surprising amount of mobility. The only consensus that emerges was that they were usually people born in Africa. But Long noted that Creoles also deeply feared and respected these individuals so their influence did cross the well-documented African/Creole divide.²⁸⁵ The large difference between practitioners in Akan societies (and Western African societies in general) and Obeah men and women in Jamaica were the societal changes that emerged under chattel slavery in Jamaica. Nigel Bolland says as much when he writes, “Cultural practices such as obeah do not exist, either in Africa or the Americas, apart from the social structures in which they are conducted and to which they relate.”²⁸⁶ Creolization, according to Bolland, should focus on the dialectics between religious values, beliefs and activities, on the one hand, and social structures, on the other.²⁸⁷ As noted in some detail above, not anyone in Akan societies could become an okomfo. Indeed, they often underwent a rigorous three- year training program to become one. Such societal structures were obviously not in place in Jamaica. In Dahomey, for another example, the role of the priest was hereditarily reserved.²⁸⁸ What were the consequences of this? I, unlike Bolland, do not see this lack of societal infrastructure in Jamaica as evidence that Obeah was a completely “new” institution on Jamaican soil. What it could have possibly meant was a liberalization of the Obeah practice. Because there was no training program in place, more people might have been able to access to these mystical powers. It was noted above that in “hothouses” sick individuals and Obeah practitioners would often talk for hours about remedies and cures. Thus on Jamaican soul such esoteric knowledge was more readily available than in Africa. Perhaps, due to chattel slavery, there was not as a stringent divide between religious personnel and the lay people and that knowledge that would have mainly been reserved for the priestly class in Africa was now distributed to a larger audience.

On the more negative side, though, this lack of societal structures also could have meant that fraudulent priests had more opportunities to cheat clients. As noted above, Akan societies had a system of checks and balances in place to deal with scheming okomfo. In Jamaica, there was no such system except for some ambivalent legislation that did not completely understand Obeah. Because slaves could not turn to the state if they were cheated by an Obeah practitioner, they had to go to other Obeah personnel to achieve any measure of justice; this, in turn, only reinforced the practice of Obeah.

Similarly, there was no system in place to deal with those individuals who used mystical power for ill. In Akan societies there was a professional class of individuals who hunted these witches and tried to bring them to justice. As well, there were limitations to whom they could inflict suffering upon. In Jamaica, however, Obeah practitioners who used their esoteric knowledge to harm individuals could cause anguish for a greater number of people. This is not to say that the majority of Obeah practitioners were “witches,” but those who were, because of this lack of proper societal structures, could use their powers on many more individuals. Ironically, therefore, the lack of proper societal mechanisms to control wayward priests and witches only reinforced the use of Obeah (for good and bad) in Jamaica.

These structural differences aside, there were still acute similarities between the Akan okomfo, and other African priests, and the Jamaican Obeah practitioner. It should be clear by now that I am not suggesting that the Obeah priest was the transplanted okomfo in its pure form. What I am arguing is that the role of okomfo helped in the emergence of this Pan-African phenomenon called Obeah. There were many similarities between these two practitioners and the focus on Obeah as a transplanted form of Asante witchcraft has only obscured these connections. The priest played a similar role in many African societies and the Akan okomfo was simply one ingredient (the Igbo dibia or the Kongo nganga would be others) to the Obeah formula. Indeed, Obeah, over time, became an all-encompassing catch-call term for various (yet similar) African religious practices. In the slaveholding context of Jamaica, therefore, these religious specialists were thus collapsed under the generic term of Obeah practitioner. This intra-African syncretism occurring among enslaved Africans with different yet closely related religious beliefs facilitated the emergence of a Pan-African religiosity in Jamaica. Dianne Stewart puts it this way, “The end products of African people’s encounters with each other were pan- African syntheses of religious and cultural practices that could serve the needs of individuals and communities at large.”²⁸⁹ Thus specifics were dropped in favour of an over-arching belief system that was hospitable to a variety of African priestly functions and beliefs that aimed to help (and unfortunately, sometimes hurt) members of the enslaved community; the Akan okomfo was certainly one of those parts.

Myal

 

Another issue that has long perplexed scholars was the relationship between Obeah and the practice of Myalism. Because of the anti-Obeah campaign attached to the Myal Revivalism of the 1840s, scholars have tended to assume that these two traditions had always been antagonistic towards each other. Patterson assumes as much when he writes, “It is not difficult to see that obeah approximates closely to what we earlier defined as bad medicine in the West African sense . . . To a large extent myalism may be said to approximate closely to standard West African good medicine.”²⁹⁰ This interpretation is anachronistic as it fails to address the evidence of collaboration between Obeah practitioners and Myalists during the period of slavery. During the slavery era, the descriptions offered present numerous similarities between the two practices. These accounts provide a common portrait of Myal as a ritual dance often enacted to conduct initiations. Moreover, Myalists were presented as a “class” of specialists within the institutional framework of Obeah. These Myal leaders, like their Obeah counterparts, were also skilled diviners. As Dianne Stewart, again, explains, “The title of doctor reportedly reserved for myal leaders among devotees, the frequent external notions of their use of ‘poisonous drugs,’ and ‘medicinal herbs’ to induce alternate states of being, further indicate their priestly specialization as diviners and herbalists.”²⁹¹ Further similarities between the two practices included: the negotiation of mystical power, shadow catching, curing diseases and restoring health.

Myalism began to take on a slightly different shape toward the end of the eighteenth century when some adherents absorbed portions of the Baptist version of Christianity. Throughout the tumultuous American War of Independence a number of British loyalists fled Jamaica. Some of the African-American slaves, and the servants who joined them, introduced the Baptist religion to Jamaica. The famous Moses Baker, for example, settled in St. James Parish in 1791 and began, with the help of the Quakers, to preach the Baptist faith to slaves. Baker, however, had great difficulty maintaining regular contact with his adherents; he could only visit them at night and could only hold services on the property of the slave-master. Baker, and men like him, became known as Black or Native Baptist preachers. They gave out tickets that marked each individual’s status and for instruction they divided their congregation into classes, each with its own leader.²⁹² The leaders, however, soon became completely independent of their superiors and ruled their classes on their own. Indeed, Baker and others found it impossible to regulate the content of their teachings and ritual ceremonies which, over time, departed dramatically from the orthodox Baptist viewpoint. Myalists emphasized two key elements of the Baptist faith because they resonated with certain African belief idioms already familiar to them: the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; and Baptism, in the same vein of John the Baptist, by immersion. Indeed, Baptism was an alluring concept because they believed that the river was the dwelling place of African spirits who were believed to protect them. Thus in the subsequent evolution of Myalism during the nineteenth century, Christianity was reinterpreted in African, not European, cultural terms. These Native Baptists also played a large part in the 1831 slave rebellion that greatly accelerated the emancipation legislation in London.²⁹³

The economic hardships experienced in the northern Jamaican parishes of St. James and Trelawny, in the 1830s and early 1840s, created a revival among Myalists who gained a plethora of new members and set out to eradicate the sorcery which had caused the misfortune. After emancipation in 1838, a number of unexplained deaths occurred in these parishes which were blamed on Obeah which became a convenient scapegoat for every misfortune that gripped the region. Jamaicans on several estates then listed the help of Myal bands to cleanse the area of these “evil” Obeah practitioners. By October 1842 this Myal movement had crossed into Trelawny and some said even into Westmoreland. It was also believed to be active as far away as St. Thomas-in-the-Vale in the same year.²⁹⁴ Because of the pronounced anti-Obeah sentiment attached to the post-slavery Myal Revivalism, scholars have tended to ignore the earlier manifestations of Myalism where Obeah was an intrinsic part of it. Often it seems that Myal is only given due treatment by scholars in the nineteenth century, when the sources open up, while its earlier and original role is often overlooked and confused.

One of the major attributes of Myalism, during the period of the British Slave Trade, which certainly caught the attention of contemporary observers, was the Myal dance. The descriptions of the Myal dance provided by contemporaries were actually references to an elated ritual performance that aimed to summon manifestations of invisible, revelatory, and transformative powers, deities, and ancestors.²⁹⁵ Edward Long offered one of the most detailed accounts of the Myal dance:

Not long since, some of these execrable wretches (obeah-men) introduced what they call the myal dance and established, a kind of society, into which they invited all they could. The lure hung out was, that every Negroe, initiated into the myal society, would be invulnerable by the white men; although they might in appearance be slain, the obeah-man could, at his pleasure, restore the body to life. The method, by which this trick was carried on, was by a cold infusion of the herb branched colalue . . . which, after the agitation of dancing, threw the party into a profound sleep. In this state he continued, to all appearance lifeless, no pulse, nor motion of the heart, being perceptible; till, on being rubbed with another infusion (as yet unknown to the Whites), the effects of the colalue gradually went off, the body resumed its motions and the party, on whom the experiment had been tried, awoke as from a trance, entirely ignorant of any thing that had passed since he left off dancing.²⁹⁶

Thus it is fair to say, from the above description, that Myal was centered upon possession trance, which was often achieved through dance. In both continental African religions and their diasporic counterparts, ancestral spirit possession was pursued for the beneficial purpose of aiding an individual or community to solve a particular misfortune or problem.²⁹⁷ It would not be disingenuous, therefore, to assume based on the pre-emancipation literature that Africans sought out Myalists for resolutions to their own personal problems. The dance, conducted by skilled Myalists, served as a vehicle that metaphysically linked enslaved Africans with their ancestors, deities and thus their homeland. Indeed possession dancing was commemorative; a potent statement by the enslaved that they had, in fact, a useable past. During these dances, enslaved blacks created a shared moral universe: they recovered their common humanity, they assumed meaningful social roles and they rendered communal values sacred by associating them with their ancestral homeland.²⁹⁸

What were the African antecedents of this practice and how did they transform on Jamaican soil? Maureen Warner-Lewis, in her study of Central Africans in the Caribbean, postulates that Jamaican Myal derived from Kongo religiosity. She argues that the term Myal came from the Kongo mayaala, the physical representation of power; these were the agents of the paramount chief’s authority.²⁹⁹ She goes on to argue that there were two components of indigenous religion the Kongo region, one good and one bad. Mbumba was that attribute of the religion that dealt with terrestrial nature, healing and well-being; their male and female priests (nganga) were routinely possessed by mbumba-type spirits. On the other hand, nkadi mpemba personified powers of destruction, of evil but also, at times, offered protection for individuals.³⁰⁰ Warner-Lewis then tries to situate the good mbumba next to Myal and the bad nkadi mpemba next to Obeah in the Jamaican setting. This is an untenable position, as Myal, outlined above, did not take on an anti-Obeah stance until the 1840s after it had undergone drastic transformations from the ceremony first reported by Long near the end of the eighteenth century. Kongo religiosity, possibly through the nganga and the minikisi, certainly, at some level, entered the Jamaican setting and played its part, but it was not through the anachronistic and simplistic good Myal / bad Obeah dichotomy.

Leonard Barrett, to my knowledge, is the only scholar who has argued for the Akan roots of the Myal phenomenon. He understands the work of the Myal man to be curative not destructive so he believes that Myal was the transplanted form of an African anti-witchcraft or ‘cleansing’ cult, specifically of the Akan variety.³⁰¹ He further argues that the word “Myal” is a derivation of the Akan word “mia” which means “to squeeze” or “to press” referring to, according to Barrett, a method for juicing the weeds in curing illness. The word also appears in many combinations, such as mia kuru, “to treat or dress a wound or sore with water or medicine.”³⁰² Personally, I am not so much interested in trying to find the etymological roots of the word, but rather in attempting to uncover the similar functions and significances between the Jamaican practice and African ones. Like in the Jamaican Myal ceremony it is important to try and identify a ritual performance in which an individual priest is acting in accordance with, not against, the wishes of the larger community. If Myal was, in fact, a mechanism that facilitated the democratization of a religious belief structure then it is incumbent upon scholars to try and locate a similar practice among African societies.

It is with these concerns in mind that I argue that the Akom ceremony in Akan societies played a similar role to the Myal ritual in Jamaica. The Akan service called Akom was and still is a participatory event. It was comprised of drumming, singing and dancing the ancient songs and rhythms of the ancestors; it was led by the senior priest or the Okomfo Panyin.³⁰³ During the course of the ceremony, several akomfo allowed certain abosom to posses them in order to send messages, perform healing and encourage the people in the audience. The akomfo took on the characteristics of the abosom when possessed and were able to dance, sing, and relay messages from the deities. It was a highly spiritual event in which those in attendance were invited to participate in the singing and dancing in order to benefit from the potent energy present. During possession, a great transformation took place in the persona of the individual okomfo as they revealed the power of the obosom. White powder or clay was often applied to the face and other body parts of the okomfo to signify that they were in a state of possession. It was a sacred state to be in as the priest lost all control of his personhood and transformed into a mouthpiece of the various deity.³⁰⁴

Isert documented such a ceremony during his sojourn on the Gold Coast. He noted that the ceremony was conducted among various “nations” to form an alliance. The ceremony thus served as a bridge between opposing viewpoints and ideas to facilitate the emergence of a collective front Indeed, it aided in the formation of a Pan-Africanized religious experience whereby Africans with diverse religious ideals dropped the specifics of their own practices to embrace a framework that was more democratic and mutually beneficial. Isert recognized that a hierarchy of akomfo played important roles in the ceremony; there was the “Chief Priest” and his subordinates. ³⁰⁵ Before the ceremony commenced, the Chief okomfo asked the people present to reflect carefully on why they were all there. The Chief priest then began to call upon the abosom by spreading smoke around in a circle, using a quasi-torch made up of grass straws bounded together. When the lesser spirit arrived, reportedly in the form of a human head made up of gold, it was carried in a large tub on the head of one of the subordinate okomfo. The Chief priest then became possessed, “He stands staring unblinkingly at the fetish as it approaches him, howls and wails, distorts all his limbs and speaks unceasingly to the fetish. It is alleged that the fetish answers him but the ears of the profane cannot hear this.”³⁰⁶ The Chief priest then took the tub from the subordinate, placed it on the ground and made a large circle of ashes around it. The participants who were going to “eat fetish” or undertake an oath, stepped into the circle. They walked around the tub three times while whispering some unintelligible words during which time the entire congregation wailed excessively. The Chief okomfo then stepped into the circle and poured some brandy on the “fetish” in the tub, murmuring some words, and then gave the participants some rum. Finally, according to Isert, “he takes two smooth, round stones from the tub and touches the arms, breast, loins and feet of the candidates in a special manner.”³⁰⁷ Isert did not understand this last gesture but, arguably, it was meant to offer some sort of protection for the ensuing battle.

What separates this ceremony, from the individual priest examples given above, was the communal aspect to it. Here we see a large number individuals joining in with several akomfo to ascertain the direction a community should take through the consultation of the abosom. Such a communal possession ceremony brought together religious authorities, soldiers, and lay people to determine collectively, through asking the gods, the correct avenue to choose. The Akom ceremony, therefore, offered a more democratic religious experience. It was not simply the solitary priest resorting to his or her hut to consult the abosom in isolation; rather, it was a community-directed effort. It made some sense to include many people in the ceremony as, noted above, the abosom were sometimes fickle and ambiguous in their declarations; interpretation, then, became a group affair.

Of course, similar communal ceremonies existed in other parts of West Africa. Melville and Frances Herskovits, during their 1930s anthropological work in Dahomey, documented, in incredible detail, the rites conducted to initiate members into “cult- houses” for the gods. All groups of adherents centered their dedications on “cult houses” established for their gods (vodun). In Dahomean cosmology there existed various pantheons of gods, including: the Sky Pantheon (Mawu-Lisa), the Earth Pantheon (Sagbata), and the Thunder Pantheon (Xevioso).³⁰⁸ Each “cult house” was headed by a chief priest (voduno) with a number of assistants taken from the ranks of the older and trusted cult members. After these specialists came the initiate members (vodunsi) who, whether male or female, were labeled “wives” of the particular vodun being worshipped.³⁰⁹ Initiation rites varied among the different pantheons and to the type of initiation being conducted.

Melville and Frances Herskovits documented the initiation rites for cult membership for a child, who was deemed, before birth, to hold special favour with a particular vodun. For forty-one days the children were taught the various rites connected with cult membership by its members. On the forty-second day, the initiates rushed forth and “collapsed” in front of the temple. The children were now understood to be “dead” as it was believed that “the Vodu has killed his woman.”³¹⁰ The “dead” children spent up to two weeks secluded within the walls of the “cult-house” before they were brought out and laid in front. The families of the “dead” children were requested to come forward and were told by the voduno, and his assistants, to confess so that the children could be “resuscitated.”³¹¹ They were asked by the priest what the child might have done during his life to make the ancestors and the gods ill-disposed towards him. As the family named each possible offense, the priest broke off a piece of straw, threw it behind him, and shouted, “If it is for this reason that your child will not be resuscitated, I have exempted it.”³¹² The body of a dead chicken was used to touch the “dead” initiate three times so to drive out the spirit that had “killed” him. The families, anxiously waiting, listened as the priest, and his assistants, called out the names of the “dead” children. Miraculously, the “dead” children leaped to their feet as their relatives kissed the ground and covered themselves in dirt in gratitude for the miracle.³¹³

Though they were now initiated into the “cult house,” and had knowledge of the pantheon of gods to which they now belonged, they did not know which particular vodun they would come to represent. The priest informed each novice that on a particular night the vodun would “declare war on them.”³¹⁴ The priest accomplished this by standing at the entrance of the “cult house,” holding a string of beads. The novice was asked to approach and touch these beads; the priest then pronounced the name of the vodun who had “captured” him. Instantly, the novice became possessed by that particular vodun and began to dance to the sounds of drumming. Possession, in the Dahomean context, was a tricky affair. The vodun, it was understood, would only possess an individual on that particular day set aside by the high priest for worship; the correct kind of drumming had to be performed; and possession could only occur near the “cult-house.”³¹⁵ As in the Akan context, when an individual in Dahomey was possessed they lost all control of their personhood. After they regained their consciousness, they had no memory of what transpired and felt only that something “heavy” had left them. Once the novice had mastered the art of possession, he played a salient role in the functioning of the “cult house” but was not at the level of the high priest. Indeed, the position of the chief priest was hereditary. ³¹⁶

There was a pronounced communal aspect, like in the Akan Akom ceremony, that underlined the functioning of these “cult houses.” The Dahomey “cult-house” symbolized the security of a spiritual home. At this spiritual locale, personal identities were interwoven with the emotional attachment to a particular deity within a collective membership. All members shared the common experience of initiation and worship as they went to the “cult-house” by a combination of free-will and supernatural control. ³¹⁷ Despite the hierarchy of the organization of the “cult-house,” the religious experience offered there was, undoubtedly, democratic. Indeed, at these sites worship, head priests met with assistants and novices to discuss religious matters and worked together to grapple with the mysteries of the vodun. The religious experience even reached beyond the walls of the temple. Families of novices, as mentioned above, felt the religious power present when they watched their children “rise from the dead.” Moreover, possession facilitated a dialogue with a particular vodun so that he could, possibly, direct the congregation towards a resolution to a particular problem. Like in the Akan Akom ceremony, we have here an experience that united many different kinds of people and was much more social in formation. The head priest worked in accordance with, not against, the wishes of his subordinates.

The communal aspect of Myal in Jamaica greatly paralleled ceremonies like the Akan Akom and the Dahomean “cult-house.” The gothic writer Matthew Lewis, in 1815, commented extensively on the Myal ceremony. These “Obeah ceremonies,” according to Lewis, always commenced with ‘the Myal dance.” The “Chief Obeah-man” sprinkled powders over his “devoted victim;” blew upon him; danced around him; obliged him to drink liquor; and whirled him rapidly round and round until he was unconscious.³¹⁸ The Myal man then retreated to the forest and gathered some herbs which he then squeezed into the mouth of the “dead” person. This was followed by a rhythmic chanting and dancing around the inanimate body until the “corpse” finally recovered and rose from the ground full of life.³¹⁹ Again it should be noted that this description illustrates how, even in 1815, Myal and Obeah were complementary forces that played off each other. Indeed, there was the chief priest or Obeah man, who, with the help of his assistants, underwent some sort of possession in order to aid an individual by metaphorically killing him and bringing him to life. Lewis made it clear that the chief priest underwent a profound transformation, “the chief Myal-Man then utters loud shrieks, rushes out of the house with wild and frantic gestures . . . and chanting all the while between a song and a howl.”³²⁰ Undoubtedly, he had become possessed by an ancestral spirit or god. Lewis also illuminated the communal aspect of the ceremony by addressing the role of the assistants: “while the assistants hand in hand dance slowly round them in a circle, stamping the ground loudly with their feet to keep time with his (priest) chant.”³²¹ Unfortunately, we will never know exactly why that individual went to see the Myal man or what “bringing him back to life” specifically accomplished. But what is important to note are the ways that Myal served some of the same functions as the Akan Akom ceremony and other African communal ceremonies, as in the Dahomean context delineated above. These ceremonies incorporated a skilled priest and her subordinates; possession and the consultation of gods and/or spirits were intrinsic to both; and both provided a religious experience that was more communal and social in formation.

 

This communal aspect of Myal underscores one of the important differences between it and Obeah. Indeed, the practice of Obeah was on a more individual basis while Myal was more social in formation. This subtle difference allows us to read Myal as the democratization of Obeah. Myal, in the literature, was only described as a religious ceremony, an association based upon corporate duty, which featured captivating leaders with groups of adherents. Moreover, Myal was characterized as a distinguishable class of Obeah religious leaders with a specialization called “Myal.”³²² Like the Akom ceremony and the Dahomean “cult-house,” Myal was an avenue by which a religious experience could be distributed to wider group of people. The “Myal society” was, therefore, social in nature and sought to hold collective ceremonies of healing and communion.

These religious ceremonies in Africa, of which the Akan Akom ceremony was certainly one, also took on a different and more important role on Jamaican soil. Just as the Akom ceremony, and the Dahomean “cult-house,” was able to bridge the divide between diverse perspectives and voices, Myal was able to serve equally as a site of dialogue and interaction which facilitated the emergence of a Pan-African religious experience in Jamaica. Indeed, the appearance of the new Myal religion in the 1760s epitomized a spirit of cooperation among enslaved Africans of various ethnic backgrounds; so much so, that practice may have fostered a Pan-African cooperation where once only ethnic division had existed.³²³ Instead of instituting a roadblock for cultural continuity, slavery forced enslaved Africans to recognize similarities as opposed to stark differences among them. A Myal ceremony allowed enslaved Africans to gather as one in order to exchange ideas, facilitate dialogue and offer a collective response to a particular problem. As opposed to Obeah, Myal incorporated a diverse group of people into deliberations that sought to exhort a collective front against whatever ailed them. African communal ceremonies, like the Akan Akom and the Dahomean “cult-house,” provided such a meeting place. But on Jamaican soil these ceremonies transformed into a meeting place for intra-African syncretism; a site that allowed for the exchange of African cultural principles and the emergence of “new” Pan-African religious conceptions. They were “new” in the sense that they did not belong to one particular region in West and West-Central Africa but “old” in the sense that they encompassed irrefutably African cultural orientations. These African communal ceremonies facilitated the emergence of Pan-Africanized social groups, or in the case of Jamaica, the Myal ceremony.

Chapter 5: Conclusion

 

It is possible that Thistlewood, if he traveled there, would have seen a lot of similarity between the cultural practices of the Akan on the Gold Coast and those of the enslaved in Jamaica. It is also plausible that he would have recognized pronounced similarities in other parts of West and West-Central Africa. Indeed, scholars are increasingly realizing that the religious diversity of West Africa, especially during the period of the British Slave Trade, has been exaggerated and there were common religious orientations that connected various locales. It was possible, therefore, for Africans in Jamaica to communicate with each other through these common religious beliefs. The Middle Passage was indeed horrifying but it could not completely shatter world-views or cultural practices; the resiliency of culture proved quite durable. These world-views helped orient slaves to their new found homes and provided a mechanism to transplant African religious viewpoints to New World settings. Indeed, Jamaica had several salient attributes that facilitated the emergence of African cultural principles: a great importer of Africans throughout the 18^th century, a low slave birth-rate, an unstable white population and a low and somewhat unsuccessful missionary presence.

As it has been illustrated, the Akan of the Gold Coast, as well as other African cultural groups, provided a great deal of sustenance to these emergent Jamaican practices. Through the practice of “Carrying the Corpse,” the role of the okomfo and the Akom ceremony, Akan cultural principles contributed greatly to the Pan Africanized phenomenons of, in Jamaica, burial practices, Obeah and Myal. It is impossible, based on the primary sources, to access in great detail the degree to which the Akan contributed to these practices. But it was, of course, not only Akan cultural idioms that contributed to these Jamaican practices. Indeed, the “Carrying the Corpse” practice was found throughout West and West Central Africa. Through the tambo ceremony, for example, the Kongolese, with the help of the priest, asked the deceased, on his way to the burial site, several questions about why/how he died to insure that he left this world without bearing any sort of grudge against them. Similar practices were found among the Diola of the Senegambian region, inhabitants of Sierra Leone, the Ga of the eastern Gold Coast, and Igbo peoples. The West-African practice of “Carrying the Corpse,” or what the Akan called “funu soa,” therefore, transformed, on Jamaican soil, into an Afro-creolized form of detecting wrongdoers and placating potentially vengeful spirits. The practice also, simultaneously, acted as a meeting place for diverse Africans to come together and discuss the appropriate way (in their cosmological understanding) for dealing with a departing spirit; it was an avenue for syncretic dialogue.

The Akan, through the role of the okomfo, also contributed to the emergence of the Obeah practice in Jamaica. The okomfo was a positive force in Akan societies as he was skilled in curing the sick, detecting criminals, handling potentially dangerous spiritually charged objects (asuman) and offering guidance through the consultation of the gods. Of course, the priest played a similar role in many African societies and the Akan okomfo was simply one ingredient (the Igbo dibia and the Kongo nganga would be others) to the Obeah formula. Obeah, over time in Jamaica, became an all-encompassing catch-call term for various (yet similar) African priestly practices. Moreover, Obeah transformed into a Pan-African religious role that was hospitable to the various priestly functions found in West and West-Central Africa.

Myalism, in Jamaica, was a mechanism in which a religious experience was distributed to a larger audience as it facilitated the democratization of the religious tenants of Obeah. Such communal ceremonies were common throughout West Africa. I focused on the Akan Akom ceremony and the religious experience found within Dahomean “cult-houses.” In these ceremonies, we see a large number of individuals joining in with several priests and other religious authorities to ascertain the direction a community should through the consultation of the gods. Such a communal ceremony brought together religious specialists, and lay people to determine collectively, through asking the gods, the correct avenue to choose. Just as these ceremonies were able to bridge the divide between diverse perspectives and voices in Africa, Myal was able to equally serve as a place of dialogue and interaction which facilitated the emergence of a Pan-African religious experience in Jamaica. Indeed, Myal incorporated a diverse group of people into deliberations that sought to exhort a collective front against whatever ailed them.

Charles Leslie, in the 1740s, witnessed such coalescing of various African viewpoints in Jamaica when he wrote, “Their notions of religion are very inconsistent, and vary according to the different countries they come from: But they have a kind of occasional conformity, and join without distinction in their solemn sacrifices.”³²⁴ In slave-holding Jamaica, therefore, various traditional African religions came together and worked towards a coherent religiosity that suited their needs under the condition of slavery. Indeed, these practices fostered a sense of belonging among the enslaved. Thus the interplay among enslaved Africans with different yet closely related religious beliefs fostered the development of Pan-African religious experience in Jamaica. In the slaveholding context of Jamaica, where ethnic identities eventually succumbed to the acculturating influence of Pan-Africanization, these religious practices where collapsed under the general categories of burial rites, Obeah, and Myal. These Pan-African practices were “new” in the sense that they required the input of a variety of African religious viewpoints but “old” in the sense that they incorporated African religious principles. The transformation, therefore, that these African religious principles and practices underwent it Jamaica, did not make them any-less African. The religious practices of the Akan, as I have attempted to illustrate, certainly played a part in these emergent Pan-African practices, but it must be recognized that Akan element was only one strand in a broader Pan-African synthesis that was re-engineered on Jamaican soil.

 

¹ Melville Herskovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941; Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.

2 Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in The Afro- Brazilian Candomble. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

3 Barnett, Leonard. Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974, 79-80.

4 This brief account of Phillip Quaque’s life is pieced together from two sources: Margaret Priestly, “Philip Quaque of Cape Coast”. In Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip Curtin, 99-139. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968; and William St. Clair, The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Bluebridge Publishers, 2007.

⁵ Priestly, “Phillip Quaque of Cape Coast,” 100.

⁶ Ibid, 102.

⁷ Ibid, 107.

⁸ Ibid, 111.

⁹ Ibid, 133.

¹⁰ Ibid, 129.

11 Thomas Thompson, An account of two missionary voyages by the appointment of the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The one to New Jersey in North America, the other from America to the coast of Guiney. By Thomas Thompson, … London, 1758, 45.

¹² St. Clair, The Door of No Return, 158.

¹³ Ibid, 160.

¹⁴ Priestly, “Phillip Quaque of Cape Coast,” 139.

¹⁵ This outline of Thomas Thistlewood’s life is put together from, again, two sources: Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo- Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004; and Douglass Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-86. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1989.

¹⁶ Burnard, Mastery Tyranny, and Desire, 4.

¹⁷ Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 203.

¹⁸ Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire,176.

19 For expectations of slave life in the Americas and how being a slave in Africa could have informed their experience in the Americas see: Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman. “Enslaved Africans and their Expectations of Slave Life in the Americas: Towards a Reconsideration of Models of ‘Creolisation’”. In Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, edited by Verene Shepherd and Glen Shepherd, 67-91. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002; especially page 70.

20 For a quick synopsis of the importance of sacrifices on the Gold Coast see, Ivor Wilks Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1993, 215-237; for a first hand account see, Henry Meredith, An Account of the Cold Coast of Africa with a Brief History of the African Company. London: Cass Library of African Studies, 1812, 111-112. For the quote, see, A.B Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking People of the Gold Coast of West Africa. Chicago: Benin Press, Limited, 1964, 159.

²¹ Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 256.

²² Ibid.

23 Charles Leslie, of Jamaica, A new history of Jamaica, from the earliest accounts, to thetaking of Porto Bello by Vice-Admiral Vernon. In thirteen letters from a gentleman to his friend. … With two maps, … The second edition London, 1740, 325. Based on information from English Short Title Catalogue. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/servlet/ECCO

²⁴ Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: Viking Penguin, 2007, 38.

²⁵ Ibid, 40.

26 For an outline of Atlantic History and the growth of it as a field see, Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005.

²⁷ For an example of this argument, see Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939, especially page 21.

²⁸ Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941, 292-299.

29 Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 296.

³⁰ Ibid, 300.

³¹ Ibid, 310.

³² Ibid, 212.

33 Sideny Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological

Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, 53.

34Ibid, 18. For other scholars who stress the importance of the heterogeneity of slave populations in general see, Philip Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments”. In Routes to Slavery: Directions, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, 122-145. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Company, 1997; and Jamaica in particular see, Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan. “The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655-1788”. William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd ser., 58, no. I (2001): 205-220.

35 Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, 12.

36 Mervyne Alleyne, The Roots of Jamaican Culture. London: Pluto Press, 1988, 23.

³⁷ Ibid.

38 For an outline of this “revisionist” approach see, Paul Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture And Religion under Slavery.” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation,II, 1 (1997).

39 For clustering see, Gwendolyn-Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005, 55-79.

40 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge,England: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 192.

41 Richard Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, 14.

⁴² Ibid, 5.

43 For a general study of the structure of Caribbean Slave societies, see Gad Heuman, “The Social Structure of the Slave Societies in the Caribbean”. In General History of the Caribbean: Volume III – The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, edited by Franklin Knight, 138-168. London: UESCO Publishing, 1997.

⁴⁴ Burton, Afro-Creole, 5.

⁴⁵ Ibid, 33-46.

46 For a succinct study into the multilayered and often confusing employment of this term, see,Carolyn Allen, “Creole: The Problem of Definition.” In Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, edited by Verene Shepherd and Glen Richards, 47-63. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002.

⁴⁷ These numbers are taken from Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 15-16.

⁴⁸ Ibid, 16.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Ibid, 17.

51 Trevor Burnard, “Not a Place for Whites? Demographic Failure and Settlement in Comparative History, Context: Jamaica, 1655-1780”. In Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: Heritage and Culture, edited by Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, 73-88. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, 80.

⁵² Ibid.

53 Richard Dunn, Moravian Missionaries at Work in a Jamaican Slave Community, 1754-1835. Minnesota: The Associates of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, 1994.

⁵⁴ Ibid, 10.

⁵⁵ Ibid, 5.

56 P.E.H Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds. Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678-1712 Two Volumes. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992, Volume 2, 552.

57 Edward Long, The history of Jamaica. Or, general survey of the antient and modern state of that island with reflections on its situation, settlements, inhabitants, … In three volumes. Illustrated with copper. . . London, 1774, Volume 2, 238.

58 This quote is taken from James Phillippo. (James Mursell). Jamaica : its past and present state- . London, 1843, 267 The Making of the Modern World. Gale 2008. Gale, Cengage Learning. York University Libraries.

<http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/servlet/MOME?af=RN&ae=U106322833&srchtp=  a&ste=14>

 

⁵⁹ Again, this is taken from James Phillippo, Jamaica: its past and present state, 268.

60 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 1982, 81.

⁶¹ Ibid, 75.

62 Robert Stewart, “A Slandered People – Views on “Negro Character” in the Mainstream Christian in

⁶³ Ibid.

Churches in Post-Emancipation Jamaica”. In Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People Diaspora, edited by Darlene Clark Hine And Jacqueline McLeod, 179-201. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999, 187-188.

64 Radcliffe’s account is taken from Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 31.

⁶⁵ Coke’s account is taken from Stewart, Three Eyes, 87.

66 James Phillippo, Jamaica : its past and present state, 290-295.

⁶⁷ Ibid, 244-45.

⁶⁸ Stewart, Three Eyes, 155-57.

69 For this interview see, Anthony Harriott, “Captured Shadows, Tongue-Tied Witnesses, ‘Compellants’ and the Courts: Obya and Social Control”. In Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, edited by Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, 115-143. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, 130-137.

70 Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in The Afro- Brazilian Candomble. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 17.

71 Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 26.

72 Paul Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora”. In Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, edited by Paul Lovejoy, 1-29. London and New York: Continuum, 2000, 8.

⁷³ Richard Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Pre-Colonial Senegambia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10.

⁷⁴ Ibid, 12.

75 Christopher DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001,

⁷⁶ Thornton, Africa and Africans, 191.

77 This list is put together from two sources: Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 24; and John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy. Oxford, England: Heinemann International, 1970, 4.

78 For the problem of essentialising, especially in terms of music, see, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993, 30-35.

⁷⁹ Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 24.

⁸⁰ John Mbiti, African Religions, 3.

81 Yacine Addoun, and Paul Lovejoy. “The Arabic Manuscript of Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu of Jamaica, c. 1823,” 2.

⁸² Ibid, 5.

⁸³ Ibid.

84 Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 58.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

86 Richard Madden, Twelve Months Residence in the West Indies, 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1837, vol. 2, 108.

⁸⁷ Gomez, Black Crescent, 58.

⁸⁸ Ibid, 59.

⁸⁹ Ibid, 54.

⁹⁰ Ibid, 59.

⁹¹ Ibid.

92 Linda Heywood and John Thornton, eds. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585 – 1660. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 170.

⁹³ Ibid, 238.

⁹⁴ Ibid, 268.

95 For more specific information on Onyame and his role in Akan religious thought see, J.B Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion. London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1944, 30-42.

⁹⁶ Decorse, Archeology of Elmina, 180.

⁹⁷ Robert Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927, 23.

⁹⁸ Decorse, Archeology of Elmina, 180.

99 J.K Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 1700-1807. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1971, 1.

100 Carl Reindorf, The History of the Gold Coast and Asante. Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1966, 19-23.

¹⁰¹ Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 5.

102 For early European exploration of the Gold Coast, see, W.E.F Ward, A History of the Gold Coast. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1948, 58-74.

¹⁰³ Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 14.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid, 19-20.

105 Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 133.

106 For the increase supply of the slaves from the Gold Coast, see also, Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, Second Edition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 58-59.

107 The historiography of the rise of the Asante is quite extensive see, for example, Walton Claridge, History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti – Volume 1. London: Frank Cass and Company, 1964 (first edition 1915), 181-208; Ellis, A.B. A History of the Gold Coast of West Africa. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898, 85-100; Wilks, Forests of Gold, 91-120; Nana Agyeman Prempeh I Otumfuo, The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country itself and Other Writings. Edited by, A. Adu Boahen, Emmanuel Akyeampong, Nancy Lawler, T.C McCaskie and Ivor Wilks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 83-113. Malcolm McLeod, The Asante. London: British Museum Publications Ltd, 1981, 9-20.

¹⁰⁸ Prempeh I, History of Ashanti Kings, 87.

¹⁰⁹ Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 33.

¹¹⁰ Claridge, History of the Gold Coast, 200-203.

¹¹¹ Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 126.

112 For the Kormantin fort see, Albert Van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco Publishing Limited, 1980, 21-23.

113 John Thornton, “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and North America and the Caribbean.” The Journal of Caribbean History 32, no.1&2, (1998), 161-162.

¹¹⁴ Ibid, 173.

¹¹⁵ Ibid.

¹¹⁶ Edward Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 445.

117 Bryan Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, .. Dublin, 1793. 2 vols, volume two, 74.

118 William Snelgrave, A New Account of some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade. London: Frank Cass & Company, 1971 (1734), 163-164.

119 Ray Key, “ ‘When I Die I shall return to my own land’: An ‘Amina’ Slave Rebellion in The Danish West Indies, 1733-34”. In The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society Ghanaian and Islamic in Honor of Ivor Wilks, edited by John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler,. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996, 163.

 

¹²⁰ This brief summation of Akan-led revolts, including the early Maroon Wars, is taken from three sources; Robert Dallas, The History of the Maroons from their Origin to the Establishment of Their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone – Volume 1. Elibron Classics Series, 2005 (1803); Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665-1740”. In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, edited by Richard Price, 242-296. New York: Anchor Books, 1973; and, Monica Schuler, “Akan Slave Rebellion in the British Caribbean”. In Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, edited by Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, 373-386. New York: The New Press, 1991.

¹²¹ Schuler, Akan Slave Rebellion, 376.

¹²² Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 260.

123 Maureen Warner-Lewis, “The Character of African-Jamaican Culture”. In Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, edited by Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, 90-91.

¹²⁴ For Tacky, see, Schuler, Akan Slave Rebellion, 378; for Akan day names see, again, Warner- Lewis, “The Character of African-Jamaican Culture,” 90-91.

125 Steeve Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760-1890. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004, 84-85.

¹²⁶ Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 470.

127 Betty Wood, “The Letters of Simon Taylor of Jamaica to Chaloner Arcedekne, 1765- 1775”. In Travel, Trade and Power in the Atlantic 1765-1884, edited by Betty Wood and Martin Lynn. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 94.

128 David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert Klein. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge, England. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

129 David Eltis and David Richardson. “The ‘West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: New Evidence of Long-Run Trends”. In Routes to Slavery: Directions, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis, and David Richardson. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Company, 1997, 20.

130 David Eltis, “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650-1865: Dimensions and Implications”. In The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, edited by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, 17-39. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, 34-35.

131 Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, 20.

¹³² Using Equiano’s narrative as a primary source for the cultural practices of the Igbo peoples during the eighteenth century has become contentious due to recent writings by Vincent Carretta. He presents evidence that Equiano was, in fact, born in South Carolina not in the hinterland of the Niger Delta as related in his narrative. I, however, follow Professor Lovejoy in believing that Equiano simply possessed too much intimate knowledge of Igbo culture for his account to be dismissed. Even if it is proven with certainty, not likely in my opinion, that Equiano was born in South Carolina, he certainly was a gifted compiler of Igbo cultural practices. He provides lucid accounts of Igbo cultural life which are, in fact, corroborated by other contemporary sources. See, Paul Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition, vol. 27, 3, 2006, 317-347.

133 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. London: Penguin Group, 2003, (1789), 53.

134 Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15^th to the 19^th Century. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004, 40-41.

135 William Beckford, A descriptive account of the island of Jamaica: with remarks upon the cultivation of the sugar-cane, … also observations and reflections upon what would probably be the consequences of an abolition of the slave-trade, and of the emancipation of the slaves. By William Beckford, Esq. … In two volumes.  , volume 2, 383.

136 Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008, 68.

¹³⁷ See for example, Phillippo’s description of the practice in the 1840s, James Phillippo, Jamaica: its past and present state, 244-45.

¹³⁸ Leslie, A new history of Jamaica, 325.

139 John Stewart, A view of the past and present state of the Island of Jamaica : with remarks on the moral and physical condition of the slaves and on the abolition of slavery in the colonies by J. Stewart. Edinburgh, 1823, 275. The Making of the Modern World. Gale 2008. Gale, Cengage Learning. York University Libraries. 05 November 2008

<http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/servlet/MOME?af=RN&ae=U104510906  &srchtp=a&ste=14>

¹⁴⁰ Ibid.

¹⁴¹ Ibid, 276.

¹⁴² Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 15.

¹⁴³ Quoted in Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade, 138.

¹⁴⁴ Ibid, 139.

¹⁴⁵ Ibid, 43.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid, 46.

¹⁴⁷ Ibid, 139.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid.

150 John Matthews, lieutenant in the Royal Navy. A voyage to the River Sierra-Leone, on the coast of Africa; containing an account of the trade and productions of the country, and of the civil and religious customs and manners of the people; in a series of letters to a friend in England. By John Matthews, … With an additional letter on the subject of the African slave trade To which are added, eight plates…. London, 1791, 122. Based on information from English Short Title Catalogue. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/servlet/ECCO

¹⁵¹ Ibid, 123.

¹⁵² Ibid.

¹⁵³ Ibid.

¹⁵⁴ Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 43.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid.

156 Hugh Crow, The Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow: The Life and Times of a Slave Trade

Captain. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007 (1830), 152.

¹⁵⁷ Ibid.

¹⁵⁸ Ibid, 155.

159 Margaret Field, Religion and Medicine of the Ga People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937, 200.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid.

¹⁶¹ Ibid.

162 James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003, 176.

¹⁶³ Ibid.

¹⁶⁴ Cavazzi’s quote is taken from Sweet, Recreating Africa, 176-178.

165 Adam Jones, ed. German Sources for West African History 1599-1669. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag Gmbh, 1983, 134.

¹⁶⁶ Ibid, 135.

¹⁶⁷ Ibid, 256.

¹⁶⁸ Ibid, 257-258.

¹⁶⁹ Ibid, 258.

170 William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, edited by J.D Fage and R.E Bradbury. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc, 1967, 226.

¹⁷¹ Ibid, 227-228.

¹⁷² Ibid, 228.

¹⁷³ Ibid, 230.

174 Hair, Jones, and Law, eds. Barbot on Guinea, Volume 2, 590.

¹⁷⁵ Rattry, Religion and Art, 167.

¹⁷⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷⁷ The following example is taken from Rattray, Religion and Art, 167-170.

¹⁷⁸ Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 152.

¹⁷⁹ Ibid, 155.

180 Selena Axelrod Winsnes, ed and translator. Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Isert’s Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia (1791). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 132.

¹⁸¹ Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 82.

182 The accounts of Cavazzi and Cortona are taken from John Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500-1700”. In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, edited by Linda Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 79.

¹⁸³ Ibid, 80.

¹⁸⁴ Ibid.

185 This quote by Laman is taken from Maureen Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2003, 144.

186 George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western African: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance From the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003, 25.

¹⁸⁷ This quote is taken from Brooks, Eurafricans, 26.

¹⁸⁸ Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade, 46.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid, 50.

190 Melville Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967 (1938), vol. 1, 352.

¹⁹¹ Ibid, 369.

192 This quote is taken from Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port” 1727-1892. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004, 89.

¹⁹³ Ibid.

194 For the use of alcohol in West African burial ceremonies and in the French and English Caribbean see, Smith, Frederick. “Spirits and Spirituality: Enslaved Persons and Alcohol in West Africa and the British and French Caribbean.” The Journal of Caribbean History 38, no.2 (2004).

¹⁹⁵ Herskovits, Dahomey, vol.2, 352.

¹⁹⁶ Ibid, 372.

197 J.H. Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1955, 19.

¹⁹⁸ Ibid, 20-21.

¹⁹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰⁰ Ibid, 31.

²⁰¹ Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 435.

²⁰² Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 145.

²⁰³ Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 69.

²⁰⁴ Ibid, 70.

²⁰⁵ Leslie, A new history of Jamaica, 324.

206 Taylor’ s account is taken from Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of Society. 1640-1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 65.

²⁰⁷ For ‘repatriation,’ see, Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 32-33; for ‘spiritual resistance’ see, Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 90.

208 Sir Hans Sloane, A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history … of the last of those islands; to which is prefix’d introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c…………………………….. Illustrated with the figures of the things describ’d, … By Hans Sloane, … In two volumes….. London, 1707-25. 2 vols, volume one, page xlix from ‘Introduction.’

209 Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. London: MacGibbon and Kee Limited, 1967, 264.

²¹⁰ Leslie, A new history of Jamaica, 324.

211 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 232-33.

²¹² Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People. 30.

²¹³ Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 435.

214 Bryan Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, .. Dublin, 1793. 2 vols, volume two, 114-117.

²¹⁵ Account of Neptune is taken from, Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 37.

216 Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, (1834), 230-234.

217 For a succinct investigation into the role of Obeah in Jamaica today, see, Anthony Harriott, “Captured Shadows, Tongue-Tied Witnesses, ‘Compellants’ and the Courts: Obya and Social Control”. In Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, edited by Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, 115-143.Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002.

218 Kenneth Bilby and Jerome Handler, “Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life.” The Journal of Caribbean History 38, no.2 (2004), 169.

²¹⁹ Ibid, 157.

220 Joseph Williams, Voodoo and Obeahs. New York: Bibliobazzar, 2007 (1932), 139-140.

²²¹ Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 188.

²²² Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 36.

²²³ Ibid.

²²⁴ Bilby and Handler, “Obeah,” 163.

²²⁵ Ibid, 164.

226 Douglas Chamber “ ‘My own nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora”. In Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis, and David Richardson. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Company, 1997, 88-89.

²²⁷ Crow, Memoirs, 145.

²²⁸ Ibid.

²²⁹ Bilby and Handler, “Obeah,” 164.

230 For the role of the Nganda see, Warner-Lewis, Central Africans, 141; and Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. London: Society for the Promotion for Christian Knowledge, 1995, 65.

²³¹ Warner-Lewis, Central Africans, 142.

²³² Ibid.

233 Selena Axelrod Winsnes, ed and translator. Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade, 128.

²³⁴ Hair, Jones, and Law, eds. Barbot on Guinea, Volume 2, 579-80.

235 Ferdinand Ludewig Romer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760), edited and translated by Selena Axelrod Winsnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 96-97.

236 The quote is taken from Rattray, Religion and Art, 23-24. For more information on the asuman and the problematic use of the term fetish, see, Robert Rattray, Ashanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, 86-91.

²³⁷ Rattray, Religion and Art, 23.

²³⁸ T.C McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante. Cambridge, England: University of Cambridge Press, 1995, 108-111.

239 John Atkins, A voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies; in His Majesty’s Ships the Swallow and Weymouth. … By John Atkins, … The second edition. London, 1737, 102.

²⁴⁰ McCaskie, State and Society, 111.

241 Jones, ed. German Sources for West African History, 165-66.

²⁴² Ibid, 164-165.

²⁴³ Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 152-53.

²⁴⁴ McCaskie, State and Society, 113.

²⁴⁵ For the training process, see, Rattray, Religion and Art, 40-47.

²⁴⁶ McCaskie, State and Society, 118.

²⁴⁷ Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 148.

248 Romer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea, 100-101.

²⁴⁹ Brooks, Eurafricans, 25.

²⁵⁰ Ibid.

²⁵¹ Warner-Lewis, Central Africans, 163-166.

252  This quote is taken from, Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House Incorporated, 1983, 117.

²⁵³ This quote is taken from, Warner-Lewis, Central Africans, 163-164.

254  For the salient role of Anoyke in the formation of the Asante nation, see: Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 160-170; Prempeh I, The History of Ashanti Kings, 85-93; McCaskie, State and Society, 129-135.

²⁵⁵ Daaku, Trade and Politics, 162-163.

²⁵⁶ Rattray, Art and Religion, 67.

²⁵⁷ McCaskie, State and Society, 131.

²⁵⁸ Winsnes, ed and translator. Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade, 128.

²⁵⁹ Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 224.

²⁶⁰ Ibid.

²⁶¹ Rattray, Religion and Art, 39.

²⁶² Ibid, 40-47.

²⁶³ For the investigation into cheating akomfo see, McCaskie, State and Society, 125.

²⁶⁴ For witchcraft in Akan societies, see Rattray, Art and Religion, 27-36. For witchcraft in Africa in general, see, Mbiti, African Religion and Philosophy, 189-198.

²⁶⁵ For witch-hunters see Rattray, Art and Religion, 30-31.

²⁶⁶ For the role of Obeah practitioners in Tacky’s Rebellion, see Long, The history of Jamaica,volume two, 450-463; Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 141-151

²⁶⁷ Leslie, A new history of Jamaica, 325.

²⁶⁸ Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 454.

²⁶⁹ Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies, volume two, 118-119.

270 This account from Thistlewood is taken from Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736-1831. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1994, 176; curiously, it is absent from Hall and Burnard.

271 William Earle, Obi or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack, edited by Srinivas Aravamudan. Toronto: Broadview Editions, 2005: Information on yaws was compiled by Aravamudan in the appendix, 160.

²⁷² Ibid.

273 Benjamin Mosely, A Treatise on Sugar. London: G.G and J. Robinson, 1799, 6.

²⁷⁴ Ibid, 8-9.

²⁷⁵ Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 423.

²⁷⁶ This account from Shipman is taken from Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 150-151.

²⁷⁷ This anti-Obeah legislation is taken from Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 37.

²⁷⁸ This Act is taken from Dallas, The History of the Maroons; see the Appendix, 292.

²⁷⁹ Quote taken from Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 150.

280 For Shipman, see Mullin, Slave Acculturation, 177; for Obeah as poison see, Peter Marsden, An account of the Island of Jamaica; with reflections on thet treatment, occupation, and provisions of the slaves. To which is added a description of the animal and vegetable predictions of the Island. By a gentleman lately resident on a plantation. Newcastle, 1788, 40.

²⁸¹ For dirt eating see, Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies, volume two, 110.

²⁸² This Quote is taken from Mullin, Michael, Slave Acculturation, 178.

283 Robert Renny, A history of Jamaica. With observations on the climate, scenery, trade, productions, is negroes, slave trade, diseases of Europeans, customs, manners and dispositions of the inhabitants. To which added, an illustration of the advantages, which are likely to result, from the abolition of the slave trade, 170.

²⁸⁴ Madden, Twelve Months, vol. 2, 74.

²⁸⁵ Long, The history of Jamaica, volume two, 415.

286 Nigel Bolland, “Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History”. In Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, edited by Verene Shepherd and Glen Richards, 15-46. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002, 34.

²⁸⁷ Ibid, 31.

288 Melville and Frances Herskovits, An Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief. New York: American

Anthropological Association, 1964. (1933), 45.

²⁸⁹ Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 42.

²⁹⁰ Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 188.

²⁹¹ Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 47.

292 Monica Schuler, Myalism and the African Religious Tradition in Jamaica”. In Africa and the

Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link, edited by Margaret Crahan and Franklin Knight. Baltimore London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, 68.

293 Schuler, “Myalism,” 69; Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 242-43.

²⁹⁴ Schuler, “Myalism,” 71.

²⁹⁵ Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 44.

²⁹⁶ Long, The history of Jamaica, 417.

²⁹⁷ Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 167.

²⁹⁸ Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 147.

299 Maureen Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2003, 190.

³⁰⁰ Ibid, 191.

301 Barrett, Soul Force, 68.

³⁰² Ibid.

303 Nana, Akua Kyerewaa Opokuwaa, The Quest for Spiritual Transformation: Introduction To Traditional Akan Religion, Rituals and Practices. New York: iUniverse, Inc, 2005, 40.

³⁰⁴ Ibid, 40-41.

³⁰⁵ Winsnes, ed and translator. Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade, 128-129.

³⁰⁶ Ibid, 130.

³⁰⁷ Ibid.

308 For a detailed investigation into the various pantheons and their gods, see Herskovits, Dahomey, vol. 2, 101-200.

309 Melville and Frances Herskovits, An Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief, 38.

³¹⁰ Ibid, 40.

³¹¹ Ibid.

³¹² Ibid, 41.

³¹³ Ibid.

³¹⁴ Ibid, 44.

³¹⁵ Ibid, 45.

³¹⁶ Ibid.

³¹⁷ Herskovits, Dahomey, vol.2, 174.

³¹⁸ Lewis, Journal, 222.

³¹⁹ Ibid, 223.

³²⁰ Ibid, 222.

³²¹ Ibid.

³²² Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 47.

³²³ Schuler, “Myalism,” 67.

³²⁴ Leslie, A new history of Jamaica, 324.

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