Religious
Cultures of the New World African Diaspora
In his
slave narrative (1789),
Olaudah Equiano remembers the role of religion
in West African cultures:
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/22.htm
Excerpts from
Slave Narratives (ed. Steven Mintz, Univ. of
Houston)
The
Life of Olaudah Equiano
In this more extensive excerpt, Equiano explains the culture of his
people
(Extract from The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself. London:
Printed for and sold by
the author, No. 10, Union-Street, Middlesex Hospital, [1789]. Vol. 1, Chapter
1, pages 4-38.
(British Library: African Collection):
http://www.bl.uk/collections/africanolaudah.html
See
also Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797):
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/Equiano.htm
In his slave
narrative (1837), Charles Ball, a slave in Western Maryland,
describes West African religious customs in burying the dead
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/23.htm
From "The African Diaspora:
Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under
Slavery"
by P.E. Lovejoy
"Enslaved Africans were victims of their predicament,
but were still agents of their own identities within the confines of slavery. As
an extensive scholarly literature now documents, slaves were often successful in
asserting their autonomy from white society and European culture."
"While many slaves were brutalized to the extent that
they died without entering into meaningful and sustainable forms of social and
cultural interaction with their compatriots, many other slaves more or less
successfully re-established communities, reformulated their sense of identity,
and reinterpreted ethnicity under slavery and freedom in the Americas."
"... [M]any slaves in the Americas, perhaps the great
majority, interpreted their lived experiences in terms of their personal
histories, as anyone would, and in that sense the African side of the Atlantic
continued to have meaning. Often slaves, former slaves, and their
descendants still regarded themselves as Africans -- in the broad sense that
they had come from Africa, no matter whether they reinterpreted that identity in
reformulated ethnic terms (Nago, Coramantee, Mandingo, Pawpaw, etc.), in
religious terms (Male/Muslim, Kongo Christian, animist), or in some other
manner. Efforts to return to Africa by boat or by joining the world
of the ancestors through suicide have special meaning in this sense. They are
perhaps the starkest examples of the continued association with Africa for some
slaves."
"For many slaves in the Americas, Africa continued to
live in their daily lives. That experience included a struggle to adapt to
slavery in the Americas and to re-interpret cultural values and religious
practices in context, but frequently maintaining a clear vision of the African
past and more than a fleeting knowledge of developments in Africa after arrival
in the Americas. Only when fresh arrivals stopped coming from a specific
homeland [i.e. from Africa] did the process of creolization
take root."
"Creolization" =
"a merger of cultures" (e.g. European and African in the New
World), which produces "a new culture and society." [See
also "Syncretism" below]
"The 'creolization' school [of the history of
the African Diaspora] emphasizes the needs of enslaved Africans to
generate defensive mechanisms to protect themselves from the arbitrary
brutality of slavery; that is 'creolization' was essentially a reaction to
slavery."
--P.E. 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).
Available: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~slavery/essays/esy9701love.html
[last accessed 21 Jan. 2002].
Note that P.E. Lovejoy, in the article which I am
quoting, critiques and complicates the dominant "creolization school"
of history of the New World African Diaspora, and identifies himself as a
"revisionist" historian who emphasizes "the maintenance of ties
with the [African] homeland."
"THE
SLAVE ASSEMBLE IN THE SWAMPS"
Peter Randolph, who grew up in slavery in Virginia,
describes the difference between the Christianity taught by white masters
and the Christianity that slaves taught to themselves (1893):
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/24.htm
"MANY
BELIEVE...IN WHAT THEY CALL CONJURATION"
In his slave narrative (1849), Henry Bibb, born in 1815 to a white father
and a slave mother
in Kentucky, describes slaves' notions of conjure that existed alongside
Christianity:
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/25.htm
Excerpts from
Slave Narratives (ed. Steven Mintz, Univ. of
Houston)
"Joyful Witnessing"
by
Carol Zaleski
Excerpts from Zaleski's Review of
Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the
African Diaspora,
by
Joseph M. Murphy
(Boston: Beacon Press).
New York Times Book Review, 16 Jan. 1994, Late ed.
The New York Times on the Web,
The New York Times Company, 1997.
“WHAT is the difference between a vodou
ceremony and a Christian church service? There are two easy answers:
one is sorcery, the other worship; one is ecstasy, the other mere decorum.
Either answer serves up our polarities neat. Take a real drink, though, and a
strange discovery is made: the spirits are mixed.
“Syncretism is
the law of religious life, especially so for descendants of the slaves who
came to the Americas from West Africa and Central Africa.
The gods of Africans, made unwelcome in their new homes, would be
worshiped under the names or in the company of Christian saints; their
presence would be known through the traditional arts of trance, healing,
sacred dance, drumming, chanting, sacrifice and divination -- as well as
through conversion, baptism and the Pentecostal phenomena.”
To make their syncretic New World religions more palatable to whites,
New World Africans emphasized the “monotheistic tendencies of traditional
African religions and harmonize[d] these tendencies with the monotheisms of
the West.”
Syncretism
= "Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief
- especially with partial success or a heterogeneous result"
--The American Heritage College Dictionary (1993 ed.).
"Joseph Murphy’s study of five
African-American religions: vodou (or voodoo) in Haiti, Candomble
in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba and the United States, Revival Zion
in Jamaica and certain black churches in the United States reveals
this syncretism at work and uncovers “the essential genius of African-American ways of
worship.” Murphy finds two
dominant themes: “that
the spirit descends on those who surrender themselves to it through music and
bodily movement; and that this work of (and for) the spirit is a potent force
for survival in the face of slavery, oppression, brutality and affliction.”
Murphy, for one, feels gratitude for this legacy of the Diasporic
Africans of the New World: "’How are we to acknowledge the freedom,
spiritual depth and energy which most of us have felt through the
syncopations, blue notes and gospel flights of African American music?
I think it is their service to the spirit which has brought the power
of that music down to us.’"
“Haitian vodou, the oldest and most maligned
of African diaspora religions, is, in Mr. Murphy's words, ‘a dance of the
spirit’ born from the resistance of African slaves to their French colonial
masters.' Among [Murphy’s]
sources is the memoir of the American dancer Katherine Dunham, who visited
Haiti during the early 1940's and recorded her own experience of initiation.
For three days, Ms. Dunham lay curled on a damp floor with other
neophytes, fasting, with her head wrapped in a poultice of ‘cornmeal,
feathers . . . blood, herbs and raw eggs’ to prepare for the approach of the
lwa (spirit). Then, with Roman Catholic prayers for an entrance
rite, the lwa was invited to possess her; she would be its ‘horse.’
By turns joyful, frightening and exhausting, this ecstatic experience
is not something one would undertake just for a thrill; its deeper value
lies in the infusion of konesans (knowledge or spiritual
insight), in the connection to the ancestral homeland and in the attainment of
healing powers, through which the initiate is enabled to serve the
community.”
“Candomble
and Santeria are like vodou in that they serve the gods (orishas)
of West African tradition in association with popularly venerated
Catholic saints, manifest the orishas through spirit-possessed dances
and harness their vital power for the benefit of the community.
With its dance courts an image of Africa in miniature, and the
authenticity of its cultic practices carefully guarded, Candomble
offers its members a sense of community centering on the recovery of African
identity and values. Santeria
("the way of the saints") gives special attention to the deep
bond between the devotee and the orisha to whose service he or she is
called -- a bond sealed by ritual and manifested by communal dance and
feasting on the food offered in sacrifice. Above all, it is in the quickening
of community life” that one sees “the spirit being ‘worked.’”
Murphy’s study of Revival Zion in
Jamaica and North American black churches, reveals different types of
“religious syncretisms, in which Protestant rather than Catholic
forms of Christianity serve as vehicles for characteristically African styles
of worship. Exit the cult of saints and sacramentals, and enter the cult of
the divine word, transmitted by Bible-centered preaching, praising, healing
and testifying. Revival
Zion, he writes, remembers Africa as the land of freedom and longs for Zion as
its perfect fulfillment. Singing biblical songs of praise and lamentation, the
children of Zion offer themselves as vessels for ecstatic possession by the
Holy Spirit, that they might journey, in the company of prophets and angels,
to the spiritual Zion whose advent is promised at the end of history.
“With the historian Eugene Genovese and the art
historian Robert Farris Thompson, Mr. Murphy discerns common themes in the African
diaspora experience throughout the hemisphere, finding affinities between orisha
worship and the black Christian spiritual traditions of the United
States. He visits a congregation
of the Church of God in Christ in Washington and sees again the working of the
spirit embodied in rhythmic song and movement, joyful witnessing and communal
solidarity, the remembrance of Africa and the eschatological dream of freedom.
Mr. Murphy says that his encounters with Santeria opened his senses to
the workings of the spirit in black North American churches, and it is a
similar opening of mind and senses that he hopes to elicit in his readers.”
Joseph
Murphy’s Working the Spirit “is a valuable guidebook to the
enduring and ever-changing African religious heritage in this hemisphere, as
well as a vivid reminder of the need for discernment of the spirit -- and
spirits -- in our midst.”
Other
sources recommended on the subject are:
Mama
Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, by Karen McCarthy Brown
The
African Religions of Brazil, a classic study by sociologist Roger
Bastide
Voudoun: The Slave Religions in America and the Diaspora
http://www.mamiwata.com/
West African Dahomean Vodoun
(Mamaissii Danzi Hounon)--presents "a positive and realistic
view of what the ancient Spiritual Tradition of what is popularly
known as 'Voodoo' really is," and seeks to
"provide to the West, a fundamental introduction to this
ancient West African tradition. I am both a Mamaissii
(Mami Wata*)
High Priestess, and Hounon of Yeveh (Dahomean) Vodoun by birth,
inheritance, initiation and training. Hence, my primary purpose
is to educate the public about this heretofore unknown aspect of
our African Traditional Spiritual heritage," and to correct
Western stereotypes. Note, too, that "we are student
friendly" and welcome serious student inquiries "in
understanding any aspect of our traditions" [email
communication with Mamaissii D. H.].
See also I is a long memoried woman: 4.
The Bloodling
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/woman4.htm
Yemanji:
var. Ymoja, one of the great goddesses of Africa,
*Mother of Waters (Mama Watta), Mother of
Gods;
As Yemanji, she is the power (orisha or orisa) of the ocean and motherhood,
strong, nurturing, creative and destructive, the ultimate manifestation of
female power:
http://www.cybercomm.net/~grandpa/ymojax.html
From "The Gods Gallery" Images (J. P. Criss):
http://www.cybercomm.net/~grandpa/chapter8.html
African Traditional Religion (maintained by Chidi Denis
Isizoh):
http://www.afrikaworld.net/afrel/
African Traditional Religions - WWW Links (Ian
Ritchie, McGill University Faculty of Religious Studies)
http://www3.sympatico.ca/ian.ritchie/AfricaLinks.htm
Religions of the World: African Religions & Their Derivatives (PorchNus)
http://members.aol.com/porchfour/religion/african.htm
"Anywhere you come
from, as long as you're a black man, you're an African."
--Peter Tosh, "Equal Rights," 1977
More on The
African Diaspora:
HUM 211 African
Timelines Part III:
African Slave Trade & European Imperialism (CE/AD 15th - early 19th
centuries):
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline3.htm
Hum 211 Course Pack
Table of Contents
for more course web resources on
The African Diaspora: Backgrounds;
Olaudah Equiano; Amistad: The True Story;
I Is a Long Memoried Woman (Introduction & Film Notes);
Religions of the New World African Diaspora; African Griots, &
more:
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/index.htm
Hum 211 Links: Diaspora
for more WWW African-Caribbean web
resources:
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/linksdiaspora.htm
HUM
211 
Open
Campus Course Information
- Winter 2002
HUM 211 Home
Page Syllabus
Course Plan
Assignments Course
Pack TV
Meetings
African
Storytelling Chinua
Achebe, Things
Fall Apart Tsitsi
Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
African Links African
Timelines: History, Orature, Literature, & Film
African
"Literary"
Map African Films
African Contexts: Film Afrique, Je Te Plumerai
Printing
Announcement Student Writing Site
Map
You are
here: Religious
Cultures of the New World African Diaspora
URL of this page:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/DiasporaReligion.htm
Last Updated: 31 March 2005
This webpage is maintained by Cora
Agatucci, Professor of English,
Humanities Department, Central
Oregon Community College
I welcome comments: cagatucci@cocc.edu
© Cora Agatucci, 1997-2002
Cora's Home Page | Current
Schedule | Cora's Classes | Copyright
| Site Map
