Much of the Caribbean’s colonial history contributed to the islands’ current religious practices. Jamaica is no exception. Though originally colonized by the Spanish, who were Catholic, the British took control of Jamaica early in the island’s history. They brought Protestantism- particularly the Church of England or Anglican faith- to the islands.
Although many Irish-Catholic servants migrated to the island early in its colonial history, the importation of slaves soon overtook the usefulness of such servants. These European servants were freed after only a few years of service. The slaves were educated in the religion of their masters, which was usually Anglican. But majority of slave owners did not permit their slaves to be education in matters of religion. Many slaves, like the first generation of imports, had their own religions.
Evidence of the cultural tenacity of religious Africanism was much stronger in the slave cultures of the Caribbean and South America than on the plantations of the American South. Jamaican slaves clung to traditional beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft and sorcery.
Obean and myalism had roots among those West African traditions that stressed the dual potential of magicoreligious powers for help or harm. The obeahman or sorcerer practiced negative spiritual medicine. The myalman counteracted with positive spiritual medicine, which came through dancing and possession trances, sometimes referred to as Jamaican Cumina, an ancestral cult. Though the African gods did not survive by name in Jamaica, as they did in Haitian vaudou, enslaved Africans clung to beliefs in family spirits and “ancestral zombies”, sometimes in support of rebellion. The colonial planters and their representatives guarded against the influence of obeahmen, whose charms were said to protect insurgents from the weapons of whites.
When at any time sudden or untimely death overtakes any of their companions, they impute it to the malicious art of some practioners in Obeah, or Obi, which is a term of African origin, and signifies sorcery or witchcraft. The practice of this art has a very powerful effect on the negroes, for, in a considerable degree, it gives a bias to their general conduct, dispositions, and manners.
The professors of Obi are, and always were, natives of Africa, and none other, and they have brought the science with them from Africa to Jamaica, where it is so universally practiced.
The Jamaican planters, who always comprised a small fraction of the island’s population and who commanded few police and limited military resources, considered that the key to slave control was the planter’s own unlimited power. To this end they assumed that as owners they had to have total control of their workforce and, as assemblymen they permitted the colonial state very limited rights to make statute law regulating slave labor.
Religion was not regarded as an assistance to slave control. In the first place it interposed an authority figure with claims to supernatural powers between themselves and the slaves. Christian beliefs in England, moreover, once the Catholic Church was destroyed and Protestant sects and churches flourished, had become expressions of intellectual and class conflict rather than instruments of class cohesion, and the English Revolution had affirmed their disruptive potential. At the same time the organizational weakness of the state Anglican Church, which scarcely mustered manpower enough to serve the planter’s ritual requirements, complemented their reluctance to expose the workers to the uncertain effects of Christian instruction. By the end of the seventeenth century, the heathenness of the Africans was being used to justify their enslavement.
Citations:
Olmos, Margarite fernandez. Creole religions of the caribbean: an introduction from vodou and santeria. 2011. 22.
Sernett, Milton C. African American religious history: a documentary witness. 1993. 20-21.
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