Title: Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery
Author: Jason R. Young
Year of Publication: 2007
Thesis:
Africans used religion as a form of resistance, and the extent to which they adopted Christianity had to do with the extent to which they could attach it to their own purposes. Africans attacked the underpinnings of slavery & Christian theology by doing so.
Time:
Geography:
- Precolonial Kongo
- Lowcountry coastal GA & SC
Organization:
Acknowledgments
- Appreciation for enslaved people
- Appreciation for Sterling Stuckey (advisor)
- Also Margaret Washington & Michael Gomez
Introduction
- Important reflection and lessons on the pitfalls of oral history and making scholarship unreccognizable to the people being questioned.
- Cites David Scott on "verificationist" epistemologies
- Cites Herskovitz (against claim Africans had/retained no culture)
- Centers study of West Central Africa
- Eschews the idea of measuring "blackness" by rubric
- References Jason Roach - dissension also marks culture
- References Saidiya Hartman - culture as a "phantom limb"
- Defines the "African Atlantic"
- Argues that black history must be transnational & fluid
1. Kongo in the Lowcountry
2. Saline Sacraments, Water Ritual, and the Spirits of the Deep: Christian Conversion in Kongo and along the Sea Islands of the Deep South
*Fix/separate ch1&2 later
- Strong presence of Kongolese
- Kongolese kingship considered divinely gotten
- Stratified into nobles, villagers, slaves (war captives)
- Trade w/Portuguese in enslaved people initially modest; develops into illegal capture
- Points out prior studies relied on unique demographics of the Lowcountry
- "The prior experience and exposure of some Africans to Christianity in Kongo undoubteedly colored their interactions with Protestant missionaires in the Americas." (return to mark page)
"Afonso believed that his own adherence to the Christian faith had placed him in conflict with his father and members of the Kongo elite, noting that 'because we remaiend firm in the true faith...we were hated by the king (João I) and by the nobility of the kingdom." (return to mark page #). To me this speaks to the ways religions from foreign powers can have a divisive function, especially exacerbating existing power struggles.
- Afonso wins by divine intervention?! This sounds like similar stories in LA where the presence of a significant army is downplayed or erased.
- Points out competition by King and local spiritual leaders over religious authority/power
- 340k baptized by late 17th century
- "When translated into kiKongo, key Christian concepts took on a complexity of meaning not always understood by Christian missionaries. Itinerant Kongolese Christians, accompanied by European missionaries, traveled the countryside, translating key terms, spreading the gospel, and administering sacraments. This raises the very real possibility that communications occurred between the translator and the congregation without the knowledge of priests." (return for page #)
- Power vacuum/wars of succession after territory disputes with Portugal, he argues, partially explains desire for Christian baptism without "state-sanctioned Christianity."
- Pushes back on Thornton's interpretation of Christianity as expressing itself in more than one way by showing influence in Kongo, but that he does not pay enough attention to Kongolese religious forms.
- Also argues against the notion that missionaries were the sole arbiters of Christian conversion.
- Kampa Vita / Dona Beatriz - has religious conversion but also challenges Christian theology (argues Jesus was born locally, Mary as slave status, etc.) & criticizes church for recognizing no Black saints (demonstrates conversion as negotiation)
- See Mafuta as well.
- Section on slave trade and conversion during the Middle Passage
- Religious instruction required, but often postponed
- Salt vs. water as blessing
- Shows how SC/GA Anglican leaders saw Kongolese Christians as entirely something else.
- Conversions according to Church there were relatively small
- Builds on arguments that enslaved people in Stono Rebellion were from W. Central Africa.
- Protestants object to Catholic Church missionaries.
- Baptists highly popular among enslaved populations due to ability to congregate & use ring shout, etc.
- References Margaret Washington - emphasis on similarities in existing rituals/structures (poro/sande, for example)
- Symbolic whiteness in after death as a feature of conversion
- Factors in attraction to Protestantism: familiarity with Christian conversion among Catholics, concept of baptism (even if with water vs. salt), experiences of distress & commune w/God, Stuckey notes cross also similar to Kongolese cosmology (cycle of birth/death), Michael Gomez - baptism also allows for multiple rituals to happen @ same time --> Young gets his interpretation of the cross from Gomez - that there are more things happening at the same time w/same symbol. Had different meanings depending on where (in Kongo or Lowcountry).
- Archeology to show pottery w/crosses supporting this contention
- Enslaved people developed "praise houses"
- Notes power of religion to empower resistance.
3. Minkisi, Conjure Bags, and the African Atlantic Religious Complex
- Fetish as pejorative term but challenge to modernity
- Garcia II (Kongo king) orders minkisi eliminated as challenge to throne after Father de Geel's murder in 1661
- Important to note that nkisi can also be considered agents in their own right.
- Nailing into nkisi to discover "wrongdoers" (return to ch3 for page #)
- Slavecatchers armed with powerful nkisi.
- puncturing/cutting conjure bags also key in Lowcountry.
- Belief & use of conjure is evidence enough that W. Central Africans challenged Christian cosmologies.
4. Burial Markers and Other Remembrances of the Dead
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Type: Cultural
Methods:
Comparative method charting how Kongo dealt with slavery at the same time it charts GA & SC. This counters the tendency for Kongo to appear monolith or interpreted as fixed/ahistorical. (intro - find page later)
Sources: Slave narratives, Protestant missionary reports, Kongolese letters, anthropological studies, folklore, WPA narratives, criminal court records.
Historiography: Herskovitz, Thornton, Sweet, Margaret Washington, Thornton, Lovejoy.
Keywords:
African Atlantic
Minkisi - (also +"complex") healing/protection/funerial/attack
Nkisi - "is a ritual object invested with otherworldly power, allowing it to affect spriritual and material functions in the world." (return for page # in ch3)
nganga - spiritual leader/abilities to communicate with ancestors/understand dreams, etc.
Fetish (from feitiço-fetisso-fetish) - derogatory - see ch3
African Atlantic
African Atlantic religious complex
Themes:
tradition-inheritance-memory:
"So I return to the notion of "tradition," mentioned above, as an ongoing praxis based not only on an inheritance--that which one receives from ancestors--but also on memory--the manner in which we call upon our ancestors and put them to use in our constructions of ourselves." (intro - find page later)
Death (both real and symbolic)
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
On the positionality of the researcher:
"In the meantime, the observer maintains distance, revealing nothing of the smoke and mirrors that constitute this particular portrait. The observer transcends gender and the camera's lens, funded by the foundation." (intro - find page later)
"This project reflects my own motivations, interests, gifts and deficits, and in the midst of a narrative about brutality and resistance, racism and religion, I am left, somewhere, swirling all about it." (intro - find page later)
On transcending the verificationist epistemology (quoted in Scott):
"And suppose then that would settle the matter of our identity once and for all, to disperse with the preoccupation as a whole of finding in ourselves the authoritatie proof of an alternate authentic origin?" (intro - find page later)
On the book's purpose:
Rituals of Resistance is not aiming to authenticate black identity in the Americas but to historicize and contextualize the religions, cultural patterns, gestures, and lexical traditions that comprise the African Atlantic." (intro - find page later)
On Ways whites recognized Black citizenship:
"Indeed, some maintain that southern society recognized the slave as human "only to the degree that he is criminally culpable." (find page later)
On the Limits of Demography:
"But demography does not, in itself, resolve critical questions related to cultural formation. As units of historical analysis, demography and culture are not coterminous. One may not reduce cultural formation to a mere matter of percentages, deducing, for example, that because West-Central Africans constituted nearly one-third of the cultural elements and practices exhibited in Lowcountry black culture." (find page later)
On religious justifications for suffering:
"When Laurent de Lucques, a missionary in Kongo, came face to face with the violence of slavery in the Middle Passage, he justified the pain and suffering that he witnessed by suggesting that the victims would enjoy otherworldy redemption. In 1708, after having completed his missionary service in Kongo, de Lucques returned from Kongo to Europe via Brazil aboard a slave ship that departed from Luanda. De Lucques recalled that the ship soon assumed the appearance of a hospital. Confusion reigned on board as some slaves cried and moaned while others, at the edge of sanity, laughed. Space was so constricted in the hold of the ship that the captives could scarecely move or bring food from hand to mouth. In fact, de Lucques himself fell ill with fever during the trip and believed that his life would end at sea. He wondered whether the pains suffered by the captives would be compared best to hell or purgatory and finally settled on the latter because the many sufferings aboard ship were temporary and hell is eternal. And yet, even in the midst of such horror, de Lucques comforted hismelf and justified his faith in the notion that those who 'endure these sufferings with patience, would find the means to extirpate their sins and acquire great merits for their soul.'" (return to find page # - ch1)
On parallel arguments w/other scholars:
"Washington's central contention--that West African secret societies affected teh manner and course of religious conversion and cultural formation in the Lowcountry--is convincing, shedding light on both the long arm of Africa in the cultural formation and versatility of slaves, who so elegantly managed and manipulated certain cultural elements in a new ritual and social context. Her conclusions run parallel to my own formulations." (return for page # - ch1)
Primary source on nkisi:
The nkisi is the name of the thing we use to help a man when he is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to the leavews and medicines combined together...An nkisi is also something which hunts down illness and chanses it away from the body. It is a hiding place for people's souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life... Some people keep them in large bags. The medicines are the ingredients [of the minkisi]; their strength comes from each individually and from their being joined together." (return for page # - ch3)
Debating cultural continuities:
"...some of these oppositions have questioned the validity of any "category of collective identity in Africa" prior to the transatlantic slave trade. Ironically, this hesitation to ascribe to Africans any collective identity before slavery runs the risk of, on the one hand, combining all Africans (or at least those from Senegambia to West Central Africa most directly affected by the slave trade) into large, unwieldy "crows" or, on hte other hand, of reducing them into so many innumerable tribal parts. Neither of these depictions is accurate; both echo older notions of Africans as both generic and provincial, ubiquitous though invisible." (return to find page # in conclusion).
Notes:
Cites David Scott in the intro, pointing out the "verificationist" epistemology that led scholars to be tied up in a continuum of what extent African cultures could be authenticated during/after transatlantic traffic in human beings.
While reading the line quoted from Hartman (footnote 49) "More than this, the subjection of the slave to all whites defined his condition in civil society that the enslaved could potentially be "used and abused by all whites" it occurred to me that enslaved people, even though privately owned, were publicly subsidized.
A key tenet of Young's work is that cultural changes took place both in Kongo as well as GA & SC. I remember well assisting for a course on Colonial Africa by Apollos Nwauwa at BGSU. Students read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and had to figure out how Achebe was demonstrating that all cultures change. It's clearly working against a long-held assumption of white supremacy that I appreciated.
Look at the end of chapters for a recap of the argument & its significance/diversion from other studies (chapter 2 - see specifically paragraph beginning with "This chapter represents the first..."