American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (58 page)

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Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

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Page 354
agricultural expertise, climate and transportation. How it dealt with the ongoing possibility of revolt was quite deliberate.
Every movement needs two basic conditions: circumstances and leaders. These leaders electrify the atmosphere of circumstances and fork the lightning of change. The Bolshevik theorist George V. Plekhanov called this the role of the individual in history; a voudou priest would call it the agreement to heed the conditions and plans of Ifa. Spike Lee called it doing the right thing. In Russia, Lenin became the personification of the Circumstances. In China, it was Mao; in Poland, Lech Walensa; in Iran, the Ayatollah; in Germany, Hitler; in Egypt, Moses, and so on. Who claimed the will of the slaves in the American South? Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey? Too late, as Genovese says, too little, too far out-gunned.
As any ruling order knows, the first thing you do in stifling trouble is to stifle those who would lead the trouble. Those who would lead the trouble among African slaves were the same cultural figures who had led the societies from which the slaves had come. The priests. The war against revolt was the war against voudou, and the war against voudou meant the extermination of the African priesthood. That the priests continued in another form may only have spelled the difference between victors and martyrs.
Like any religion, i.e. the agreed cultural repository of the souls of a people, voudou was the most dangerous communicative ideology imported with the slaves. In Dahomey, Benin and other kingdoms, voudou was not only a religion, it was a centuries-old organizing principle of society. Royalty drew its authority from the orisha (or whatever the spirits were known as) and from the ancestors, and it was no mortal's place to challenge that. Priests as well as kings (who were also priests) were invested with politico-organizational authority; a theocracy as "natural" as democracy would later be argued to be by bourgeoisie Europeans. In the diaspora, priests often became the only

 

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leadership element with links to the cultural traditions; they were often implicated in shipboard rebellion, and continued their roles, under extreme duress, on the plantations.
Gayraud S. Wilmore (
Black Religion and Black Radicalism
, 1972), relying on the pioneering work of the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, who through studies in Dahomey and Haiti established the link of voudou from Africa to the New World, described a typical priest-leader scenario in the slave trade:
One known source of such leaders was Dahomey, where dynastic quarrels produced persons who were then sold to white traders as slaves. Herskovits points out that the most intransigent among the people conquered by the Dahomeans were the local priests of the river cults. While compliant priests were retained in order not to incur the wrath of their gods, those who resisted, such as the priests of the river gods, were sold to the slavers and probably ended up in the New World.
Herskovits comments on the implication of this for the incipient development of resistance among the slaves: ''What indeed could have more adequately sanctioned resistance to slavery than the presence of priests who, able to assure supernatural support to leaders and followers alike, helped them fight by giving the conviction that the powers of their ancestors were aiding them in their struggle for freedom?
(p. 8)
In the Caribbean basin, notably Haiti, the conditions of rural isolation, large unit cultivation and extreme oppression noted by Genovese, Hunt, Simpson and others allowed the priest-leaders to retain considerable influencein their traditional social form. In the United States, closer socio-economic super-

 

Page 356
vision and widespread Protestant evangelism led to a transformation of the priest that would have far-reaching consequences.
Wilmore and Sterling Stuckey (
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America,
1987) were among many scholars of African-American theology who, especially 3 since the 1960s, have noted the link first publicly observed by DuBois: the priest became a preacher. "If the African religious leader was to operate in the open," observes Stuckey, "the safest cloak to hide behind was that of Christianity.... [T]his helps explain the authority of the black preacher through slavery and later" (p. 38). According to Wilmore, "the point that needs to be stressed is that the early spiritual leaders among the slaves in the West Indian and American colonies were the representatives of the traditional African religions ... the prophets and preachers who evolved out of the class of African medicine men among the slaves ... called the people to a sense of pride, solidarity and the first stirrings of resentment against slavery" (Wilmore, p. 25).
The paradox this development posed for the United States would have effects lasting past slavery or the Civil War. Two factors came into strange union. As the priests of African culture gave way to the preachers of the "invisible church," slave Christianity, the tools of knowledge of the Christianity of the masters were delivered into the minds of the slave preachers. Great evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries put tremendous pressure on white churches to extend the Gospel to the pagan slaves. According to
DeBow's Review
(January 1859, p. 118) the South under slavery Christianized five times more blacks than all the missionaries in the world, combined. Total black membership in southern Protestant churches alone climbed from 348,000 in 1847 to 465,000 in 1859, according to the pro-slavery journal, which said those figures represented only about a third of those blacks who regularly attended services. At the end of the nineteenth century, church

 

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membership climbed to 2.7 million among a total black population that had grown to 8.3 million (Stuckey, citing Albert J. Raboteau, p. 367). That increase, which was both absolute and proportional, either indicates an earlier resistance to Christianity under slavery or a gradual succumbing to cultural domination, depending on how you want to see it.
The conversions, however viewed from a marketing standpoint, created a schizophrenic spiritual debate. What about slaves once they had been Christianized? Jesus says all saved souls should be free. Did he mean slaves, too? The role of the churches splitin the North towards abolition; in the South towards rationalization of slavery within a Christian context. Ultimately this debate laid the basis for a further split, that of the Negro Church (now the Black Church) as a separate American theological movement, beginning with Richard Allen's breakway African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1816 and evolving into the rise of Black Theology in the 1960s. It also led to the permanent segregation of Christianity in Americaabout ninety percent of African-American Christians worship, by choice, in separatist congregations (Simpson, p. 313).
The more immediate effect was to create a major source of sedition. The slave preachers shared a similar agendahow to get free. There was the solution offered by the new religion, a place in heaven after a life of tribulation on earth, or there was armed struggle. The patchwork of laws restricting slave worship grew, not coincidentally, alongside that dilemma. But the brunt of the legal restrictions were aimed at limiting education and communication; difficult goals when you are also trying to teach people about the Bible. Sooner or later someone has to learn to read it. The preachers were those people, and they read the same subtext of liberation that Desmond Tutu and Bishop Romero and the Jesuits in Central America today have read. They also read the liberation polemics, such as
Walker's Appeal
, com-

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