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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 8
Clothing styles. As I said earlier, Afro-Barbadians are least African in terms of their clothing. Much of their clothing by tradition has been cast-off garments or depending on European styles. The African kente cloth tradition died out early and much of the practice of weaving ended with the slave period which ended in Barbados in 1838. After that, social mobility, respectability and evidence that you were a Christian and not a savage were associated with wearing European clothing, the heavier the better, so woollen cloths, tweeds, serges and other heavy European cloth became the wear of the Afro-Barbadian. I went to school in the heart of the Barbadian countryside, the Lodge School, and our wear was the woollen blazer and grey flannel pants which we wore on hot days. Alfred's school, Combermere, had no blazer - it was a working class school. There is a move now that has come out of the Black Consciousness era of the 60's and 70's, a move to resuscitate, not the weaving tradition of Afro-Barbadians, but wearing the Kente cloth and other products of West Africa. The sandals made of leather (that sandal tradition never died out in Barbados) is an African practice which went through a period of slowness for 100 years during which time people in Barbados generally went for European hard shoes. However, with the rise if the Rastafari movement, who are a distinctly and obviously black-oriented and the resuscitation of leather craft, we have found African styles in sandals, in handbags and even in wear coming back into Barbados. So the African tradition is like a phoenix in Barbados, it reasserts itself in various ways and in areas where one would never expect after a time.
Moving on to religion and music, and here is the most controversial area! It is normally and universally (and I say universally) believed in the Caribbean, in Barbados, that the only contribution of the African people to Barbadian heritage was obeah which is our Eastern Caribbean equivalent of what is known as voodoo in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, and my students 18 and over believe that obeah is devil worship and that it is universally negative in its effects and its culture, manifestations and it is extremely difficult to have many Barbadians submit to rational examination of what obeah is , or even voodoo. We scholars do not use the name "voodoo", we use the African term vodun. Suffice to say that the African who came to the Caribbean was not only a sugar cultivator, yam eating, cou-cou eating person, he had a religious element in his make up as well. He brought with him certain cultural practices, the chief manifestation is ancestor worship - "Obi" and Anglicised to "obeah" is a religion of the priests, where the priest becomes not only the intermediary between the present day and the ancestor, but the priest becomes himself the object of worship, a cult more or less. So the cult of "obi" became the dominant form of African religious worship in the Caribbean, in Barbados during the slave period. The 'obeah man' if we can call him that, was faith-healer, priest, community leader, doctor, counselor; he also gave people love potions. He could use either trickery or magic to make you believe that incantations and poultices work a change in your normal life and destiny and bring back an estranged loved one, defeat a rival etc. One must say that the most pervasive African element of culture in Barbadian culture is that of obeah. It has never died out but there is no one in here, I have never found a Barbadian who knows where an obeah man is, yet it is possible for any Barbadian to find an obeah man when he/she wants one. People go straight from church on Sunday morning, having prayed to the European God for relief from internal / external pain, from the pangs of being in a love triangle to an obeah man. They have that central nervous system, that connection with Africa. They are not satisfied with praying to the European God, they find themselves on Sunday afternoon or Sunday night at the obeah man. Obeah was made illegal during the slave period in the laws of Barbados and the laws of the Caribbean, but from 1627 until the 1820's, 200 years, the African was denied the ceremony and the option of the Christian sacraments, baptism, church, marriage, Christian burial, therefore he was left in a religious no-mans's land. He was prevented from practising his own religion and yet excluded from the white man's religion. Obeah became submerged - it still is. I always tell this story: Our present Attorney General, the Government's major legal officer, when he was a practising barrister about ten years ago, he defended in the court of law a man accused of killing his wife's lover and although the gentleman was found, as the Americans say - with a smoking gun in his hand - that is, in a cane field with a knife which had his fingerprint on it and a man laying dead from knife wounds inflicted by the same knife, the man was not convicted of the capital charge of murder but was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter. How? The defence lawyer offered the argument that the man was being cuckolded or "horned" as we say in Barbados by this lover so he went to an obeah man and the obeah mantold him to bring an item of his wife's underwear, which he did. He boiled it, he did some magical formula with it and gave him to drink, and the accused said "Your honour when I drank that afterwards I did not know where I was and I next found myself in this cane field with this man dead next to me and the knife". He was acquitted of murder and convicted of the lesser charge because he said he was under the influence of obeah. And that is about ten years ago - an unlikely story but nonetheless is the pervasive and strong belief in the submerged and subterranean power of obeah which exists in all Caribbean territories and of course all people have this fear of the supernatural.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
