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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 9
In Barbados, in Guyana, in Trinidad, in East India the ethnic Muslim is considered to have a secret weapon in the form of a leprechaun figure called 'Bacchoo' who will settle on you if you infringe any of the contractual arrangements that you have with itinerant or travelling salesmen, or if you interfere with them in any possible way. We Afro-Caribbean people believe in obeah in the Eastern Caribbean, in Cuba they believe in "Santeria", in Haiti of course the universally-known and universally-misunderstood voodoo. I have been to Haiti, I went there in 1991 for a Voodoo ceremony and I listened to the voodoo drums and it was the same drumming that we use here for the tuk band, yes the same rhythms. I went there with a friend who is now Minister of Housing. We went in 1991 for a ceremony celebrating the August 1791 slave revolt which eventuated in the emergence of Haiti as the first black republic in the region. I say that to suggest there is perhaps more mystique than magic in these African religions, more reputation that people can put the evil eye on you or that voodoo can make you into a zombie, the living dead, because dispassionate historians have found no evidence of people who were zombified. Nevertheless, I place great credence on that story about the obeah-induced murder, Alfred has debunked it and it is possible that it is just that, a story, a clever exercise by a defence lawyer to get a man off. Such is the reputed power of obeah that we can believe anything.
There is a large body of socio-cultural and socio-philosophical, socio-psychological history which suggests that Afro-Caribbean people developed their own justice system and that the notion of the intervention of the supernatural that is involved to get revenge to establish a hierarchy of beliefs, a counter set of beliefs to that of the oppressor and all of this really feeds into the obeah etc, harnessing magic to bring instant rectification, instant redress of your ills.
Obeah women in Barbados come into their own when obeah men die out; in other words, harnessing the elements in society for magical use was the reserve of a man and our anthropologists like Jerome Handler who have done research on the grave cemeteries of these obeah people find several male Obi skeletons. How do we know they are obeah persons? Their "grave goods" are more extensive and contain bone, iron and sometimes gold which indicate higher status. They are also oriented a different way from the rest of the persons who have been buried. We find too that in a conventional religion, the fundamentalist religion that developed in the 20th century in Barbados and Caribbean territories, a number of women have emerged as shepherdesses, not only of this fundamental religion, Nazarene Church but also of Baptists etc, but only after their husbands died and left them. They became more or less heir-presumptives, but not on their own did they get preference ahead of men. You still have a patriarchical system, a patriarchical hierarchy here.
We could spend an entire day talking about Barbadian religion, suffice to say that it bifurcates into two strains, one being of the pure African which is manifested in the obeah tradition which is still submerged, which is still illegal. In fact there is only one Caribbean territory in which obeah has been legalised, even 160 years after slavery, and that is Guyana, and the entire rest of the Caribbean ridiculed the Guyanese for doing that because they still associate obeah with devil worship. The other strain of our Afro-religious system is a westernised stream - Africans in Barbados belong to western religious tradition, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Moravian. We just celebrated 200 years of a church, the Sharon Moravian Church established in 1799 by some Saxon brethren, United Brethren from Germany, distinctly and almost exclusively to cater to the spiritual needs of Afro-Barbadian slaves and that has been a continuous element in our history for the last 200 years. We also go to the extreme; black Barbadians now subscribe to North American churches, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Jehovah witnesses, Salvation Army, and course the fundamentalist ones, the Baptists, the Moonies - are they here? - no! and the Worldwide Church of God. You will find black Barbadians have no discrimination where religious worship patterns and buildings are concerned because one would think that they would not become part of the Mormons or the Worldwide Church of God because the ideology of those churches is distinctly anti-black. For example the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and the Mormons have as an article of belief that blacks were created unequal to whites and that there should be no miscegenation. As you know that is what informed the Apartheid system, "there shall be no equality in church or state between black and white" so these are the churches which preach that we black people became black because we are descended from two people who indulged in incorrigible sin - Cain the world's first murderer and Ham who apparently polluted his father. In religious terms we are therefore "lesser persons" who are not of the 144,000 or the elect and the select but this is not important about African-Barbadians; they are eclectic, they are catholic, they are non-discriminatory now in their search for God, wherever he or she can be found (because my students believe that God is a woman, a woman's spirit that is). Therefore the wheel has come full circle with black Africans started out with a belief in a whole pantheon of Gods, the rivers, the trees, the fields, fertility etc and everyone was more or less a priest and could interpret God in his or her own way. Today transferred-Africans in Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean believe in all sorts and conditions of religious movements and beliefs about the same God. If you are disgruntled as a black Barbadian and displeased with your religious leader, the easiest thing now is to form your own church and utilise Afro-centred worship practices, shelter and religious emotionalism which is distinct from the sober worship practice of Europe and North America. In our fundamentalist churches a devotee testifies and screams and wails and shuts their eyes during prayers and incantations where they can express their own belief in God. Interestingly enough, African music, the same sort of rhythm which is associated with the Crop Over and the Holetown Festival and jollification and revelry, that is found more and more in our churches and not the sober organ type strains of "We thank we all our God". We have 31 versions of Protestantism here. We also have Muslims and Hindus. We have freedom of religion and this is why obeah can now easily become legitimate, so both Alfred and I will lobby so that obeah becomes decriminalised because it is a hangover of our slave experience.
Spiritual Baptists are the latest in a line of infusions into our religious body and Spiritual Baptists are extremely African in worship practice, in regalia and in music. They use a lot of drumming and African rhythms and they are decidedly African Christians. There is a lot of syncretism here. It is not a Barbadian product, it came here in 1957 from Trinidad. Baptists had been there in the post-emancipation period, because Trinidad received a lot of free Africans after 1838.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
