Mysteries and Secrets of Voodoo, Santeria, and Obeah

by Lionel

  The indigenous Cubans, led by their fearless and formidable chief, Hatuey, put up a tremendous struggle against the European invaders but were eventually defeated by superior Spanish weapon technology. One demographic estimate suggests that there were well over a million people in Cuba before the Europeans arrived. A quarter of a century later, that population was down to two thousand. Starvation and disease killed many of them. Some died of overwork in the mines. Others ended their own lives out of sheer desperation. Indigenous populations on many of the Caribbean islands fell in much the same way. This created a problem for the mine owners, plantation owners, and other slave users: without adequate manpower there was no profit to be made. They turned to importing slaves from Africa. By the middle of the sixteenth century, as many as ten thousand slaves were being brought in from Africa each year.

  British involvement led to prison fortresses being built along the African coasts so that slaves could be held there until the next slaving ship arrived. Initially, slaves were obtained from victorious local chieftains selling off their prisoners of war. As the demand increased inexorably, raiding parties went out with the sole intention of capturing slaves who would be exchanged profitably for the prestigious European goods that the victorious chieftains wanted.

  What is often referred to as the Atlantic slave trade consisted of the capture, enslavement, and shipping of perhaps as many as 40 million victims from West Africa and Central Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean islands and the Americas. Contemporary specialist historians, however, estimate the number to be less than half the earlier estimates. Academic African-American experts use the term Maafa for this wholesale tragedy. Maafa is a Kishwali word that translates as “major disaster” or “cataclysmic event.” The economic stimulus behind all this human suffering was known as the Triangular Trade — it affected millions of slaves, it lasted four centuries, and its impact affected four continents.

  In South Carolina, New England, and Virginia, the colonists were struggling to survive against hostility from the indigenous American peoples nearby. The colonists therefore needed to make treaties and alliances with them. Such treaties precluded attempting to take any of the indigenous peoples as slaves. That meant importing slaves from somewhere else.

  One side of the notorious Atlantic Triangle was the trading of goods from Europe to Africa in exchange for slaves, and it needs to be remembered that much of this trading was coercive. The African customers for European goods were only too well aware that if they failed to provide the slaves that the European traders wanted, there was a very real danger that they and their people would themselves end up chained in the hold of a European slaving ship.

  There were eight principal areas from which slaves were taken across the Atlantic to the New World on this second instalment of the triangular run. Victims were embarked in Mozambique and Madagascar; they also came from Gabon, Angola, and the Congo, while other dispatch points were Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. The Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana were used, as were Benin and Biafra.

  Having acquired the African slaves whom they wanted, the slavers set off for North and South America and the Caribbean Islands. Two out of every five slaves came from the region of West Central Africa. One in five came from Benin, and one in ten from the Gold Coast. Each of the other regions was responsible for approximately one slave out of every twenty.

  Academic analysis of the ethnic groups to which the African slaves belonged indicates that there were between forty and fifty distinct groups represented among them. Of these forty-plus groups the Chamba, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples of Nigeria were prominently represented, as were the Wolof of Senegal and the Makua of Mozambique. The Yoruba are especially significant here because of their powerful, ancient African religious traditions. Much of their ancient faith survives in Santeria.

  There are records of what were euphemistically termed “training camps” or “seasoning camps” for newly arrived slaves. The luckier slaves went straight to their new work on the plantations. Those who were put through the seasoning camps frequently died during their so-called training. In the minds of those who ran the camps, the new slaves needed to be broken in — like horses — and for the slaves this meant savage torture to ensure their future docility and obedience.

  Once the slaves were auctioned off in the New World, to start their processing in the conditioning camps, the ships were loaded with tobacco, rum, molasses, sugar, and cotton from the slave plantations and then headed back to Europe to complete the triangle. As soon as the goods were sold in European markets, the whole sordid business began again with yet another voyage to Africa to collect fresh slaves.

  Analysis of the underlying economics indicates that many of the products of the New World that were wanted in Europe simply could not be grown there. Other commodities could be grown far more cheaply in the Caribbean and the Americas than they could in Europe. The problem for the New World producers was that their harvests were very labour intensive. This labour problem was aggravated and prolonged because there were vast amounts of inexpensive land available in the Americas. When free workers arrived from Europe, they were soon able to acquire land for themselves and needed workers to develop it.

  The tragedy for Africans captured as prisoners of war or abducted on slaving raids was that if they had been allowed to remain in Africa instead of being sold to Europeans, they would have had a reasonable chance of escape. They might well have been liberated and repatriated if their own people had regained a military advantage over their opponents. In any case, the traditions associated with internal African slavery were less rigorous than those that applied in the New World. African slaves who remained in Africa were often paid a small wage and could hope eventually to buy their freedom.

  Inhabitants of the Niger valley, when captured by slavers, would be taken to the coast and sold to Europeans or exchanged for alcohol, cloth fabrics, and weapons such as muskets that would enable the African slave dealers to acquire more prisoners. It also became common practice to punish criminals by selling them as slaves, who then ended up abroad.

  One strange and interesting example of the consequences of the African slave trade and its mysterious religious impact on the New World can be traced back to Oistins, near Christchurch in Barbados, and the unsolved mystery of the Chase Elliott tomb. Excavated prior to 1724 from the coral stone of which Barbados is formed, and built of sturdy coral stone blocks above-ground, the tomb had been intended to house the body of James Waldron, a wealthy Barbadian planter. Whether he was ever buried there is a matter of conjecture, because the tomb was empty when the first of the Chase Elliott family was laid to rest there in 1807. Over the next few years, right up until 1819, the previously buried coffins were found to have been disturbed between interments.

  Every time a burial party entered to carry out a fresh interment, they would find the previously interred coffins in a state of chaotic disorder. Precautions were taken to ensure that there were no secret passages leading into the tomb through which intruders might have entered to carry out the desecrations. Sand was sprinkled on the floor to detect any footprints, flood marks, or drag marks. The big blue Devonshire marble slab that covered the tomb entrance was sealed, and on the penultimate occasion, in 1819, the governor of Barbados, Lord Combermere himself, was present and placed his official seal into the soft cement — as did a number of reputable leading citizens.

  The Chase Elliott vault on Barbados.

  A few months later, when the tomb was reopened on Combermere’s orders, the seals were all intact, and there were no marks in the sand, but the coffins were again in disorder — one of them was even reported to have been found halfway up the coral stone steps that led down from the vault.

  That was enough even for Combermere — a seasoned cavalry commander from the Peninsula Wars, where he had served with the Duke of Wellington. With the agreement of the vicar, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Orderson, all the coffins were reinterred in separate graves in the Christchurch cemetery
.

  The sinister tomb has stood empty for close on two centuries — as it was when we examined it thoroughly as part of a BBC documentary we were making on location in Barbados.

  Among the varied theories that researchers have put forward to account for the mystery of the moving coffins — several of which were lead-covered and extremely heavy — was that some form of powerful religious magic was involved: Voodoo, Santeria, Obeah, or one of the others.

  Lionel holding a small stone from the Chase vault in Barbados.

  Among those who lay in the Chase Elliott vault was Samuel Brewster, a relative of the Chase family, who had been killed during a slave revolt in Barbados. Another corpse that lay inside the vault in a wooden coffin with a lead covering was that of the notorious Colonel Chase, who had been hated and feared by his family, his servants, and his slaves alike. Very powerful emotions like the ones he aroused are believed to play a significant role in the spells, charms, prayers, and incantations of the magical mystery religions such as Santeria, Obeah, and Voodoo. There was no shortage of negative emotion between sugar planters and slaves on Barbados at the time when the coffins moved in the Chase Elliott vault. The risk of a slave revolt was high on the island because there was little or no hope of escape for slaves on Barbados.

  By contrast, for slaves who were sold to American mainland plantations some faint hope still survived. For them there was the Underground Railway — a secret system of hiding and transporting fugitives — that helped escaped slaves from the south to reach the north.

  Perhaps the best known episode of this era was John Brown’s capture of Harper’s Ferry. It was on October 16, 1859, that John Brown’s handful of men — barely twenty of them — captured the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Already deeply committed to the abolitionist cause, Brown and his men knew that weapons and ammunition would be of crucial importance if they were to succeed in what they regarded as their war against slavery. When President Washington had originally chosen Harper’s Ferry as the site of the arsenal and armoury, he had had in mind the importance of waterpower for manufacturing — and Harper’s Ferry was close to both the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers. Part of the armoury became known as John Brown’s Fort during the bitter fighting that ensued before Brown and his surviving abolitionists were killed or captured, tried, and subsequently executed. Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry became a memorably charismatic event in the war against slavery.

  Abolitionists offered the shelter of their homes, along with refreshments and money, to fugitives who were making a break for freedom. Fourteen northern states and Canada were involved in the Underground Railway, and by the middle of the nineteenth century more than three thousand freedom lovers were working to help escaped slaves. After slavery had been abolished in Canada, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act became part of legislation in the U.S.A., it was naturally to Canada that escaped slaves headed from the southern plantation states of America. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act gave bounty hunters the right to pursue runaway slaves into free areas and to abduct them back into slavery. It is greatly to the credit of Canadian captains and seamen on many of the nineteenth-century Great Lakes ships such as Phoebus, Forest Queen, and Morning Star that they would pick up fugitive slaves and take them to the safety of the Canadian side without asking for a fare.

  It is also greatly to the credit of Canadian members of the Society of Friends that they founded the Wilberforce Settlement: they bought nearly one thousand acres of land on which escaped slaves could settle. In 1851 Henry Bibb and Josiah Henson worked together to establish the Refugees’ Home Colony for escaped slaves who had managed to reach Canada.

  For this in-depth study of Santeria, Obeah, Voodoo, and the other mysterious, syncretized religions associated with them, there are seven significant points to analyze from the African slave trade from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and its consequences today.

  The first factor is that until European, Arabian, and Asian ingressions into Africa, most Africans who found themselves enslaved remained in their own vast continent. Even if escape or repatriation did not occur for them, most of them were still within their own familiar climatic and cultural environment. Although the religious beliefs of one African group might differ significantly from those of another, there was far more in common between the range of ancient African faiths than there was between any of those old indigenous religious systems and Islam or Christianity — and yet, like Islam and Christianity, the ancient African belief systems acknowledged the existence of one supreme god. Africans enslaved by a neighbouring African power had no particular reason to change their religion. One of the most important consequences of their being sold across the Atlantic was that they were under strong pressure to change — or to appear to change.

  The second point is that during slavery and its consequential hardships — often very prolonged ones — religion was a vital factor in psychological survival. Holding on to the belief that their gods would help, support, sustain, and perhaps miraculously liberate them often enabled enslaved peoples to endure their deplorable living conditions. If their ancient, traditional religions were forbidden, if mentioning an Orisha’s name in the hearing of an overseer would invite the lash or the branding iron, then the old gods in whom they still believed had to be effectively camouflaged.

  How could a traditional, ancient African god be disguised in a western Christian culture? African slaves in contact with Christianity — especially with Catholicism — soon became acquainted with an alphabet of saints, both historical and legendary. This vast array of holy men and women included Abban the hermit, Barnabas, Callistus of catacomb fame, Dagobert, Edward, Florentius, Thomas Garnet, Helen, Ignatius, Joachim, Kenelm, Laudus, Matthew, Nectan, Odilo, Philomena, Quentin, Radegund, Sexburga, Thomas, Ulric, Valentine, Withburga, Ythamar, and Zeno.

  There were, therefore, Christian saints to spare who could serve as disguises — or alter egos — for the ancient African deities that filled the memories of the slaves. These ancient gods included Elegua, Obatala, Shango, Bumba, Abassi, Eshu, Oloron, Anansi, and Yemaya — a list almost as long as the catalogue of saints. A slave beside a Cuban waterfall ostensibly praying to Saint Philomena or to Saint Jacques was in reality praying to an Orisha, or to one of his Loas, or household gods.

  The third factor is the way that the old African religious ideas were so widely disseminated as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. Caribbean slaves brought their African religion with them. Slaves in South America and the southern states of the U.S.A. brought it with them. When the Underground Railway got them out of slavery and up to Canada and the free northern states of the U.S.A. their ancient African religion travelled with them.

  Saints identified as Orishas.

  The fourth point is that all human ideas — including religious ideas — are affected by travel and exposure to other cultures. Even without the necessity to pretend to belong to a new religion while secretly holding fast to the old one, traditional belief in the gods of ancient Africa was unavoidably modified to a greater or lesser extent because the believers found themselves in a totally different environment. Different demands were placed on them by that environment, and those varied demands led to changes in their prayers and supplications to the old African gods.

  The fifth factor is the inbuilt human desire for newness, for change, for innovation. Tradition and stability have their appeal — but so does the craving for change. Scientists and inventors make new observations and they then produce new theories and technologies that harmonize with those new observations. Theologians, philosophers, and religious leaders do the same thing. Saint Paul’s theology as he travelled widely among Greeks and Romans during the first century differed significantly from the teachings and practices of Saint James and the early Jerusalem Christians. Religious leaders among the African slaves were just as dynamic and innovative in their thinking as any other theologians. Some began to question the old ways. They looked for new and different explanations for what was happen
ing to them and to the world.

  The sixth point is the heredity factor. Although family life was cruelly broken and disrupted for many of the slaves, there were nevertheless a few families that were relatively stable despite the worst that their owners could do to them. There were warmly loving slave husbands and wives, with loyal and affectionate sons and daughters to whom the old African religious ideas and traditions could safely be passed on. Down from father to son and from mother to daughter went the names and characteristics of the old African gods, and the traditional techniques of invoking their aid by prayer, worship, and sacrifice. Some escaped slaves also found loving partners from other ethnic backgrounds and in their combined families the old African beliefs tended to blend with the partner’s different faith and cultural background.

  The seventh factor — perhaps the most potent of all — is the universal human need to cope with life’s difficulties: poverty, illness, injury, unsatisfied ambition, and the deep need for purpose and self-fulfillment. For those who mingled with African slaves and their descendants, and were prepared to listen to them, there were opportunities to learn about the ways that the old African gods helped and supported their worshippers. Stories of divine intervention to bring about a desired marriage, to make crops grow, to cause rain to fall, to make the sun shine, to escape from dangerous wild beasts — or from human enemies — these all spread from their African originators to those who were prepared to listen to them. History shows repeatedly that when people are desperate enough they will try any remedy rather than no remedy. As the syncretism between Christianity and the old African faiths grew into Obeah, Santeria, and Voodoo, so increasing numbers of people with needs began to approach priests and priestesses for help.