HOWARD UNIVERSITY

Black Magic Woman: Towards a Theory of

Africana Womenʼs Resistance

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School

of

HOWARD UNIVERSITY

in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the
degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History

by

Iyelli Ichile Hanks

Washington, D.C.
May 2011
 UMI Number: 3460670

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 HOWARD UNIVERSITY
GRADUATE SCHOOL
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE

________________________________
Quito Swan, Ph.D.,
Chairperson

________________________________
Selwyn H. H. Carrington, Ph.D.

________________________________
Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Ph.D.

________________________________
Edna Medford, Ph.D.

________________________________
Emory Tolbert, Ph.D.

________________________________
Jim C. Harper, Ph.D.
Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts
Associate Professor
Department of History
North Carolina Central University

______________________________________________
Emory Tolbert, Ph. D
Dissertation Advisor

Candidate: Iyelli Marie Ichile Hanks

Date of Defense: April 14, 2011


 ii

 DEDICATION

This dissertation belongs to the Almighty, our Good Mother-Father God,

To Asaase Yaa, our Mother Earth,
To each divine elemental force,
To the ancestors, both in my direct bloodline,
and those who are venerated by the collective.

This work is dedicated to my family,

especially my beloved daughter, Amu Zora Hanks.

I have no words with which to adequately thank my mother, Gladys,

Nor my father, Felix,
Nor my sisters, Ongisa and Imbi…
but THANK YOU!!!

I will devote the rest of my life to demonstrating to you all that this struggle was worth
each minute,
Each tear,
Each cuss and scream,
Each long conversation.

To my husband, Steven, thank you for allowing me to do what I needed to do to

finish this.

I dedicate the spirit of resistance in these pages to my friends Quito, and Marcos,
and to the Cimarrones

I devote the spirit of womanhood in these pages to my Sacred Circle sisters, to

Nsaa, and to Sankofa Emma.

To Baile, Mama Fatade and the Drummers, thank you.

I thank Howard University for being my home.

I know I have forgotten to list many listeners, nurturers, protectors, advisors, etc.
who have supported me through the years.
Forgive me.

I dedicate this to YOU!!


 iii

 ABSTRACT

This study uses African sacred cultures and cosmologies as a framework with

which to reveal more about enslaved black womenʼs participation in organized

resistance. The Akan diaspora in the Americas provides a uniquely fruitful case

study, due to the fact that pre-colonial Akan culture is matrilineal, and in many

regards, matrifocal. Enslaved Akan womenʼs roles in resistance are compared with

those played by women of other and intermingled African ethnicities.

Towards the goal of excavating the stories of enslaved African women from the

margins of mainstream American history, this examination attempts to contextualize

their roles as spiritual and political leaders, based on relevant African cosmologies.

Three major aspects of womenʼs resistance emerged from the investigation: 1)

African women acted as queens and queen mothers, activated at key moments to

galvanize enslaved people seeking not only freedom, but sovereignty; 2) In maroon

communities, womenʼs maintenance of African cultural traditions, agricultural

production and motherhood made long-term settlements possible; 3) As priestesses

and “conjurers,” women attacked slaveholders with their spiritual gifts and

knowledge, in ways that were sometimes more effective than direct, military

confrontation, and were often coordinated to work in tandem with armed conflict.

A critical reading of both the primary source documentation and the historiography

of slave resistance reveals the tendency to dismiss African beliefs and practices as

superstition, to demonize them, to diminish their importance, or to ignore them


 iv

completely. Furthermore, the legal and social measures taken to eliminate African-

based spiritual traditions indicate whitesʼ belief in and fear of them. These anxieties

are not only linked to sexist, racist views of African people; most of the negative

characteristics ascribed to African spirituality originate in Euro-American folkloric

witchcraft.

Throughout the African Diaspora, black women played critical roles in organized

resistance. Indeed, in Africansʼ struggle to maintain their humanity, the presence of

women—as half of the human whole—increased the threat and revolutionary

potential of these movements.





























 v

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DISSERTATION APPROVAL SHEET…………………………………………………...ii

DEDICATION……………………………....………………………………….…..…….…iii

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………..…………………….…....iv

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………….…..vii

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................1

Methodology…………………………………………………………………..……….7
Review of Selected Literature………………………………………….…………..17

CHAPTER ONE: QUEENS, QUEEN MOTHERS AND THE QUEST FOR

SOVEREIGNTY AMONG ENSLAVED
AFRICANS……………..............................................................................................28

CHAPTER TWO: WOMEN AS NATION-BUILDERS AND WARRIORS IN

MAROON SETTLEMENTS.......................................................................................56

CHAPTER THREE: PRIESTESSES CONJURE WOMEN, AND OTHER RITUAL

EXPERTS..................................................................................................................91

CHAPTER FOUR: CRIMINALIZING AND PUNISHING THE BLACK MAGIC

WOMAN……………………………………………………………………………..…….122

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..………..145

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………..…………..169


 vi

 LIST OF FIGURES

1. Map of West Africa in the Era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade………….…15

2. Bush Negroes (Maroons), Surinam, 1839………………………………………61

3. African Slave Family, Surinam, 1770s………………………………………......74

4. A Spiritual Healer or Medicine Woman, Paramaibo, Surinam, 1839…........108

5. Treadmill, Jamaica, 1837…………………………………………………..……138


 vii

 INTRODUCTION

According to the framework outlined by Dr. Joseph E. Harris in 1982, a major

lacuna in African Diaspora studies is gender analysis. Since the 1980s, work

towards more balanced treatment of gender has gained significant momentum,

yet there are still the documentary limitations resulting from primarily privileged,

white/Arab male record-keepers who may not have viewed women, much less

black women, as historical actors significant enough to mention. A number of

scholars1 have overcome these challenges and have presented well-researched

black womenʼs histories. Yet much more work is still needed to understand

womenʼs agency and power in the African Diaspora more fully.

Another key assumption of the African Diaspora concept is that in order to

understand people in the African Diaspora, it is necessary to understand their

place of origin, in Africa. Past being a mere point of departure for the worldʼs

scattered Africans, Africa is viewed as a context for the study of black life beyond

its borders. Indeed, to some scholars, African Diaspora Studies is an extension of

African studies. Among these scholars is Africanist historian Jeanne Maddox

Toungara, who asserts that “the failure of adequate scholarly inquiry into the

African identities that formed the basis for acculturation has adversely affected


























































1
Darlene Clark Hine and Roslyn Terborg Penn come immediately to mind, as do
scholars not necessarily tied to the Academy, such as Afua Cooper, who wrote
the monograph The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery
and the Burning of Old Montreal (2007).

 1

our understanding of black womenʼs leadership roles…”2 Moreover, historical

links between women in Africa and those in the Diaspora are seldom very clearly

established. This work is specifically concerned with how African womenʼs

power and leadership roles shaped their resistance to enslavement in the

Americas.

Black womenʼs role in resistance is a relatively new field of study. The

discourse is dominated by analyses of women as food poisoners, “foot-draggers,”

sharp-tongued cussers, and baby-killers. Maureen G. Elgersmanʼs Unyielding

Spirits—a comparison of the experiences of enslaved black women in Canada

and Jamaica—also adds marronage to the categorical analyses of enslaved

womenʼs resistance, but it fails to provide much depth of understanding the roles

played by maroon women in their communities.3 This shortcoming is due in large

part to Elgersmansʼ heavy reliance on white primary source materials, which she

lists as a limitation of her study at the beginning of the book. Barbara Bush, also

a Caribbean womenʼs historian, argues that women were rendered invisible in

the historical documents due to certain gender-based cultural blindspots among

the chroniclers of slave resistance, and that “this invisibility makes it difficult to


























































2
Jeanne M. Toungara, “ʼBig Mamas and Queen Mothersʼ”: The Origins of Black
Womenʼs Leadership in the African Diaspora,” in Emerging Voices and
Paradigms: Black Womenʼs Scholarship, eds. Ida E. Jones and Elizabeth Clark-
Lewis (Washington: Association of Black Women Historians, 2008), 211.
3
Maureen Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early
Jamaica and Canada (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999).


 2

determine the true role slave women played in slave uprisings.”4 Had Bush or

Elgersman drawn more heavily upon black Caribbean or Canadian folk history, or

folklore, they would have found much more detail with which to describe maroon

womenʼs experiences, and womenʼs resistance to slavery, in general. Take for

instance, the black historical narratives, offered in the form of maroon

recollections of Queen Nanny, arguably the most well loved, popular maroon in

Jamaicaʼs history. Queen Nanny is an official National Hero(ine) of Jamaica,

venerated for being such an effective leader of a maroon society, that the British

offered her “ and the people residing with her” a peace treaty and a land patent.5

In her book, The Mother of Us All, Karla Gottlieb states, “the folklore

concerning Queen Nanny is a topic that could easily provide enough information

to fill several volumes.”6 It is surprising that Maureen Elgersman adds none of

this type of folk history to her work, and thus misses some key themes in

womenʼs resistance. A key theme in black womenʼs resistance, and one which

the black historical sources bring to the fore, is African spirituality. Queen Nanny,


























































4
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press,1990), p. 67. Bush does, however, attempt to locate
womenʼs participation in revolts, and discusses, in particular, one Joan, an
enslaved woman who is executed for participation in the 1736 Antigua uprising.
5
“Windward Treaty,” June 30, 1739, Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 137/56; and
“Land Patent to Nanny, 1740,” Patents Volume 22, Folio 15B; as reprinted in
Karla Gottlieb, “The Mother of Us All”: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the
Windward Jamaican Maroons (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000),
Appendices B and A, respectively. Nanny and the other maroon women, were
reluctant to sign these “peace” agreements, which the British designed to limit
severely the maroonsʼ autonomy.
6
Gottlieb, Mother of Us All, 67.

 3

as will be discussed in greater detail later in this paper, was more than a political

leader among the Jamaican maroons. She was an African-born “woman of

science,” a Queen mother, and a priestess. She taught her soldiers guerrilla

military tactics, but she also protected them using her metaphysical expertise.

African cultural traditions were a source of empowerment for women, in

particular, due to both the critical roles of women in the cultural institutions of pre-

colonial African societies and the limitations placed on womenʼs agency in

patriarchal, Christian Euro-American societies. More specifically, African women

were empowered by sacred knowledge. In her semiautobiographical work,

Jambalaya, African priestess Luisah Teish discusses how New Orleans Vodou,

specifically, afforded the long-time nineteenth century Voodoo Queen, Marie

Laveau, and her daughter, the type of power that dissolved the boundaries

imposed on them by virtue of their blackness and their femaleness: “The LaVeau

women stepped outside of societal “feminine” restrictions and used their power in

the political arena.”7 Even creole white women were attracted to these female-

headed Vodou houses, and were found participating in some of the rituals.

Black women maintained and/or adapted the gifts and expertise derived from

African spiritual systems to resist the oppression they faced in American slave

systems. I contend, therefore, that a deeper understanding of womenʼs power

and authority within the domains perceived as spiritual can assist in our efforts to

unpack and reformulate womenʼs leadership and resistance in the Americas.


























































7
Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Womanʼs Book of Personal Charms and
Practical Rituals (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1985), 171.

 4

Once this is done, our general understanding of resistance is more nuanced, and

comprehensive.

Still, due to the often clandestine, esoteric, and specialized nature of African

spiritual practices—especially as they were used in acts of rebellion—it is difficult

to locate primary source documentation from the perspective of the practitioners

themselves. Thus, one main question of this dissertation is “how can we uncover

more about the nature of and extent to which enslaved people in the African

Diaspora drew upon their sacred culture to liberate themselves, by a more

culturally-informed reading of the privileged white sources and historical

narratives?” Corresponding with this main question is a central goal of this

investigation: to advance the notion that the resistance of enslaved African

people was primarily grounded in African cosmologies prior to the widespread

emergence of Christian beliefs among them—to such an extent that even the

larger white society around them was acutely aware of the insurrectionary

potential of these beliefs and their corresponding practices.

Interpreting mainstream historical narratives about resistance within the

context of specific, relevant African spiritual cosmologies, or worldviews, reveals

a set of significant people, places, things and ideas that has been marginalized

by the hegemonic Euro-Christian discourse on slavery and resistance. African

priests and conjurers, for example, can then be viewed as the liberatory agents

that they often were, and not simply purveyors of superstition for personal gain. I


 5

intend to demonstrate the effectiveness of this interpretive framework by using it

to excavate womenʼs roles in resistance from the historiographical margins.

Women maintained social stability in an inherently unstable situation, by

institutionalizing the intangible cultural heritage they brought with them across the

Atlantic Ocean. The term “intangible” is useful in the sense that while actual

objects and physical structures associated with culture were not often carried

across the Atlantic in the slave ships, the beliefs, intent and meanings of cultural

practices and symbols were carried in the minds of the captives, and to whatever

extent possible, re-materialized once they reached the western shores.

Through ritual acts and responsibilities, women exerted influence over the

social and familial organization of enslaved communities and maroon

settlements. They perpetuated African systems of training, socialization and

education. They participated in intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge,

professional and spiritual mentorship, as well as political roles, all of which were

still in existence, despite slavery. They re-materialized these so-called “invisible

institutions”8 through ritual—and the adaptation of rituals—which marked out and

gave human meaning to the life cycles of enslaved people.


























































8
The phrase “invisible institutions” is a direct reference to its use by Albert J.
Raboteau, who, in his book, Slave Religion: the "Invisible Institution" in the
Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) maintains that
African sacred practices were invisible to whites, and carried out in a primarily
clandestine fashion. This statement, while somewhat accurate from the historical
perspective of whites, is totally inaccurate from the black peopleʼs point of view.
This dissertation will demonstrate that these spiritual institutions were quite
visible, central even, to people of African descent, even if they were

 6

 In terms of those cultural traditions that factored into resistance, women held

influence over rituals of distress; they facilitated spiritual practices intended for

healing the sick and injured, for protection, in preparation for warfare/conflict, and

actually to make war. Thus, when put in an African cultural and/or cosmological

context, women are revealed as key players in acts of collective and individual

resistance to enslavement, from poisoning, to providing spiritual protection for

warriors, to full participation in violent rebellion. Womenʼs unique areas of

strength and expertise arose from their potential to be mothers, their socialization

and cultural training, which by design, was complementary to the strengths

cultivated in their male counterparts. These complementary roles expressed the

ideal gender relations outlined by ancient Africans, and at their best, mirrored

what they held to be the structure of the spirit-filled universe around them.

Methodology

I find that a significant amount of detail about African spiritual practices can

be gleaned from re-interpreting documents in which African spiritual practitioners

were demonized for their “crimes” against the slaveholding society. Furthermore,

evidence of these practices can be found by taking a deductive look at the laws

that were passed against certain cultural practices among enslaved persons, as


























































misunderstood, misrepresented or purposely obscured in official Euro-American
historical records.

 7

well as the negative commentary found in the white academic and popular media

of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The difficulty here is that although conjure women, healers and priestesses

are important figures in black folk history and oral testimonies, little has been

said, at least in the United States context, about their roles in resistance. It is

widely acknowledged that formerly enslaved black people were often reluctant to

discuss resistance to slavery with white people who endeavored to collect “ex-

slave” narratives and black folklore. The exceptions to this rule are those ex-

slave narratives collected by black interviewers like Ophelia Settles Egypt, who

found the theme of resistance to slavery to be such a popular one in the

narratives she collected, that she wrote a monograph entitled “Unruly Slaves

(Fighters for Freedom).”9

These evidentiary limitations have created the opportunity for this author to

complete a project that moves beyond standard historical methodology. My

objective is to demonstrate the interdisciplinary and comparative approach that is

fundamental to the African Diaspora method outlined by Dr. Joseph E. Harris:

Primary and secondary source materials from the academic disciplines of law,

religious studies, film studies, archaeology and folklore have been incorporated

into the resulting dissertation.


























































9
Ophelia Settles Egypt, “Ophelia Settles Egypt Papers” (Washington, D.C.:
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Manuscript Division).

 8

 The first part of the study establishes three key categories of black womenʼs

spiritually-based resistance to slavery, and highlights the ways in which women

increased the threat that organized resistance posed to the institution of slavery:

1) politico-spiritual leadership as queens/ queen mothers; 2) nation-building and

warrior service in maroon societies; and 3) everyday acts of healing and harming

as priestesses and conjurers in slave societies.

First, historical anthropology is used to ascertain womenʼs roles in those

African spiritual cosmologies that found significant expression in the Americas.

Next, selected primary and secondary historical sources are interpreted from this

context, which enables me to suggest—or at least imagine—what the historical

narratives on enslaved Africansʼ resistance have often failed to provide. The idea

of African gender complementarity 10 as a top-down, cosmos-to-humankind

operational structure is explored, as it was actively constructed to facilitate

resistance movements.


























































10
Filomena Chioma Steady describes gender complementarity, in the context of
African feminism thus:

For women, the male is not ʻthe otherʼ but part of the human same.
Each gender constitutes the critical half that makes the human
whole…Each has and needs a complement, despite the
possession of unique features of its own. Sexual differences and
similarities, as well as sex roles, enhance sexual autonomy and
cooperation between women and men, rather than promote
polarization and fragmentation. Within the metaphysical realm, both
male and female principles encompass life and operate jointly to
maintain cosmological balance.

Quote found in F. Chioma Steady, “African Feminism: A Worldwide Perspective,”

in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, et al.
(Washington: Howard University Press, 1987), 8.

 9

 I conclude the work by providing a brief, yet critical examination of white

reactions to Africansʼ use of spirituality for empowerment and resistance.

European-American folklore is consulted, in order to delineate white folk beliefs

about the “supernatural,” about African people and their cultures, and about

women. My re-reading of mainstream historical sources may also reveal white

attitudes toward Africana spirituality that may not have been previously discussed

in a comprehensive fashion. What may simply be viewed as white

condescension of “primitive” African practices was based in large part on white

fear of the insurrectionary potential of these practices, as well as their association

of any non-Judeo-Christian belief systems with witchcraft.

The primary and secondary source materials are mainly published materials

available at the Library of Congress, at Howard Universityʼs Founders Library and

the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. My use of legal documents, including

laws and court records, is a means of assessing the impact that these African

practices had on their intended targets. The Library of Congress and Howard

Universityʼs Founders Library hold nearly all the published primary sources that I

have reviewed, including published collections and monographs on black folklore,

ex-slave interviews and autobiographies. These sources contain evidence of the

existence of African-based spiritual beliefs and practices among the enslaved,

including evidence of the use of these practices in resistance to slavery. At the

Library of Congress, I have collected data from runaway slave advertisements

and from major state and local newspapers.


 10

 This dissertation will also draw upon the research findings in several important

dissertations, theses and scholarly monographs, especially in the fields of

anthropology and archaeology. These archaeological investigations reveal the

presence of African religious worship, African healing traditions,11 and a host of

other spiritual practices in the United States, South America and several

Caribbean islands.12 Other important dissertation research that informs this

project is that pertaining to issues of gender as they relate to Euro-American

witchcraft. This provides a context for white attitudes towards non-Christian

spirituality, especially among women.

In a crisis situation, among people for whom spirit is an integral part of every

aspect of life and the environment,13 spiritual praxis is the first and last means of

offense (or defense). Spiritual leaders, then, would have been of perhaps even

more critical importance in the American slavery context than in Africa. Thus, one

can more easily understand the process by which sacred leaders, who may not

have been attached to the ruling classes in Africa, became the leaders in


























































11
Hamby, Erin Brooke, “The roots of healing: Archaeological and historical
investigations of African-American herbal medicine.” PhD diss., The University of
Tennessee, 2004. Proquest Dissertations and Theses.
12
Patricia Merle Samford, “Power Runs in Many Channels: Subfloor Pits and
West African-Based Spiritual Traditions in Colonial Virginia.” PhD diss.,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000. Proquest Dissertations and
Theses.
13
In Introduction to African Religions ( 2nd ed., Johannesburg: Heinemann
Publishers, Ltd., 1975), Joseph Mbiti points out that in most African languages,
there is no word for “religion,” since spirituality is incorporated into most aspects
of day-today living in African societies (see page 60).

 11

America. For example, the names of Ganga Zumba, chief of Angola Janga

(Palmares) in Brazil, and Gaspar Yanga, leader of African maroons in Mexico,

derivatives of the Bantu term nganga, or nyanga, meaning “healer” or “priest,”

indicate that it was their spiritual authority/expertise which gave them political

power in their respective African communities.

Indeed, the fear and respect evoked by the conjurer caused harsh

reactionary measures by white society, the examination of which may provide

some insight into the origins of the popular fear and negativity towards African

spiritual culture in mainstream American society, throughout the Western world,

and even in colonized Africa.

One of the main historiographical issues to be addressed in this research

is gender. Beyond the occasional scholarly treatment of poisoning, which

identifies it as a uniquely female strategy based on African womenʼs

ethnobotanical expertise and access to whitesʼ food supply, the critical

participation of women in resistance to slavery has received little scholarly

attention, much less their use of African endogenous knowledge in it. African

womenʼs cultural tools were used, often to great effect, in organized resistance

movements throughout the Americas. Indeed, this invisibility to outsiders is what

made womenʼs culture-based strategies all the more devastating to their targets.

African women suffered equally “under the lash” with their male counterparts,

and, as several important studies have shown, women faced several additional

forms of abuse due to their sex. Thus, they were at least equally as frustrated,


 12

angry and freedom-minded as their male counterparts. Of course then, women,

too, would utilize African spiritual means to defend themselves and to attack their

oppressors. As both people of African descent and as females, Black women

who used African sacred knowledge were especially targeted by an American

legal and social system heavily influenced by the seventeenth century Euro-

American witch craze. Whites considered African spiritual traditions primitive and

evil and they labeled culturally deviant or powerful women as witches. In this

context then, an African witch would have been a doubly troublesome figure.

There were several “black witches,” who posed a serious threat to slave

societies.

For the purposes of this essay, a comparison of Akan women and their

counterparts in the Diaspora provides a useful case study about womenʼs power

and ritual expertise, which connects many locales surrounding the Atlantic

Ocean. The primary reason for having made this selection is that Akan peoples,

or as they have been called in the Americas, “Koromantyns”14 have

demographical predominance in places like Jamaica and Barbados, beginning in

the early eighteenth century.


























































14
There was a wide variety of spellings of Koromantyn found throughout the
Americas, to include those spelled with a “C:” ʻCoromantyn,ʼ ʻCoromantee,ʼ
ʻCaramantee,ʼ ʻCoromantin,ʼ ʻCoromantine,ʼ as well as some spellings that begin
with a “K:” ʻKoromantee,ʼ ʻKoromantine,ʼ ʻKoromantin,ʼ and ʻKromanti,ʼ For the
purposes of this study, each quotation will retain its original spelling of the word,
and in all other text, I will use the spelling Koromantyn.


 13

 From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, the Asante Empire,

mainly composed of Akan-speaking peoples, expanded both its territory and

influence at an amazing rate, via its gold mining industry, its absorption of

smaller, neighboring groups, and its involvement in the Trans-Atlantic trade in

captive peoples. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,15

between 1650 and 1807, slave ship voyages from the Gold Coast (See Figure 1),

which carried mainly captives from Akan-influenced areas, accounted for almost

20 percent of all voyages to the British Caribbean, 10 percent of voyages to

(what would become) the United States, and 51% of all voyages to Jamaica.


























































15
David Eltis, et al. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” online. Accessed May
2nd, 2009. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces.


 14

 Figure 1.
Map of West Africa in the Era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade16


























































David Eltis, "New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Special Issue,
William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 16-17.

 15

 In Jamaica, for instance, the Akan cultural influence was and continues to be

heavy.17 Koromantyns, so called because of the African port Koromantse from

which many of them departed, had a reputation for being not only culturally

dominant, but the documentarians describe them as domineering, with respect to

other African groups in the Americas. Akan language, religious traditions, social

organization, and matrilineal familial structures have survived in places like

Jamaica until today. Besides a deep belief in the value of their own culture, which

other groups had as well, Akans show up in the historical record as “rebel slaves

par excellence,” from the Virgin Islands to Suriname, from the seventeenth

through the nineteenth century.18 These revolutionary talents are attributed to the

warrior tradition that is foundational to the Asante kingdom19 from which some of


























































17
In African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005),
historian Anne C. Bailey records quotes from several interviews with Black
residents of her home community, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica. “Interview 37” said
ʻThey say, most blacks were from the Koramantee strain—very difficult to
handle…” In a detailed, yet anonymous 1934 article “Ashanti Influence in
Jamaica,” a folklorist describes the historical cultural dominance of
“Coromantyns” among the enslaved Africans in Jamaica.
18
Monica Schuler, “Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean,” in Caribbean
Slave Society and Economy, eds. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (New
Press: New York, 1993), 374.
19
See Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, “The Romanticization of the Asante Kingdom: A
Critique,” Africana 1.2 (2008): 98. “Asante” comes from esa nte fo, which means
“the because of war people,” originally a derisive name given to Osei Tutuʼs
people, who were thought to have only united to fight other groups.


 16

the Coromantyns came, and which, during this time period, was being utilized at

an intensified level to expand the kingdom.20

The majority of this dissertation will use Akan spiritual cosmology as a

means of locating Akan womenʼs resistance in organized rebellions, marronage,

and in everyday acts of survival and resistance. It will expand the historical

narratives by seeking new insight into what black women actually did in these

three contexts, thereby giving more substance to the names of women who were

tried and executed for being a threat to slavery, but whose actions were not

deemed worthy of full documentation. In a broad sense, placing women at the

center of this analysis can enrich our understanding of the development of the

black radical tradition in the Diaspora.

Review of Selected Literature

Melville J. Herskovits was one of the first scholars to take a serious look at

African cultural practices in the African Diaspora. He and his students, including

Zora Neale Hurston, utilized folklore, dance studies, religious studies, and

ethnography to describe black Diaspora life as an extension of the African lives

that were forcibly left behind.

Black cultural historians such as Sterling Stuckey and John Blassingame

wrote the next set of foundational texts which posited that mainly African


























































20
Schuler, “Akan Slave Rebellions,” 374.

 17

worldviews informed the lives and cultural transformation of enslaved people in

America: Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black

America (1987) and The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum

South (1972). Resistance to slavery is an important theme in both books,

however, the question of African spirituality was given only slight attention.

Historian E. Franklin Frazier took a decidedly different view of African

American culture in his 1939 book, The Negro Family in the United States. He

asserted that African-Americans had been totally divested of their African culture

by the brutalities of slavery. Historian Phillip D. Morgan took a more nuanced

approach to both arguments, by comparing the cultural development of two

different enslaved communities in Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the

Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry: the Virginia Chesapeake and

the South Carolina Lowcountry (1998). He argued that as a result of the social

and economic structures of each slave society, the enslaved in the Lowcountry

maintained a significant amount of African culture, while the Chesapeake

bondspeople had become “totally” culturally assimilated and dependent on the

white slaveholders by the end of the eighteenth century. My comparison of these

two enslaved societies might yield more similarities, in terms of African cultural

retention, than Morganʼs.

In Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in

the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998), Slavery and African Ethnicity in the

Americas: Restoring the Links (2005), and Africa in America: Slave Acculturation


 18

and Resistance in the American South (1994), historians Michael Gomez and

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and to some extent, Michael Mullin, followed up with an

even closer analysis of the African societies and the ethnic groupings that

melded to create black American cultures. In Exchanging Our Country Marks,

Gomez devoted a well-organized chapter, entitled “Turning Down the Pot:

Christianity and the African-based Community,” to describing the predominance

of African spiritual sensibilities among enslaved people almost until the legal end

of slavery. The role of African spirituality in resistance was discussed in several

sections of all three books, yet it was still not the primary focus of the research.

Albert J. Raboteau initiated a major trend in Africana Studies, with his book

Slave Religion: the "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (1978). Most

studies of African spirituality in the African Diaspora had, up until that time,

focused on areas outside of the United States such as Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica,

which generated the impression that there was less of an African cultural

influence in the United States than elsewhere. Raboteauʼs analysis, however, did

much to begin the conversation about the African influences on black spirituality

in America, and the scholarship in this area has progressed steadily over the last

thirty years. Again, however, little attention was paid to this African spirituality as

a foundation for resistance to slavery.

In 2003, Yvonne Chireau moved this scholarship towards a deeper, more

comprehensive understanding of the so-called “conjure” tradition in the African

American community with her book Black Magic: Religion and the African


 19

American Conjuring Tradition, giving a solid measure of analysis to the use of

conjure in resistance to slavery. Still, Chireauʼs text displays certain general

limitations, such as a somewhat limited understanding of the influence of African

religions and scant attention paid to gender. Her analysis of conjure and its

critical role in resistance was further limited by her assertion that these practices

ended in the nineteenth century.

Chireau briefly mentions poisoning as a form of resistance, but her main

argument is that enslaved people mainly used their spiritual resources to harm

one another. Chireau makes this statement quite declaratively, yet she does not

actually support it with historical evidence. If this statement is accurate, then

more work should have been done to understand the rationale behind these

actions. Otherwise, one is left to assume that African people mainly directed their

frustrations at each other, and that either direct or indirect attacks on white

slaveholders was seldom a consideration.

In the groundbreaking, thoroughly researched tome Jesus, Jobs, and Justice:

African American Women and Religion (2010), Bettye Collier-Thomas sheds

much-needed light on the role of African-American women in religion. While her

work is monumental in its depth of research, and the connections she makes

between black womenʼs spirituality and their struggle for racial justice in the U.S.

are clear, its scope is still limited in one glaring way: Collier-Thomas does almost

no research into the African origins of black womenʼs spiritual empowerment. The

closest she comes is a brief reference to Albert Raboteauʼs “invisible institution.”


 20

Even the title points to this scholarly blind spot, which, in fairness to Dr. Collier-

Thomas, who is neither an Africanist, nor an African Diaspora scholar, is not an

area in which she has expertise. Jesus reinforces the narrow, Christian-centered

definition of the term ʻreligion.ʼ

Rebecca Hallʼs 2004 dissertation, entitled “Not Killing Me Softly: African

American Women, Slave Revolts and Historical Constructions of Racialized

Gender,” directly addresses the historical lacunae of Black womenʼs participation

in organized rebellions. She makes an important critique of the scholarly

community and its ignorance—either willful or unwitting—of womenʼs roles in

slave revolts, by identifying what she calls a “prose of passivity,” in the

historiography of slave revolts. This refers to the tendency of historians to

characterize women as non-violent, even passive, in terms of slave rebellions, in

order to “shore up” black menʼs masculinity. In their quest to dismantle the docile

“sambo” stereotype of enslaved black men, scholars impose white, middle class

gender norms of unchallenged male authority on African people, among whom

menʼs empowerment did not necessarily depend on womenʼs disempowerment.

In her words, the Prose of Passivity “deconstructs the ʻpassive negroʼ by

constructing the ʻpassive negress.ʼ”

Hallʼs methodology for locating womenʼs roles in slave revolts by using African

culture as the interpretive framework is useful. She explores African womenʼs

participation in West Central African martial traditions, and ties this, albeit

loosely, to their participation in organized movements, such as the 1712 New


 21

York Slave Revolt. Hall fails to make a direct connection between the Bantu-

speaking women in African martial arts traditions and the largely Akan-speaking

women involved in New York. I hope to build upon her idea, by making more

solid links across the Atlantic Ocean.

Another critical limitation in Hallʼs work is that her standpoint on gender and

organized resistance focuses only on direct, armed violence. Soldiers are not the

only actors in a war. I assert that attention paid to other, less militaristic forms of

resistance, based on African cultural knowledge and metaphysical practice may

reveal an even greater level of womenʼs participation than Hall might have

imagined.

Renee K. Harrisonʼs Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in

Antebellum America (2009) is another work that explores womenʼs roles in

resistance to slavery, and owing to her training in the field of theology, spirituality

is the primary focus. Harrison, however, does what other scholars have begun to

do in recent years; in her efforts to establish the link between African cultures and

those of Africans in America, she reads several and varied historical situations

through a Yoruba spiritual lens. This is problematical because although the

Yoruba share many cosmological similarities with other African ethnic groups,

they do not represent a significant segment of the enslaved population until the

nineteenth century, nor do they ever have a significant ethnic identity among

those enslaved in the U.S. The methodology of this dissertation advances the

notion that relatively specific African cultural institutions were still in operation


 22

during slavery. Although intra-African, African-Indigenous, and African-European

cultural exchanges took place, their intangible cultural heritage was the

framework by which Africans functioned, and even incorporated the cultural

practices of others. These frameworks must be reckoned with, and they can be

used to interpret the actions that Africans took to resist slavery.

The most current and relevant historical works to this investigation are The

River Flows on: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early

America (2006) by Walter Rucker, and The Akan Diaspora in the Americas

(2010) by Kwasi Konadu. Ruckerʼs text is an exploration of some of the major

American slave rebellions and the ways in which they were informed by African

culture. In fact, he asserts, as I do, that African cosmology was the foundation of

the African rebelsʼ resistance strategies, and as such, must be the foundation of

any scholarly analysis of these insurrections. Resistance is also a major theme in

Konaduʼs well-researched monograph, and he goes even deeper into the specific

Akan cosmological basis for acculturation in the Americas. He also covers a

wider geographical area than Rucker, and even gives some attention to Akan

women in American slavery-era societies. Both works, however, would have

benefitted greatly from deeper gender analysis, since, as the present study will

show, women were key participants in organized resistance.

The first chapter of this dissertation, Queens, Queen Mothers and the Quest

for Sovereignty Among Enslaved Africans, starts the examination of black

womenʼs resistance from the top, so to speak; it analyzes women who, although


 23

defined as property by slaveholding white society, were designated as queens,

queen mothers, or some other such noble status, by the enslaved African

community. The Akan case study begins with a discussion of the roles of an

Akan queen mother in eighteenth and nineteenth century Africa, followed by the

analysis of at least three Akan queen mothers found in the historical records of

American societies.

I suggest that those women who exerted significant and, to the whites,

“troubling” influence over others in their community may have held these

leadership roles, even if they did not have actual titles. The African cosmological

framework exposes and adds dimension to instances in which men and women

collaborated or shared leadership in organized insurrection. Queen mothers and

chiefs often formed an essential collaborative team, which suggests a form of

gender “complementarity” in enslaved resistance strategies—at least among the

upper ranks of the African class structures, which to some extent, still existed in

the Americas. Their presence at these critical moments signified an increased

threat to the slaveholders because by inducting a queen/queen mother, the

rebels indicated their quest not only for freedom, but also for sovereignty.

Chapter Two, Women as Nation-Builders and Warriors in Maroon

Settlements, reviews and critiques the historiography of women in maroon

societies. Primary sources on women maroons are more scarce than those of

influential enslaved women. This is primarily because women are thought to have

been infrequent maroons, and those who did find themselves in such a


 24

community were described by contemporary writers as victims of kidnapping and

quasi-slavery at the hands of their male maroon counterparts. By examining

womenʼs roles in Akan state maintenance, culture, and spiritual life, this author

attempts to imply more about what life may have been like for women in maroon

communities in which significant numbers of Akans took up residence.

Women played key roles in maintaining several key cultural institutions,

especially in those rituals that marked out the life cycle of each individual, and in

healing work. They cultivated and cooked. They also served as soldiers in the

defense of their maroon societies. Women maintained social cohesiveness and

thus the atmosphere of nationhood among the maroons. By doing all of these

things, women made long-term, or grand marronage possible, which in turn,

increased the threat that these communities posed to the system of slavery.

In the third chapter, Priestesses, Conjure Women, and Other Ritual Experts, I

look more closely at women who were not necessarily considered nobility, but

who used African sacred culture to resist slavery from within the slave labor

environment. Queens and queen mothers were called to action at certain

strategic moments, and maroon women stayed as far from the slavery

environment as possible, but conjure women and priestesses were present every

day, on farms and plantations, and in white households. They had direct, daily

access to both the enslaved and the slaveholders. Hence, their threat could be a

more immediate one.


 25

 These women have been called “obeah,” root doctors, conjurers, and

priestesses. Their spiritual gifts and skills have been deployed in both large and

small-scale acts of resistance, from conducting oaths of secrecy among rebels,

to making protective charms, to imparting their spiritual visions to guide war

strategies. Their actions were arguably more effective at eliminating white

enemies of the enslaved than organized revolts, especially through the act (art)

of poisoning.

Euro-American attitudes towards Africans and the spiritual realm ran the

gamut from those who viewed Africans as merely an ignorant, superstitious

group, to those who associated Africans with malicious magic and devil worship.

The fourth chapter, Criminalizing and Punishing the Black Magic Woman, will

explore the nature of these attitudes as they influenced enslaved women, both in

and beyond the legal system. The first segment will explore the witch craze of

seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe and America, and then relate the

folkloric beliefs about witches to the similar ideas used to describe and persecute

black women priestesses and conjurers. This negative language not only

demonized African spiritual practices, it directed considerable attention to black

women.

In Echoes of the Old Darkland, Dr. Charles Finch describes the debate

between Johann Jakob Bachofen and Cheik Anta Diop, both scholars who assert

the predominance of matriarchal systems of social organization in the ancient,

non-Western world, but who differ in the historical cultural value they place on


 26

matriarchal societies.21 While Bachofen posits that matriarchy is the earlier,

primitive system and patriarchy is the sign of a civilized, more evolved cultural

state,22 Diop offered the examples of the Cushites and Egyptians as evidence of

highly evolved, culturally sophisticated societies built on matriarchal foundations,

while advancing his “two cradle” theory of human cultural development.23

The ensuing work is a move towards refuting Bachofenʼs theory, and

supporting Diopʼs assertion that societies in which women exercise power—on

several levels—are culturally sophisticated. African women whose indigenous

cosmologies positioned them as leaders and experts increased the potency of

organized resistance to slavery. At some point, assessments such as this may

prompt the academy to re-name some of the better-known rebellions and

conspiracies after the important women leaders. This work may also add several

previously underappreciated resistance movements—those based not

necessarily on military action, but on spiritual action—to the lists of slave revolts.

The ensuing chapter focuses on womenʼs leadership in organized resistance,

as it was facilitated by political designations such as queen and queen mother.

These women leaders demonstrate the continuation of African leadership models

and the complex spiritual-political systems that factored into enslaved Africansʼ

resistance ethos.


























































21
Charles Finch, Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden
(Decatur, Georgia: Khenti, Inc., 1991), 58-59.
22
ibid., 58.
23
ibid.

 27

 CHAPTER ONE: QUEENS, QUEEN MOTHERS AND THE QUEST FOR
SOVEREIGNTY AMONG ENSLAVED AFRICANS

The African cosmological context is key to the understanding the significant

role-played by those women who were considered slaves by white society, and

queens by their own people. This chapter draws most heavily upon the Akan

example, specifically the politico-religious power exercised by women royals,

specifically the ohemaa, or queen mother. It uses an understanding of the roles

played by an ohemaa to examine how this royal spiritual status was transferred,

mainly intact, to “queens” and “queen mothers” in the Americas, who traced their

origins to these Akan societies.

African queen mothers wielded this power through ritual expertise and

endogenous knowledge. With it, they were the sign and symbol of the Africansʼ

declaration of sovereignty in American lands. In Akan societies, the queen

mother and the chief serve complementary roles. Evidence of this same

relationship between chief and queen mother is found in the slavery-era

Americas. The queen mothers in places like Jamaica and Antigua were

recognized because of their leadership in resistance movements. As advisors

and co-conspirators with male leaders, or “chiefs” of the rebellions, they served in

a number of ritual capacities: they prepared enslaved Akans for warfare, they

sometimes fought as soldiers, and were to establish the cultural and spiritual

foundation for the new Akan “nations” which were often the end goal of the

rebels. As the spiritual embodiment of her people, the keeper of the bloodlines of


 28

a given collective, the emergence of the queen mother among the enslaved was

also a symbolic declaration of their sovereignty.

The ensuing chapter will study the role of Akan queen mothers in at least four

major slave uprisings; the 1736 Antigua Conspiracy, the 1741 Negro Plot, and

Tackyʼs Revolt of 1760 (in Jamaica), and the Maroon Wars fought under the

leadership of Queen Nanny. From there, it will perform more brief explorations of

other African groups in which the “queen-among-the-enslaved” phenomenon can

be observed, and in which her spiritual role played a part in resistance

movements. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of white attempts to

proscribe certain types of gatherings of enslaved people, due to their recognition

that in these gatherings, African leadership was established and activated, often

for the purposes of rebellion.

In the cosmology of the Asante Empire, the most dominant Akan-speaking

group, women were the founders of the various Asante clans, thus beginning the

nation and each of its matrilineal kinship groups.24 In fact, in the Asante creation

mythology, a body of female ancestors are said to have come from the sky or the

earth and founded the six major towns from which the Asante believe they

originated.25 Using this and other aspects of Akan cosmology to recontextualize


























































24
J. Agyeman-Duah, recorder, Ashanti Stool Histories, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, K.
Ampom Darkwah and B.C. Obaka, eds. (Legon: University of Ghana Institute of
African Studies, 1976).
25
Ivor Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and Kingdom of Asante
(Athens, Ohio: 1993), 91.


 29

the historical narratives about slave resistance reveals the central importance of

women as political and spiritual leaders in these movements.

As the leading woman in a royal lineage, the queen mother, or ohemaa, has

a multitude of symbolic, spiritual and ritual responsibilities. The queen mother is,

therefore, frequently post-menopausal, due to menstrual taboos, which would

prevent a woman of childbearing capability from carrying out certain ritual

responsibilities of the ohemaa. She is a powerful political figure, gives the

community its chief (ohene), and subsequently advises this king. She is regarded

as the chiefʼs “mother,” though more often, she was his maternal sister, cousin or

aunt. In the instance that the chief is killed, or otherwise removed from power, the

queen mother may rule in his stead.

The Queen mother derives her power as female ruler by virtue of the critical

importance of the matri-clan in Akan social organization. In Akan societies, the

woman is the “genetically significant link between successive generations.”26 This

means that Akan peoples receive their inheritance, status, rights and

responsibilities through the blood, or mogya, of their mothers. Descent is traced

from a common female ancestress, to her daughters and to her daughterʼs

daughters, down through time. In fact, the female kinship role as sister, aunt, and

especially mother is often of more social importance than as wife, since to an


























































26
Agnes Akosua Aidoo, “Asante Queen Mothers in Government and Politics in
the Nineteenth Century,” in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, Filomena
Chioma Steady, ed. (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 65.


 30

Akan, spouses are from outside of the matrilineal, or uterine line of descent, and

thus are always outsiders.

All of the Akan-speaking groups, including those that were either colonized or

heavily influenced by the Asante Kingdom (including the Baule, the Akwamu and

the Fante) trace their ancestry and inheritance matrilineally, and recognize queen

mothers as leaders. While the queen mother provides leadership to both men

and women, and is not solely a representative of womenʼs interests at the state

level, she does symbolize the height of womenʼs influence on political matters,

and as such, regulates womenʼs affairs at the civic level.27 She is often referred

to as aberewa, “old woman,” meaning that whether she is an elderly woman or

not, she is literally “wisdom personified,” which underscores the deep level of

trust in her guidance.28

The queen mother reflects the Akan cosmology, in which Asase Yaa, the

spiritual force that manifests itself in the earth29, is a feminine deity, and is


























































27
Ibid., 65-77; Kwame Arhin, “The Political and Military Roles of Akan Women,”
in Female and Male in West Africa, Christine Oppong, ed. (London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1983), 91-98.
28
Kwame Brempong Arhin, “The Role of Yaa Asantewaa in the 1900 Asante War
of Resistance,” Le Griot, Vol. VIII (Kumasi: Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology, Department of African Studies, 2000).
29
According to Kwasi Konaduʼs Akan informants, Asaase Ya literally means “one
who supports all creation on its shoulders and does not become exhausted.” See
Konadu, Kwasi. “Concepts of Medicine as Interpreted by Akan Healers and
Indigenous Knowledge Archives Among the Bono-Takyiman of Ghana, West
Africa: A Case Study.” PhD diss., Howard University, 2004, p. 47. Proquest
Dissertations and Theses.


 31

second only to Nyame, the Supreme Being, in power. From the top of their

spiritual hierarchy to their political one, the Akans, like many other pre-colonial

African societies, was a theocracy, a state in which the Divine, or divinities are

considered the true rulers, the law-givers, and the models for social organization.

This is why in many societies, the ruling class is either directly linked with the

priesthood, or heavily influenced by it.

It is understood that each chief in Asante had his own head priest, or okomfo,

as did each military fighting unit and clan. What is less often acknowledged is

that each chief also shared leadership with a queen mother. As

folklorist/ethnographer Beverly J. Stoeltje explains,

Each political unit in this (Asante) matrilineal society has not only a
chief but a queen mother also. One does not exist without the other.
The queen mother has responsibilities for women and domestic
affairs and for advising the chief in all matters. The duties of the
queen mother and the chief differ, but they function in parallel. As a
duality, they are expected to consult regularly, even daily, and to
cooperate in their leadership, acting always in the best interest of
the community they represent. The queen mother and chief
constitute a unit…Asante queen mothers can be understood most
effectively through the concept of gender parallelism in which
leadership is dual.30

Along with the queen mother and the chief, there is the council of state/elders,

which adds yet another representative body to balance out the governmental


























































30
Beverly J. Stoeltje. “Asante Queen Mothers: A Study in Female Authority,” in
Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and Power: Case Studies in African
Gender, Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan, ed. (New York: New York Academy of
Sciences, 1997), 43.


 32

structure. The Akan have enshrined this belief in pluralistic, democratic

leadership in a kente cloth pattern called Obakofo mmu oman, which depicts the

maxim: “One person does not rule a nation.”31

A fruitful example of this gender complementarity in Akan leadership is found

in the case of the 1736 “Intended Conspiracy” in Antigua, which was said to have

been mainly orchestrated by enslaved Akans, called “Coromantees,” in this

particular context.32 The leader, or chief of the alleged plot was a man named

Court, also called Tackey, which may be a corruption of the word “Kwatakye,”

which means a brave, valiant person.33 The record asserts that this conspiracy

was a joint effort between enslaved Akans and creoles, who planned to blow up

the white attendees at a ball, taking place in the capital city of St. Johnʼs.

According to the testimony of an enslaved Akan named Quamina, Court

frequently visited an old woman named Queen. He brought her goods to sell for

him, and upon the suppression of the revolt, when Court realized he would be put

to death, he sent word to Queen that she might keep all of his possessions.

David Barry Gaspar pointed out in a 1978 article on the Antigua Conspiracy that


























































31
“Akan Kente Cloths and Motifs,” Akan Cultural Symbols Project online,
conducted by G. F. Kojo Arthur and Robert Rowe, 1998. Accessed, May 2nd,
2009. http://www.marshall.edu/akanart/KENTECLOTH_SAMPLES.HTML .
32
The primary source used in studies of this conspiracy is A Genuine Narrative
of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua, a collection of trial records
compiled by one of the judges, who tried the suspected rebels. A Genuine
Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua. 1737, (Dublin;
reprinted in New York: Ayer Co. Publishers, 1972).
33
J. B. Danquah. The Akan Doctrine of God (London: Cass, 1968), 93.


 33

women seemed “willing to fight in the revolt,” and that there were women in

attendance at gatherings held by conspirators.” By 1998, he had turned more

attention to the role of women in this plot, and suggests that Queen was acting as

the queen mother to Courtʼs chiefdom. In an effort to take Gasparʼs suggestion

to the level of a strong and detailed probability, giving more value to the

participation of women, the relationship between Court, Queen, and the revolt,

must be grounded more solidly in an Akan cultural framework.

Beyond the trade relationship, which identifies Queen as a marketwoman in

true West African tradition, these visits with Court may have been time spent in

consultation. As a queen mother, she would have been Courtʼs main advisor,

educating him in Akan tradition, guiding his leadership, planning the rebellion,

and preparing the Akan community for its sovereignty. Ultimately, this revolt was

thwarted by the colonial militia, and resulted in a large number of the accused

being sentenced to death, while others were sentenced to transportation to the

colony of New York.

At least one of these same Antiguan transportees, a man named Will,

resurfaced later, as a participant in the 1741 Negro Conspiracy. Many of these

rebels bore Akan day names, as did their New York predecessors in the 1712

revolt,34 and their Antiguan counterparts. With this African ethnic element among


























































34
The historical documents from the 1712 revolt do not give special attention to
any particular woman who stands out as a leader, although there were definitely
women participants. Still, the present analysis contends that there was likely at
least one functional queen mother involved, especially due to the important
unifying role of “Koromantyn” ethnic identity in the execution of this rebellion.

 34

the New York rebels, then, we might be able to contextualize the participation of

the lone female convicted among them, a woman named Sarah. As one of the

chief justices of the supreme court of the New York province who presided over

the cases of the conspirators, Daniel Horsmanden provided the most

contemporary source on the 1741 conspiracy. In Horsmandenʼs Journal of the

Proceedings Against the Conspirators, at New-York in 1741 (1810), he describes

a woman named Sarah as “one of the oddest animals amongst the black

confederates, and gave the most trouble in her examinations; a creature of an

outrageous spirit.”35 During questioning, Sarah was forced, on pain of death, to

confess to having been involved with the conspiracy. She was told that there was

a significant amount of “positive evidence” that would not only prove her

attendance at one of two major rebel meetings, but “…that she was one

consenting and advising thereto.” 36 A young man named Sawney, or Sandy,

testified that he was brought to the house of a Mr. Comfort, and led in by

Comfortʼs servant, Jack. There were approximately twenty black people in

attendance, and Sarah was the only woman among them. Sandy was asked to

help them burn down white homes and establishments, and when he refused, it

was Sarah who spoke first, and “swore at him.”37 The rebels then took out knives,


























































35
Daniel Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings Against the Conspirators, at
New-York in 1741 (New-York: Southwick & Pelsue, 1810), 106.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 78.

 35

whetted them, pointed out that they were “sharp enough to cut the white menʼs

heads off,”38 and used them to threaten Sandy. Sarah spoke again. Sandy claims

that she recommended that his head be cut off if he did not participate in the

rebellion. Another man, Bastian says that Sarah scolded Sandy for speaking

“impudently” to “Captain Jack,” and that he “deserved to have his head cut off.”39

Jack even confessed that Sarah “made” Sandy drink the oath to which

everyone present was being sworn.40 In the end, Sandy agreed to set fire to the

Slip Market. Sarah obviously held the floor and the respect of all of the men

gathered at Comfortʼs house that evening. She even scolded young Sandy for

disrespecting the other leader, Jack, whom she referred to as “Captain.” This

same military rank and title is found among Akan maroon leaders, such as

Captain Leonard Parkinson, and Captain Cudjoe of the Jamaican maroons. The

statements about the meeting at Comfortʼs house suggest that Sarah and

Captain Jack shared leadership. When read within the cultural context of the

Akans involved, Sarah and Jack indicate the Akan queen mother-chief power

structure, operating at the heart of the New York Conspiracy. If leadership in

African resistance movements is viewed as gender-balanced co-leadership, then

perhaps several—if not all—of the titles given to revolts and conspiracies among

the enslaved should be changed.


























































38
Ibid., 166.
39
Ibid., 166.
40
Ibid., 132.

 36

 Another, only slightly more substantive example would be from Jamaica. A

woman named Abena, also sometimes called Cubah, was known as the “Queen

of Kingston.” In Jamaica in 1760, a major uprising of nearly all of the islandʼs

enslaved “Koromantyn” Africans was to take place throughout at least six

parishes. Their leader was a man also called “Tacky,” and their goal was to seize

the entire island from their oppressors. As a queen mother, Abena/Cubah would

have been a key strategist in this rebellion:

Cubah, a female slave who belonged to a Jewess of Kingston was

prominent among the plotters. She was crowned ʻQueen of
Kingstonʼ and was probably expected to perform the functions of a
traditional West African Queen Mother. She presided in state under
a canopy with a robe around her shoulders and a crown on her
head. At the time when the plot was discovered, a wooden sword
was also found, with a red feather stuck into the handle, symbolic
no doubt, of the blow to be struck for freedom. 41

Cubah has become a popular anecdote in historical writings about gender and

slave resistance movements in the Caribbean. Several researchers have looked

at Edward Longʼs description of this woman, each from a slightly different

perspective. At times, Cubah provides an example of a heroine, whose

leadership—as demonstrated through elaborate ritual—was central to the


























































41
Lucille Mathurin Mair, “The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies During
Slavery” in Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds., Caribbean Slavery
in the Atlantic World: A student reader (Kingston: Randle Publishers, Ltd., 2000),
993. Mair paraphrases the description of Cubah originally reported by Edward
Long in his book, The History of Jamaica: Vol. II (London: T. Lowndes, 1774),
455.


 37

rebellion. At other times, she is depicted as a mere figurehead, a woman in a

costume who shares delusions of grandeur with those enslaved people who

“crowned” her. Cubah was repeatedly told to stop her “charade” by colonial

authorities, yet she kept making these appearances as “queen”: she was seated

“in state,” with a canopy of some sort over her head. This is the same type of

arrangement in which Court of the Antiguan rebellion would sometimes appear.

The seating of Akan royalty on “stools” when presiding over matters of state is

still an essential practice today. When a new king is named, the ceremony is

called an “enstoolment,” rather than a coronation, although kings and queens

may still wear special adornments on their heads. It is seated in state and

wearing a crown that we find Cubah, on the eve of revolt in Jamaica.

As for the wooden sword of state, with a red feather attached to its handle,

both Steeve O. Buckley42 and Lucille Mathurin Mair infer that this red feather

represents the fight for freedom, and in terms of Akan color symbolism, they are

not far from the mark. The color red is a symbol of blood and warfare, made

particularly emphatic by being attached to a wooden sword. Court also carried a

saber with a red scabbard, and dressed in what was described as the clothing

appropriate for “Coromantine rites performed when a king had resolved upon

war.”43 Yaa Asantewaa, an Akan queen mother in Asante, who led soldiers


























































42
Steeve O. Buckley. The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accomodation in
Jamaica, 1760-1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 85.
43
Bush, Slave Women, 72-73.


 38

against the British during the Asante Wars in Africa more than 100 years after

Cubah, is remembered in praise songs as having carried both a gun and a sword

of state.44

Buckley comes the closest to providing an explanation of Cubahʼs significance

as a Queen Mother, from the perspective of the Akan rebels, during a critique of

Edward Longʼs narrative. He reasons that Longʼs dismissal of Cubah as

“peculiar” is a reflection of both his own prejudices and of colonial societyʼs

inability to accept or acknowledge the role women played in resistance. Buckley

goes on to state that although Cubah was probably viewed as a “mere

figurehead, or a carnivalesque caricature and an object of ridicule” by the white

community, she was a symbol of “hope and unity” in the eyes of her own people.

He concludes that Cubahʼs status as queen indicates that she had created an

“African-style kingdom under the jurisdiction of an African-style aristocracy.45

Cubah lived as the servant of a Jewish woman in the city of Kingston. It is

speculated that belonging to a Jewish person is what allowed her the “freedom”

to act in the capacity of a queen. Edward Long alleges that the Jews and the

insurgent Africans had come to some sort of agreement in which the Jews would

have a secure place in the newly formed Akan society after the revolution.46


























































44
Sandra M. Grayson, Symbolizing the Past: Reading Sankofa, Daughters of the
Dust and Eveʼs Bayou as Histories (Lanham, Maryland: University of America
Press, 2000), 33.
45
Buckley, Language of Dress, 84.
46
Long, History of Jamaica, 455.

 39

Whether this is true or not, Cubahʼs location in the capital city is of note. It is the

strategy of any group involved in war to “capture the flag,” so to speak, to take

over a nation by first taking over its headquarters. If Cubah was in fact, the

Queen Mother in Kingston, then she was probably the most important African

woman on the island.

Michael Gomez mentions a woman named “Abena,” who presides as Queen

Mother in Jamaica during the same year, which may mean that Abena and

Cubah is the same woman. Both names come from Akan day-names, perhaps

corruptions of the name “Cobena” or “Kwabena.” Otherwise, both Abena and

Cubah may have been queen mothers, each presiding over a different parish,

and playing an essential role in steering a major revolt.

What then, is the significance of Cubah, queen mother of Kingston? Feminist

scholars present her story as an example of a woman who defied her

subordinate status as both a slave and a woman by assuming a leadership role

typically reserved for men. While her activities did require a great deal of

courage, this perspective on her life is based on a reading of the historical “text”

from a Western, patriarchal perspective. From the perspective of the Akans

themselves, Cubahʼs role as a leader is natural; it demonstrates the equal, if not

central role that women have always played in Akan leadership, and the

perpetuation of this political structure in the Americas. Indeed, several other




























































 40

women served in Tackyʼs War in actual combat positions, though none were

given significant treatment in the trial records.

Interestingly, Cubahʼs exile and secret return to the island may also provide

some clues about the magnitude of her role in this situation. The only crime that

has been insinuated in the documents was her “charades” as a queen in state,

which were possibly interpreted as a public disturbance. Consequently, Cubah

was sentenced to permanent transportation from Jamaica. The severity of the

punishment for what, on the surface, seems to be such a light offense calls

attention to the perceived threat that was associated with African customs. Soon

after being taken away on a ship, Cubah convinced the captain of the ship to

smuggle her back into the island, being dropped off on the Leeward side of the

island. How did an enslaved African, recently convicted and sentenced for a

crime, negotiate such a favor?

Unfortunately, the implication that there was some sort of sexual exchange

between Cubah and the sailor has been made, and cannot, at this point, be ruled

out as a possibility. Still, considering the prevailing opinion that sailors were pure

mercenaries who were only loyal to the party that paid more, it is more likely that

Cubah found a way to pay for her transportation back to Jamaica. If returning to

the island meant risking death if she was caught, what would bring Cubah back?

Why would her return be so dangerous as to warrant her execution? This

question lays bare the fact that belief in the authority of African spiritual and

political leadership extended into the white population as well. Their belief in


 41

Cubahʼs power and influence among the enslaved population caused them to

view her as a menace, and this fear led them to put her to death. Perhaps the

white planters and historians of the time even understood that because Cubah

was a queen mother, the rebellion would not continue in any fashion in her

absence. Conversely, Cubah had everything to gain if somehow she could get

back to the island and the struggle of Tacky and the rebels was successfully won.

They assassinated her.

Although traditionally, Akan women are excluded from actual military service

due to menstruation taboos, there were at least a few Akan queen mothers, like

Yaa Asantewaa, who fought after they had reached menopause. On the

American side, there is the most well known “American” queen mother: Queen

Nanny.

This powerful obeah47 and skilled war strategist led the Windward Maroons in

the First Maroon War (1724-1739) against the British. She was said to be able to

catch bullets between her hands, legs and buttocks, and produce magical

charms that could render her soldiers invincible.48 It makes sense that Nanny and

other spiritual specialists could be found in abundance in the Americas, due to


























































47
Thought to be a word derived from the Twi word “obayifo,” which refers to a
male or female sorcerer, or witch, obeah is a term used throughout the British
Caribbean to identify individuals who employ African-based medicinal, religious,
and mystical practices to heal, harm, protect or instruct others.
48
Walter C. Rucker. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity
Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2007), 40-41.


 42

the fact that a priest or priestess on the battlefield attended each military unit.49 A

significant number of these priests may have ended up as prisoners of war and

eventually as captives transported across the ocean. From the rebelsʼ

perspective, then, had Nanny not been able to demonstrate, on some level, her

ritual expertise and spiritual authority, they would not have followed her into

battle.

Like Cubah, Nanny fits the description of a queen mother, having carried all of

the key responsibilities and qualities ascribed to the ohemaa. She is further

validated as a queen mother by the fact that she is considered the ancestral

mother of all maroons in Jamaica today. Her name may be a combination of the

two Akan terms, nana, a gender-neutral honorific title given to “chiefs, spiritual

leaders and elderly women,” and ni, meaning “first mother.” 50

Nanny is said to have actually chosen to travel across the Atlantic Ocean, so

that she could free her people from bondage. She came with her sister, Sekesu,

who remained in slavery. Sekesu is considered the maternal ancestress of those

Jamaicans who remained enslaved, those whom some maroons call niega.51

Other renditions of Nannyʼs story tell of her arrival in Jamaica with several


























































49
Willem Bosman. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea,
Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts (1705; reprint, London: J.
Knapton, D. Midwinter, B. Lintot, G. Strahan, J. Rand, E. Bell, 1721), 155-156.
50
Karla Gottlieb, The Mother of Us All: A History of Nanny, Leader of the
Windward Jamaican Maroons (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2000),
24.
51
Gottlieb. Mother of Us All.


 43

brothers, each intending to fulfill a mission of establishing a free nation among

their people in the “New World.” In fact, if this were the case, Nanny may have

been the attendant queen mother to each of her brothers, each of whom is said

to have established a maroon community in the mountains.

Folk historical accounts of her origins link Nanny most closely with a man

named “Cudjoe,” or Kojo--also an Akan name—either as his wife or sister. Within

her own community, however, she is said to have collaborated frequently with a

man named Quao (an Akan name, Kwao). This collaboration may indicate this

same queen mother-chief dyad, or it may simply indicate a royal clan re-

establishing its traditional status in a new place. With this understanding of the

symbiotic relationship between an Akan chief and a queen mother, one should

consider that there was at least one woman involved in every Akan revolt in the

Americas. In fact, this notion is further supported by the maroon leaders, Claire

and Copena—probably from the Akan name, Kwabena—a woman and a man

who led an uprising together, in French Guiana in 1748.52

Nannyʼs story is preserved in the collective memory of her “children,” the

Leeward Maroons. While the maroon community has been accused of

maintaining and propagating a “useable” history of Nanny, which upholds its

identity, nearly everyone who has written about this woman has generated a

history meant to be used for a specific purpose. The first two documents

confirming Nannyʼs existence are oral testimonies, one from the black man who


























































52
Bush,Slave Women, 71.


 44

killed her, and the other from a maroon who defected to the British side. In 1733,

Cuffee, the “good party negro,” or collaborator with the British, describes her as

an “old obeah woman,” and in 1735, Cupid, an Ibo man, describes how Nanny

had several British soldiers put to death.53 Neither man paints a positive picture,

primarily because his perspective on Nanny must reflect his disdain for her and

his loyalty to the British.

The most cited historical document that describes Nanny comes from a British

soldier, Phillip Thicknesse, who was at one point held hostage by the maroons.

Thicknesse was part of a delegation which was sent to request that the maroons

sign a peace accord with the British. He was actually taunted by the women and

children he encountered in the maroon community, who generally opposed the

peace accord.54 R. C. Dallas describes Thicknesseʼs experiences thus:

To show the deadly hatred they bore the white people, Thicknesse,
who was the first in the town, and the person left with them as a
hostage, related that having taken up his abode with Quao, his
children could not refrain striking their pointed fingers at his breast
as they would have done knives, had they been permitted, calling
out “Buckra, Buckra.” In their savage resentment the women wore
rows of the teeth of white men as ornaments…55


























































53
See Robert C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons, from Their Origin to the
Establishment of Their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone: Volume 1 (1803; reprinted in
London: Adamant Media Corp., 2005), 73.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.


 45

At Quaoʼs house, Thicknesse was told about a white man before him, who had

come to get a peace agreement signed, and was beheaded, on orders from the

“obeah woman.” 56 Hence, Thicknesseʼs account is probably motivated in part by

resentment generated by his captivity in the maroon settlement, and in part by his

desire to interest readers with sensationalized, dramatic storytelling.

As Karla Gottlieb points out, Thicknesseʼs story is useful to us as historians, in

that it indicates that Nanny—if the ʻobeah womanʼ was, in fact, Nanny—wielded a

great deal of power in determining relations with the British.57 Some of the folk

histories suggest that Nanny may not have actually participated in battles, but all

accounts agree that she did train soldiers. Herein lies the most important theme

in remembrances of Nanny: her military prowess. She showed them how to use

the abeng, a cow horn, to give long distance calls to those in the community to

prepare for visitors or enemies.58 She taught them how to camouflage

themselves in ambush against the British. Today, during national maroon

holidays, celebrants camouflage themselves using tree branches, and dance

through the towns, while sounding the abeng.59


























































56
Philip Thicknesse, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse, Late
Lieutenant Governor of Land Guard Fort, and Unfortunately Father to George
Touchet, Baron Audley (Dublin: William Jones, 1788).
57
Gottlieb, Mother of Us All.
58
See Gottlieb, Mother of Us All, 44-45.
59
Ibid.


 46

 While Nanny is remembered as a powerful obeah woman and political leader,

the maroonsʼ existence in the wilderness of the Jamaican mountainside placed

several other responsibilities on her shoulders as queen mother. She was

responsible for the basic survival of her people. A popular story among the

present day maroons is that of Nanny and the pumpkin seeds, which reflects her

role as provider for her nation/ spiritual “children.” The seeds miraculously appear

just as her people arrive at the brink of starvation and surrender to the British.

Before she gives in, she somehow finds or is given three pumpkin seeds, which

grew to an immense size in a short period of time—either one day or one week—

and yielded enough pumpkin to feed all the maroons, indefinitely.60

Nanny and the Akan queen mothers provide a rich case study of what

appears to be gender complementarity in action, at least among people of a

certain social status. They, however, were not the only women whose African

cultural institutions granted them a remarkable level of power and leadership in

the American slavery context. Several other queens, most of whom led

resistance movements, will be discussed in the subsequent segments. Using

African cosmological frameworks to make transnational connections across the

African Diaspora, in this case, amounts to using pre-colonial African nations as

new “national” contexts. The added examples will also reinforce the notion that

with African cosmology as the interpretive framework, African women are

revealed as key players in resistance movements.


























































60
Gottlieb, Mother of Us All, 62-63.


 47

 In Saint Domingue, now Haiti, among the folk, there is no mystery about

womenʼs participation in resistance movements, though there is not much about

their participation in the archival records. These women were mambos, or

priestesses of Voodoo,61 and some of them may have also been considered

queens.

These women, practitioners of a combination of African Vodou beliefs from Ewe,

Fon and Aja-speaking peoples conquered by the kingdom of Dahomey and

beliefs emanating from the Kongo-influenced areas of West Central Africa, used

the power they wielded in the sacred realm to exert political influence in the

Americas. The obviously powerful, deeply-trusted mambo who co-facilitated the

legendary 1791 Vodou ceremony at Boïs Caiman, which initiated the enslaved

Africansʼ engagement in the Saint Domingue Revolt, killed a pig and offered it to

the divine elemental forces, or lwa, in exchange for their assistance in battle.

Ezilie Dantor62 and other warlike forces were brought down to help their human

devotees to liberate themselves. This mambo inherited a long tradition of


























































61
Mambo is a female priest, and oungan, sometimes spelled houngan, is a male
priest. Oungan is also a term said to have come from the Bantu word for “priest,”
nganga.
62
Statement made by Baba Agyei Akoto at Sankofa Conference in April of 2009,
after the mounting of a priestess by Ezilie Dantor at their closing akom, an Akan
spiritual convocation with the deities (personal communication). Though the
Ankobea Society of Washington, D.C., is an Akan religious society, their akoms
welcome vodou deities, lwa, Yoruba deities, orisha, and ancestral spirits, in
addition to Akan deities, obosom.


 48

womenʼs leadership through spiritual authority, in part from the kpojitos, or

“queen mothers” of pre-colonial Dahomey.

The kingdom of Dahomey rose to the height of its power in the early

eighteenth century, with the capture of several slave trading ports, including

Allada (1724). At the top of its political hierarchy was the king, also called the

Leopard, and the kpojito, who unlike the Akan queen mother, was not from the

noble lineage. She was a woman chosen from among the commoners, whose

leadership would, thus, balance that of the Leopard in more ways than one. This

dual leadership was reflected in the creation mythology of one of Dahomeyʼs

most powerful dynasties, the Alladahonu. A princess, Aligbonon, was said to

have given birth to a human son who had leopard characteristics. This son,

Agasu, was later deified, becoming a vodun, or “spirit” in the Fon language. Thus,

the king is associated with the leopard, and his attendant queen mother is

referred to as the “one who whelped the leopard.”63

In the middle of the eighteenth century, a queen mother and priestess from

the nearby Aja peoples, named Hwanjile, brought several vodun to Dahomey, as

well as a new concept of the Creator. The godhead, as she explained it,

consisted of a male entity (Lisa) and a female entity (Mawu), both of which she


























































63
Edna Bay, “The Kpojito or ʻQueen Motherʼ of Precolonial Dahomey: Towards
an Institutional History,” in Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses and Power:
Case Studies in African Gender, Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan, ed. (New York: The
New York Academy of Sciences, 1997), 22.


 49

personally controlled.64 The establishment of these new deities, under her

authority stabilized the monarchy, and upheld the kpojitoʼs power over all who

worshiped these divine forces.

This system of shared male-female leadership is also reflected in the clan

hierarchies of most Fon-speakers, who had both a male and a female clan head.

The female clan head, the tanninon, was responsible for maintaining the familiesʼ

connection to their ancestors, and who also selected the new hennugan, male

clan head, who would succeed her partner once he died.65

The kpojito of the eighteenth century enjoyed a great deal of power, and were

able to use religion to consolidate power for the Alladahonu dynasty, as it took

over new territories in the Allada region. By taking control over the religious life of

the palace, and by transforming the spiritual structures of Dahomey to

incorporate the ancestral spirits of the newly acquired lands, the kpojitos

appeased the new Dahomean subjects, and gave legitimacy to the leopardʼs

regime.

Perhaps the most infamous kpojito is Agontime, a priestess, who attempted to

preserve the power of the kpojito in Dahomean leadership. The 19th century

brought increased trade in enslaved peoples, and increasing outside influences

from Europeans and even Yoruba peoples, groups thought to have male-


























































64
Melville Herskovits. Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, vol. 2 (New
York, 1938),104. Herskovits claims that Hwanjile brought the following vodun to
Dahomey: Mawu, Lisa, Sakpata, Heviosso, Gu, Dan Aidowhedo, Nesuhwe,
Tovodun, Fa, Menona, and Boko-Legba.
65
Bay, “Kpojito,” 24.

 50

centered leadership. Agontime was sold into slavery in Brazil, in 1797, having

been accused of poisoning the Leopard. Herein lies an important cultural rupture.

As the influence of women decreased among the elites of pre-colonial Dahomey,

those sold away maintained their more gender-balanced notions of power.

Moreover, the enslaved may have held on more tightly to their more ancient

traditions and ways of organizing themselves, in response or reaction to the

hostile, patriarchal Euro-American societies. Simply having female leaders, then,

may have been a form of cultural resistance for the enslaved.

To the Fon, a person needed the support of the spiritual realm to succeed at

anything in the physical realm. In return, humans would need to “feed” the vodun,

to sustain their power.66 The mambo at Boïs Caiman gave the pigʼs life in this a

service that represents a continuation of all of these same Fon sensibilities.

According to “traditions,” as Bay calls folk history in this West African region,

Agontime, was later sent for by the new Leopard, Gezo, and was found in Brazil

and brought back to Dahomey. According to Brazilian folk history, there actually

was a queen mother from Dahomey who arrived there. She was said to have

carried several Dahomean deities with her to Brazil.67 Once she returned to

Dahomey, in 1840, however, a major shift had occurred. The external influences


























































66
See Bernard Maupoil, La Géomancie à lʼancienne Côte des Esclaves, (Paris:
Institut dʼEthnologie, 1943), 57, quoted and translated to English in Bay,
“Kpojito,” 28.
67
James Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and
Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 90.


 51

had caused the decline of the kpojitoʼs power. Though subsequent Leopards and

kpojitos, attempted to prevent this shift, her power was never fully restored. In

both political and religious life, the balance between royal and commoner, male

and female, which had once been the ideal and the strength of Dahomey, was

disturbed. With this decline, came the deterioration of the whole kingdom. 68

Brazil had its own share of queens. The evidence of these queens is found

mainly in the histories of maroon societies, some of which were led by women.

The most famous maroon queen in Brazil is Zeferina, leader of the quilombo

Urubu, now called Pirajá. Second in fame only to Zumbi of Palmares, Zeferina is

regarded in a fashion similar to Queen Nanny of Jamaica.

Zeferina led primarily Yoruba maroons in defending their communities against

the Brazilian colonial government in what is called the 1826 Uprising. In her 2003

dissertation on Zeferina, Silvia Maria Silva Barbosa uses the ways in which

African cultural institutions empowered women to contextualize Zeferinaʼs power

as a female maroon leader. Barbosaʼs work focuses on the matrilineal structures

found in pre-colonial Angolan culture and creates the link to Brazil through

enslaved Africansʼ strong historical memory of Queen Nzinga Mbandi of Mbundu/

Angola.

That a queen ruled Yoruba people contradicts the argument made by scholars

such as Edna Bay, that the Yoruba were, historically, a patriarchal society, even

in terms of the traditional priesthood. Perhaps the Yoruba underwent a


























































68
Bay, “Kpojito,” 38.

 52

transformation similar to that of Dahomey; one in which on the continent of Africa,

female leaders were disempowered over time, yet retained their power in the

Americas. Though it does not seem likely, an alternative possibility is that Queen

Nzingaʼs memory was wielded among the maroon queens in Brazil as a means

of legitimizing female leadership, and challenging the limited scope of female

power in the Yoruba context.

Zeferinaʼs mother, Amália was from Angola, and as Barbosa states, Zeferina

…received from her mother strong cultural influence of the

matrilineal system of Angola, being cognizant of the history of the
resistance struggle in Angola, in which Queen Nzinga Mbandi
participated. This matrilineal tradition of resistance was taken up
later by the leader in Quilombo Urubu (Zeferina), with the goal of
keeping alive the history of identity, cultural resistance, and religion
and of freedom for the excluded African community.69

According to the testimony of those self-designated Nagôs, or Yorubas, who

were captured, including Zeferina herself, the group had plans to fight against the

government and the slaveholders, on Christmas Eve and would bring an end to

slavery.70 Men and women fought valiantly, both in the city of Salvador, and at

places along the outskirts, like Urubu. At Urubu, Zeferina led the fight, sending


























































69
Silvia Maria Silva Barbosa, “O Poder de Zeferina no Quilombo do Urubu: Uma
Reconstruçaô Histórica Político-Social” (PhD diss., Universidade Metodista de
Sâo Paulo, 2003),176.
70
Ann M. Pescatello, “Prêto Power, Brazilian Style,” in The African in Latin
America, Ann M. Pescatello, ed. (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1975), 218. See
also Joâo José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in
Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 57.


 53

deadly arrows to the enemy, rallying the rebels, and keeping them in line. The

provincial president saw this, and “in an involuntary burst of praise, referred to

her as ʻqueenʼ.”71 Bows, arrows, guns and machetes were not the only means of

making war for Zeferinaʼs people.

After the battle, soldiers searched a house of candomblé, owned by a mulatto

man named Antônio, which was located at Urubu. In it, they found several

religious items, which João José Reis identifies as Yoruba. These artifacts will be

discussed in more detail in Chapter Three, but the main idea in terms of the role

of the African queen/queen mother is that the preparation and guidance in their

war with the whites of Bahia was grounded in their African sacred knowledge and

in African-styled leadership. Barbosa identifies several other women maroon

queens in her dissertation. She includes Dandara, who shared leadership with

Ganga Zumba and later, with Zumbi, in the quilombo of Palmares (Angola

Janga). Acotirene/Aqualtune, is the maroon queen thought to be the mother of

Ganga Zumba and the grandmother of Zumbi. Barbosa also briefly mentions

maroon leaders Tereza, Felipa Maria Aranha and Mariana.

Although she experienced some victories, Zeferina and Antônio were

eventually arrested and sentenced to hard labor. Today, she is commemorated

during the Dia Nacional da Consciência Negra in Brazil, alongside Zumbi dos

Palmares, and during an annual festival in Pirajá. She is thus “alive in the

individual and collective memory of Pirajá neighborhood and surrounding


























































71
Ibid.


 54

areas.”72 Dandara and Acotirene were immortalized in the film Quilombo (1986)

by Carlos Diegues.

As it was stated previously, these queens and queen mothers demonstrate

that not all enslaved women poisoned their oppressorsʼ food, or aborted their

children. The were not simply helpers to men, bringing them supplies, nor were

they feisty pregnant women, wildly attempting to eke out a bit of “freedom” for

their unborn children. They actually plotted and led a full-scale, direct conflict with

the white plantation establishment.

Still, these women represent a small, elite group among enslaved people who

rebelled. A comprehensive study must then, include patterns of resistance found

among the collective. Furthermore, as organized resistance happened both in

slaveholding societies and from the free spaces around them, it is critical that we

examine women in maroon communities.


























































72
Barbosa, “Poder de Zeferina.”


 55

 CHAPTER TWO: WOMEN AS NATION-BUILDERS AND WARRIORS IN
MAROON SETTLEMENTS

The practice of marronage, running away from slavery and building

communities of free people, is a historical phenomenon that has existed in the

Western Hemisphere since Europeans first instituted slavery in the Americas.

Maroons are defined as people who live in communities comprised mainly of

African people who escaped enslavement, their descendants, and frequently,

indigenous American peoples. These maroon communities are sometimes

located in hilly, mountainous, or otherwise geographically isolated areas like

caves and swamps. The term maroon, is the English cognate to the Spanish term

cimarrón, which means a “fugitive” or “runaway” that lives in the hilltops. This

term is further derived from the Spanish word cima, which means “top” or

“summit.” Originally used by the Spanish to describe cattle that had run away to

the hills, in the context of slave societies in the Americas, it quickly took on the

connotation for a person who was “fierce,” or “unbroken”73 Richard Price, a

prominent scholar on maroon societies, asserts that maroons are critical to our

understanding of slavery because “they were both the antithesis of all that

slavery stood for, and at the same time a widespread and embarrassingly visible

part of these systems.”74 Beyond embarrassment, these ubiquitous, often well-


























































73
Richard Price, “Maroons: Rebel Slaves in the Americas,” Smithsonian
Institution Folklife Maroon Educational Guide. Accessed February 20th, 2011.
http://www.folklife.si.edu/resources/maroon/educational_guide/23.htm
74
Ibid.

 56

hidden communities were sources of fear for the slaveholding class. For the

enslaved, however, maroon communities were sources of hope, and reminders

of the possibility of freedom.

In the U.S, however, especially in the public history arena, marronage is a

seldom-discussed topic, much less a debated one. When slavery is presented to

the public—in museums, historical films or in textbooks—the narrative about

resistance usually includes the concept of flight, but there is little discussion on to

where exactly did enslaved people flee, or how life developed once they got

there. The trope of the runaway slave is typically shown to have depended

heavily on the compassion and aid of whites, to reach some vague promised land

called “the North.” Marronage, on the other hand, often involved direct physical

conflict with Europeans and an ideological-physical separation from their

societies.

Marronage, by its very definition, reveals the fallacy of the harmonious

pluralistic utopia that Americans purport is their goal. By its very nature, it

criticizes white supremacy, capitalism, and sexism, concepts still firmly

entrenched in the mainstream ideology of this society. Because in maroon

societies, people largely organized themselves according to African traditions,

this was an outright rejection of the notion that Euro-American cultures were

inherently superior to African ones. The fact that even the large maroon

settlements did not depend on large-scale, exploitative labor systems for

economic stability, but rather on communal, subsistence-based agriculture, is a


 57

critique of the sprawling plantation system that only enriched a few whites.

According to Kenneth Bilby and Filomena Chioma Steady, a central theme of

palenques, or maroon communities, in the Americas was the “valuation of women

and their contribution to maroon survival.” The above quote, excerpted from the

book Black Women Cross-Culturally,75 suggests that there must have been a

great deal of concern for and high value placed on African women among the

maroons. Still, the majority of historical literature on maroon societies—and on

African resistance in general—does not reflect the vital roles that African women

have played. Rebecca Hall contends that “the historiography of maroons is one

of the richest sites for an examination of the legacies of African culture and its

shaping of resistance,” and furthermore, that “[maroon] studies and their

interpretive work stand as fruitful sites for examining historians constructions of

gender.”76 This chapter will explain my concurrence with Steady and Bilby, by

appraising how African women have been treated in the historical literature on

marronage, and comparing this historiography with what may be revealed about

women maroons by using African cosmologies as an interpretive framework. The

chapter will conclude with a discussion of judicial laws and punishments meted


























































75
Kenneth Bilby and Filomena Chioma Steady. “Black Women and Survival: A
Maroon Case.” Black Women Cross-Culturally, F. Chioma Steady, ed.
(Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 452.
76
Rebecca Hall, "Not Killing Me Softly: African-American Women, Slave Revolts,
and Historical Constructions of Racialized Gender," (PhD diss., University of
California, Santa Cruz, 2004), 24.

 58

out to those convicted of marronage, especially those legal measures designated

specificially for maroon women and their children.

Due to the fact that maroon communities were societies, with the immediate

objective of maintaining the freedom of the inhabitants and for some, the long-

term goal of creating systems of self-governance that would maintain their

sovereignty, we might consider them as nations within nations. As historian John

Henrik Clark asserts, “the family is the building block of the nation.”77 How then,

could any community, society, or nation hope for long-term viability without the

presence of women?

This is certainly not to say that the only source of womenʼs value in maroon

societies is their capacity to have babies. Indeed, African women are critical for

the survival of these societies. Aside from the project of reconstituting familial

structures that may have been disrupted or strained during enslavement, maroon

women continued the roles they play as the primary agricultural workers in

several African societies by cultivating most of the food that sustained their

communities. Bilby and Steady depict maroon women and their children as the

“true denizens”78 of these settlements, while the men are more transient, being

frequently concerned with hunting and maintaining security. Still, womenʼs roles

extended far beyond homemaking and family building. Women have played


























































77
John Henrik Clarke, as quoted in A Great and Mighty Walk. Directed by St.
Claire Bourne. USA: Black Dot Media, 1996.
78
Kenneth Bilby and Filomena Chioma Steady. “Black Women and Survival: A
Maroon Case.” Black Women Cross-Culturally, F. Chioma Steady, ed.
(Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 452.

 59

crucial roles in the resistance movements that created these communities and in

defending them from attack.

The bulk of the historiography of marronage presents an image of African

women in maroon societies as victims of kidnapping, by a group of “wild” men.

Documents from all across the Americas indicate that a number of African

women who were captured from maroon settlements and questioned in court,

frequently did say that they were “kidnapped” by maroon men. Although this has

been widely accepted as fact (See Figure 2, in which a maroon women is

depicted as being forced to wear bells around her waist, to prevent her from

sneaking away from the maroons), historian Alvin O. Thompson devotes a short

but intriguing four pages to the question of abduction of maroon women in his

book Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas,

deducing that the low proportion of women in maroon societies raises questions

about their alleged wide-scale abduction by men.”79

There is much work to be done to correct the historical narrative of African

maroon women as perpetual victims. Aside from being abductees, African

maroon women are seen as beasts of burden. From the earliest documents on

marronage, written by the likes of Edward Long, and later, Sally Price, maroon

women are depicted as the unfortunate ones who left a white master only to have

him replaced by a Black (male) master.


























































79
Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the
Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 67-71.

 60

 Figure 2.
Bush Negroes (Maroons), Surinam, 183980

The most critical problem in the historical treatment of African women in maroon

communities, however, is no treatment at all. African women are rendered

invisible on multiple historiographical levels, beyond perhaps the sexual

oppression they may have experienced at the hands of their male counterparts.

African women maroons are not typically documented or described in any detail

in archival records. In some places, the maroon societies are rendered as having

a predominately African man + Indigenous woman demographic. According to

Thompson, this may have been the case in some places like Peru, Colombia,

Brazil or Mexico, where the number of indigenous women was large and there


























































80
“Bush Negroes (Maroons), Surinam, 1839;” Image Reference BEN18a, as
shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the
Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

 61

were incentives for intermarrying with them, such as having offspring who were

considered legally free. This, however, was not always the case.

Especially as it pertains to direct, violent confrontation, white male record-

keepers have failed to indicate the presence of women, much less any leadership

roles they may have played in these events. Aside from the fact that the very

existence of maroon communities in the midst of slaveholding societies was a

source of embarrassment for whites, being successfully challenged by women

could be a source of total humiliation. Women have been mentioned, albeit

cursorily, in depictions of maroonsʼ day-to-day lives, but their roles as nation-

builders and resisters have yet to be seriously analyzed. Jean Fouchard

declares that maroon women are as critical to maroon societies as they are to

colonial society in general.81 Therefore, excavating the experiences of these

women from the historiographical margins is a critical task. This important task

must be initiated by critiquing the existing scholarship on marronage.

Cuffee, leader of a group of Jamaican maroons, was said to have “taken” an

enslaved woman named Patty from her provision ground to an encampment of

maroons which included several women. Upon being recaptured and questioned

by the colonial authorities, as historian Michael Mullin states, Patty tried to protect

the other women in the maroon settlement by suggesting that they, like she, had

been taken against their will, even though some refused to leave, and actually

helped to develop the settlement. Take for example, Blanche, who Patty said was


























































81
Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons de la Liberté (Paris: Editions de lʼÈcole, 1972),
289.

 62

“carried off” of the Peru Estate by her own husband, and Tomas, who named her

child after “Old Quaco,” a spiritual leader of this maroon community.82

Pattyʼs story indicates that there must have been a direct motivating factor for

a woman to lie about being taken to a maroon community against her will. The

severity of punishments for runaways, and especially for maroons who were

caught by state and local authorities was extremely harsh. For acts of

marronage, a man or woman could be disfigured, killed, or humiliated. Under the

Code Noir of San Domingue, for instance, fugitives from slavery who stayed at

large for longer than a month would be branded on the shoulder and have their

ears cut off. The second time a fugitive was caught, his/her hamstring would be

cut and the other shoulder branded. The third recapture meant execution.83

It has been argued that women who were found in maroon communities were

judged more leniently than men, since the prevailing belief was that women

would not willingly run away.84 While men did have more opportunities to run

away than women, and they were not hindered by factors like pregnancy, women

and families did flee to maroon settlements. According to Bernard Moitt, women

in the French Caribbean were actually motivated to join maroon settlements by


























































82
Michael Mullin, “Women and the Comparative Study of American Negro
Slavery” Slavery & Abolition 6 (1985): 25-40.
83
Bernard Moitt, “Slave Women and Resistance in the French Caribbean,” in
More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, David Barry
Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996), 247.
84
Ibid.

 63

the desire to have and raise their children in freedom, which directly conflicts with

the notion that womenʼs escape efforts were hindered by their children. Escape

from sexual abuse in slavery was no doubt another motivation for women

maroons. In Canada, for instance, marronage, in the form of absenteeism, was

the primary means of resistance for enslaved women.85

To be sure, some women were abducted from slavery, yet the history of

marronage overstates this phenomenon, and thereby limits our understanding of

the agency exercised by women fugitives and their strategies for survival. In his

article on gender and marronage in the Caribbean, Alvin O. Thompson argues

that while some women were kidnapped by maroon men, they were being taken

as “wives, homemakers and mothers”, not simply as slaves. While the taking of

women as wives did not necessarily guarantee better conditions for them, it

indicates that exploiting them as a labor force was not the maroonsʼ primary

motive for taking them. In fact, Thompson lists several instances in which women

ran to maroon settlements in equal proportion to, if not more than men.86 More

research needs to answer these questions: How many women were actually

kidnapped, and how many went voluntarily?

The few scholarly treatments that critique the “female abductees” assumption

are found in historical writings that specifically seek to recover womenʼs stories


























































85
Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 105.
86
Alvin O. Thompson, “Gender and Marronage in the Caribbean,” The Journal of
Caribbean History, 39.2 (2005): 262-289.


 64

from the margins of history, such as More Than Chattel: Black Women and

Slavery in the Americas, edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine.

These woman-centered works are relatively recent phenomena, having gained

popularity only within the last 15 years. In works that describe maroons in a

general sense, women are still marginal historical actors, sometimes even written

about as if they were just another commodity to be traded between the implicitly

male maroons and the slaveholders.87

Unfortunately, the work to rectify this exaggeration is just beginning. There is

a great deal of maroon history that portrays the maroon woman as a mere victim,

an uncritical rehashing of the openly anti-maroon writings of such slavery

proponents as Edward Long and Bryan Edwards, historians whose agenda was

to convince the Jamaican Assembly to remove the maroons from the island.

Beyond being twice-taken captives, women in maroon communities have been

depicted as twice-made slaves. Edwards, who borrowed heavily from Longʼs

writing on the maroons for his own publication on the history of Jamaica,

describes the (male) maroons of Jamaica as displaying a “spirit of brutality”

towards their wives and children. He accuses the men of not caring for the


























































87
A. James Arnold. “From the Problematic Maroon to a Woman-Centered Creole
Project in the Literature of the French West Indies,” in Slavery in the Caribbean
Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities, Doris Y.
Kadish, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000),165. Even as Arnold
critiques the divergence between the plantation record and the “mythology” of the
heroic maroon, he reinscribes the notion that maroons are male, and that they
depend heavily on plantation society for provisions like clothing, food and
women.


 65

wellbeing of the women, and the women of having accepted this cruel fate.88

Edwards describes this society as polygynous, yet the statistics on the gender

imbalance in maroon communities in Jamaica do not indicate the feasibility of a

maroon man having more than one wife. In some of the more contemporary

historical treatment of maroon women, the narrative has changed very little. In his

analysis of the “Role of Women in the Maroon Societies of Suriname and French

Guiana,” Thomas Polimé lists a number of rules, which, up until the late 1950s,

women were made to follow, including “the wife was not allowed to behave

rebelliously toward her husband.”89

Sally Price, an ethnographer, writes about the present-day Saramaka

maroons of Suriname, with special attention paid to gendered art forms. She

argues that although outsiders frequently see maroon women going about their

daily tasks and organizing their lives rather independently from the maroon men,

they are not free from male domination. She warns that the outsider can easily

conflate this matrilineal society with a matriarchal society. She contends that

women do not exercise the political, religious, and social power of men, and


























































88
Bryan Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the
West Indies, in Three Volumes (1793; reprinted in London: Adamant Media Corp,
2005).
89
Thomas Polimé, “The Role of Women in the Maroon Societies of Suriname and
French Guiana,” Creativity and Resistance: Maroon Cultures in the Americas
online exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. Accessed February 20th, 2011.
http://www.folklife.si.edu/resources/maroon/educational_guide/46.htm.


 66

directs our attention to their exclusion from certain types of artwork, like the

carving of calabashes, as well as their ritual seclusion during menstruation.90

These arguments are valid. As a person who has spent a great deal of time

among the Saramaka women, Price adds that there are several other incidents

that she witnessed firsthand that indicate male domination, and it is undeniably

an issue that should be addressed. It is not clear, however, whether Saramaka

gender relations are representative of most maroon societies. Obviously, Sally

Price is not insinuating that the Saramaka community reflects any particular

cultural patterns in other maroon societies, but she may be imposing western,

feminist ideals onto a society in which these values may have little relevance.

This is merely to suggest that there may be other ways to view cultural

phenomena such as the gender-based art of the Saramaka. The men carve the

calabashes to win the admiration and romantic love of women, and the women in

turn sew elaborate capes for the men. Are there many Saramaka women who

would like to carve calabashes? Are there any Saramaka men who would like to

sew capes? Does this gendered separation of art and its relation to courtship

represent male dominance or does not the “exclusion” go both ways?

Robert Charles Dallas, a historian and early nineteenth century observer of

Jamaican maroon settlements had a decidedly different take on the experiences

of maroon women than either Bryan Edwards or Edward Long. In Dallasʼ The


























































90
Sally Price, “Sexism and the Construction of Reality: An Afro-American
Example,” in Anthropology for the Nineties: Introductory Readings, Johnnetta B.
Cole, ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 126-148.

 67

History of the Maroons, from Their Origin to the Establishment of Their Chief

Tribe at Sierra Leone: Volume 1 (1803), he directly addressed Edwardsʼ

comments, and described the relationship between maroon women and men

thus:

It was very expensive to have several wives; for the husband, on

making a present to one, was obliged to make an equal gift to each
of the others. Each wife lived in turn with her husband two days,
during which time the others cultivated their grounds, or carried
their provisions to market; the property of each was distinct from
that of the others, but the husband shared with all...”

In the above quote, Dallas presents a decidedly different image of maroon

men as husbands, pointing out their obligation to give gifts to their wives.
He goes on to provide a context for incidents of abuse directed at maroon
women, and directly quotes the opposing argument:

If the men sometimes behaved with brutality to their wives of

children, it was generally the effect of intoxication. It has been
asserted, “that they regarded their wives as so many beasts of
burden, and felt no more concern at the loss of one of them, than a
white planter would have felt at the loss of a bullock*”…

Dallas concludes his discussion of maroon marital relations by illustrating

the loyalty that maroon men displayed for not one, but multiple wives:

In the course of an attempt that was made to convert the Maroons

to Christianity…polygamy was considered, and the Maroon told that
as a Christian, he could not have more than one wife. Having been
attached to two for some time, and having children by both—“…you
say me mus forsake my wife.”—“Only one of them.”—“Which dat
one? Jesus Christ say so? Gar aʼmighty say so? No, no massa;
Gar aʼmighty good; he no tell somebody he mus forsake him wife
and children”…”No, massa, dis here talk no do for we.”91


























































91
The (*) refers the reader to Dallasʼ footnote, which simply reads: “Edwards.”
The latter portion of this quoted section was Dallasʼ attempt at transcribing

 68

 Marriage has been the most frequent lens through which women maroons are

viewed in the historiography. They are mentioned, albeit cursorily, as the wives

of maroon men and the mothers of maroon children. In his article “Women and

the Comparative Study of American Negro Slavery,” Michael Mullin proposes a

framework for understanding women and families in marronage that views

maroon survival strategies as either “male/skirmishing/interactive with white

society” or “female/sedentary/isolated.”92 This framework is intended to reveal the

difference between the most commonly-referenced, predominately-male maroon

bands, which survived based on resources that could be taken from raids on the

plantation society, and the more isolated, stable maroon settlements, in which

women and families could thrive. While this dichotomy presents a useful model

for understanding the roles of wives and mothers in the development of long-term

maroon settlements, it does not subsume all possible circumstances faced by

maroon women.

The need to remain close to her family drove many an enslaved woman to

become a maroon, either via temporary, individual truancy from the plantation in

order to visit relatives, or long-term, collective marronage. This long-term

marronage was not always a stable, organized community situation, as Mullin

suggests. In North Carolina, for example, a young woman stayed in the swamps


























































maroon speech as it sounded to him. He adds a translation, of sorts, immediately
after it.
92
Michael Mullin, “Women and the Comparative Study of American Negro
Slavery” Slavery & Abolition 6 (1985): 25-40.


 69

near the plantation where her husband was enslaved, rather than allow herself to

be sold and leave the area completely. She depended on him for food because

she did not know how to hunt, and the swamp was not conducive to growing

subsistence crops. At some point, her husband was unable to get out to the

swamps to bring her provisions, so she was forced to turn herself in to the

slaveholders, so that her children would not starve. She had lived in the swamp

for seven years.93

This unfortunate incident underscores the deep importance of family among

enslaved people. Women were critical in maintaining these family units, both in

and beyond slave societies, and so were men. Another major shortcoming in the

historiography of marronage is that it does not adequately highlight the high value

of mothers and wives in the creation and maintenance of maroon spaces.

In Akan societies, as in many other African societies, the family is considered

the building block of the nation. If the family does not reproduce itself, it dies out,

and the nation weakens. Mothers, and by extension, wives, were responsible for

the financial wellbeing of the nuclear family or compound. They sold goods at

market and made up the majority of the agrarian labor force in Akan societies.

Perhaps even more importantly, they had babies.

The high value of mothers refers back to Akan cosmology, in which Asaase

Yaa is the Earth, and thus, mother of all. In the pouring of libation, a ritual act


























































93
Sylviane Diouf, “American Maroons: Exploring the Lives of African Americans
Living in the Southern Woods During Slavery” (paper presented at Rutgers
University Center for Historical Analysisʼ Black Atlantic Seminar, April 14th, 2009).

 70

which is available to both the initiated and non-initiated Akan traditionalists, the

name of Nyame is called first, followed directly by Asase Yaa. After Earth, come

the divine essences of the rivers and lakes, which in turn act as mothers, bringing

forth many of the other divinities.94 This layering of mothers among the deities,

and the spiritual family tree which their mother-child links create, is reified

through ritual. Thus, the centrality of mothers and their reproductive importance,

is underscored each time libation is poured.

The higher the number of people in a given family, lineage, and/or nation, the

stronger it is. According to J. B. Danquah, “if you would know what an Akan

regards as most sacred and inviolable, attempt to make distinctions between him

and members of his clan, or worse still, his family.”95 Family ties are sacred, and

form the unit of personality for Akan people. These blood ties also form at least

one component of an individualʼs soul. According to the Akan concept of the

human soul, there is the kra, the personʼs “life force,” or true soul, given by

Nyame, the sunsum, an individualʼs personality, which he/she gets from the

ntoro, the patrilineal line, and the mogya, literally a personʼs blood, which is given

by his/her mother, but which has both physical and spiritual qualities.96 This


























































94
Richard J. Gehman. African Traditional Religions in Biblical Perspective
(Nairobi, Kenya: East African Educational Publishers, 2005), 192.
95
J. B. Danquah. Akan Laws and Customs (London: Cass, 1928), 194.
96
K. A. Busia. “The Ashanti” in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological
Ideals and Social Values of African Peoples, D. Forde, ed. (London, New York:
1963).

 71

mogya bestows upon the individual his/her membership in the collective, a

matrilineal clan, and thus, his/her citizenship.

At the interpersonal level, this is why motherhood is such a highly valued

status. Mothers are sacred, and children are precious gifts. In fact, childbirth is

considered the most important rite of passage in an Asante womanʼs life. Queen

mothers like Nanny were the symbolic “mothers” of the entire community. Just as

the queen mother acts as the custodian of customs on the community level, the

regular mother must serve the same purpose within her own household. For

those Africans in the Americas who formed maroon settlements, or even just

committed short-lived acts of petit marronage or absenteeism near the slave

quarters, women drew upon their ritual knowledge to support, organize, and if

need-be, mobilize the people.

This valuation of maroon women reflects the great importance of women in

the African Diaspora, in general. As in the African societies from which many of

them came to the Americas, maroon women facilitated the survival of the

inhabitants of the community, and the transmission of cultural heritage—both

tangible and intangible—from one generation to the next. Even with a shortage

of women that existed in most maroon settlements, there were ways to ensure

that each individual could be incorporated into a husband-wife-family unit. Among

the Leeward Maroons of Jamaica, “there were carefully codified rules regulating

the sharing of one woman by more than one man.”97 Unfortunately, even as he


























































97
Richard Price, “Introduction,” in Maroon Societies, 19.

 72

makes a statement that amounts to polyandry in Jamaica, here Richard Price

verbally disempowers the maroon woman by presenting her as the person to be

“shared” by multiple men, as opposed to a woman who can take multiple

husbands for herself, under the protection of the law.

To some extent, the harsh conditions of living on the geographical fringes of

slave societies may have limited womenʼs abilities to assert the full range of their

power, and increased their dependence on men for more strenuous labor and

defense. Still, African women were no strangers to hard work, and likely formed a

critical agrarian labor force in many maroon settlements. They also bore a variety

of responsibilities from childrearing and homemaking, to food cultivation and

management of provision grounds.

The heavy responsibility of women in feeding their communities is dramatized

in the oral history of several communities, from South Carolina to Suriname, to

Brazil: contemporary maroons give startlingly similar accounts of African women

ancestors having transported grains of rice across the Atlantic Ocean, or later,

from the plantation, by tucking them into their hair. This rice was subsequently

planted and used to feed their communities.98 Men were typically responsible for

work that took them away from the settlements, and took advantage of their more

muscular bodies, like mining, clearing of forested areas, hunting and

blacksmithing (See Figure 3).


























































98
Judith A. Carney, “ʻWith Grains in Her Hairʼ: Rice in Colonial Brazil” Slavery &
Abolition 25.1 (2004): 1-27.


 73

 Figure 3.
African Slave Family, Surinam, 1770s99

Thompson cautions against drawing such strong lines in the gendered division of

labor in maroon settlements, simply because maroons produced whatever they

could to survive. In other words, if there was a shortage of women in a particular


























































99
“African Slave Family, Surinam, 1770s;” Image Reference NW0134, as shown
on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the
Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

 74

community, the men had to perform agrarian labor as well. Maroons produced

everything from fabric to baskets to butter for trade with surrounding

communities.100 In places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic, both maroon

men and women would pan for gold in the mountain streams, which could be

sold in the markets in the towns.101 Overall, maroon women can be said to have

played just as important a role, if not more so, than their male counterparts in

maroon economies. The historiography must take deliberate steps to reflect their

value.

Diverse economies did not exist in most settlements, but maroon economies

challenge the assumption that maroons were mainly bands of male guerilla-style

outlaws who survived by banditry alone. The majority of books and articles

published about maroons place heavy emphasis on maroon wars with

colonial/state authorities, citing a few key “generals,” “captains” or “chiefs” with

whom they had particularly difficult interactions. Even those more stable, more

isolated communities are viewed as militaristic in nature. This could be a result of

the fact that much of the interaction between slave societies and maroons was on

the battlefield, and consequently, several of the official documents about

maroons come from military reports. Be this as it may, the onus falls to the


























































100
Alvin O. Thompson, “Gender and Marronage,” 262-289.
101
Jane Landers, “The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon
Communities,” Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American
Diaspora, Linda Heywood, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
236.

 75

academic community to seek out sources that will bring out a more

comprehensive history.

Women in maroon societies played a variety of roles beyond motherhood and

farming. They served as political leaders, spiritual leaders, and warriors.

Unfortunately, the majority of prominent maroon women are simply listed as the

wives or mothers of prominent maroon men. There are a few female exceptions

in the historical literature, the most popular one being Queen Nanny of the

Jamaican Maroons. There were other women leaders, as well as groups of

women who acted collectively in the development and defense of maroon

societies.

The primary literary device that renders maroon women invisible is the implied

“maleness” of a maroon. Across the scholarship, maroons are depicted as men.

Images of maroons are most often of men, usually armed men. While it is a fact

that the overwhelming majority of enslaved persons, and maroons were men,

there should be more gender-neutral descriptions of maroons in the historical

literature, to account for the women who may have participated in a particular

maroon situation. Women were even present in the violent confrontations

between maroons and colonial authorities, providing logistical support, if not

actually fighting.

African women performed militaristic duties for maroon settlements. In

Suriname and other parts of the Americas, they provided the food supply for the

fighting groups, even during combat, and they absconded with food and other


 76

goods during maroon raids of plantations and towns. In preparation for battle,

they fortified the menʼs fighting spirit with protective amulets, herbal baths,

prayers, sacrifice, and prophesying. Once on the battlefield, women maroons

nursed the wounded, chanted and danced their support, and brought ammunition

and weapons to the maroon soldiers. Though there is hardly any documentation

to support this claim, some women did fight. Interestingly, however, though trial

records do not usually describe the participation of African women in maroon

resistance, we find that these women are given equal treatment with men at the

gallows, on the chopping block, and in the pillory.

Rebecca Hall explores African womenʼs martial traditions in Africa and

suggests that these same martial traditions can be found in womenʼs

participation in American slave revolts. She investigates the role that maroon

women play in violent confrontations between maroons and state militias in the

United States, while leveling a serious critique of the historical documentation in

which a “Prose of Passivity” elides their participation. In more than one account,

she finds that there are women fighting alongside the men in these skirmishes.102

In Le Cap, San Domingue, in 1793, for instance, “there were over 14,000 maroon

women” involved in fierce battles with the French.103 In fact, French commander

Rochambeau informed Napoleon that if France planned to regain Saint


























































102
Rebecca Hall, "Not Killing Me Softly." These particular maroon women were
found in Fort Negro, located along the Apalachicola River in Florida.
103
Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons, 550.


 77

Domingue, she must “…destroy at least 30,000 negroes and negresses—the

latter being more cruel than the men.”104

Maroon societies have been particularly rich sites for the study of African

cultural transformation in the Americas, and rightly so. In many of the African

societies from which the maroons originated, male and female power is not

always viewed as being the same in all areas, but some form of equal

collaboration is common. There are numerous records of servile insurrections in

which African men and women are co-conspirators, and even when the women

are not identified in leadership roles, they are executed all the same, an indirect

indication of their high level of participation. Such was the case of Cubah of

Jamaica. This is likely even more so the case when a group of people is under

duress, fighting to liberate themselves from chattel enslavement—everyone who

can become a soldier, is made a soldier.

This transformation of “traditional” gendered roles in times of distress calls for

a closer study of the social and/or cosmological structures of the African

ethnicities represented in these maroon societies, in the name of learning more

about the roles of African women in resistance. Take, for instance, the fact that in

the vast majority of West and West Central African societies, the Supreme Being

is both “male” and “female.” Likewise, the lesser aspects of divinity, or deities,

can have predominately masculine or feminine qualities. In many traditions,


























































104
Letter from Le Cap, dated October 6, 1803, quoted in C.L.R. James, The
Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938;
revised ed., London: Allison & Busby, 1980), 360.

 78

“female” deities, like Yansa (Yoruba) and Ezilie Dantor (Vodou), are frequently

“warriors,” who engage in spiritual warfare right along with “male” deities, like

Ogun (Yoruba) or Gu (Vodou). Masculine and feminine power is perceived as

complementary, if not equal. It is therefore, no surprise that on the human level,

African women could also function as warriors and protectors of maroon

societies, which adds another dimension to their importance for maroon survival.

The historical literature provides very few insights into the subjectivities of

women maroons. Again, this may be attributable to the limitations of the sources

on maroons. Because maroon women in maroon societies is such an

underexplored subject, it is a given that there have been few studies of a

comparative nature conducted on them. The story of maroon women has begun

the way most new fields of inquiry begin: with the biographies of prominent

leaders.

There has only been room for one female rebel leader in the master narrative

of Jamaican, and by extension Caribbean, history, and Queen Nanny is it. Known

as a powerful obeah105 Nanny was thought to be able to catch bullets between


























































105
Thought to be a word derived from the Twi word “obayifo,” which refers to a
sorcerer, or witch, obeah is a term used throughout the British Caribbean to
identify individuals who employ African-based medicinal, religious, and mystical
practices to heal, harm, protect or instruct others.


 79

her hands and legs, and produce magical charms that would render her soldiers

invincible.106

In her short monograph, Karla Gottlieb critiques the archival sources for

some of the same shortcomings discussed above, and advocates for the use of

folkloric and oral history sources for unearthing the stories of these forgotten

heroines.” She presents the maroonsʼ spiritual beliefs as a valid interpretive

framework and uses them to evaluate Nannyʼs roles as both a military/political

leader and a spiritual leader. Gottlieb draws a distinction between Nannyʼs

historical persona among her “children,” the present-day maroons, and among

the documents in the archives. British generals depicted Nanny as an “old hag,” a

terrifying, mannish, bloodthirsty witch, while maroons remember her in their oral

tradition as a queen with supernatural abilities that demanded love, fear and

respect. This contrasting look at the sources is the strength of Gottliebʼs work;

she has identified many of the pitfalls that will arise when doing research on

maroon women.107

Any study of gender and marronage must be sensitive to the unique

circumstances of African women in slave societies. It must pay attention to the

centrality of family and kinship, as both a mobilizing factor and an organizing

mechanism among maroons. It must seek an understanding of womenʼs roles in


























































106
Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and
Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2007), 40-41.
107
Gottlieb, Mother of Us All.


 80

African societies, since the majority of the original maroons, men and women,

were African-born. It must question the biases inherent in the primary sources,

and seek to fill gaps in the secondary sources. And finally, it must display an

understanding of African women as critical actors in maroon resistance and

survival.

Enslaved and maroon women were not only responsible for feeding their

families through marketing and farming, but they were also responsible for

feeding them spiritually. Women kept the oral tradition and historical

consciousness alive by gathering the community to hear folktales and to

recount/dramatize past events. A key example would be the “Anansi” stories,

which, according to an anonymous folklorist in the 1930s, “have been passed

along in living tradition by the old Nanas, or creole nurses, who correspond in

many respects to the Mammies of the Southern States,108 as well as among

maroons. Womenʼs cultural stewardship and their ability to adapt their traditions

to serve the community in an otherwise hostile environment is a testament to

their creativity and intelligence. In effect, they were the shapers of the African

identity and the negotiators of group consciousness in the Americas.

Sylvia W. de Groot published an article entitled “Maroon Women as

Ancestors, Priests and Mediums in Suriname,” in 1986. In it, she draws upon

historical, oral tradition, and ethnographic sources, in an effort to piece together


























































108
Unknown, “Ashanti Influence in Jamaica,” The Journal of American Folklore
47.186 (Oct.-Dec., 1934): 394.


 81

all of the various duties carried out by maroon women in eighteenth century

Suriname.109 Aside from the family and economic roles described earlier in this

essay, de Groot describes womenʼs unique power in the spiritual sciences of the

Suriname maroons. As ritual experts, women maintained the kinship connections

in the predominately matrilineal communities, they exerted indirect influence over

administrative affairs, and they served as mediums, priestesses, and medicine

women. As healers in maroon communities, women were reputed herbalists,

who shared equal respect in the spiritual arts and ethnobotanical sciences with

men.

This knowledge gained women a great deal of reverence among other

Africans due to the fact that health, injury and malnutrition were of constant

concern to them. The deep belief in, and the highly technical skill involved with

herbal knowledge is a sensibility that points directly to many African cosmological

systems. Maroon women and men institutionalized this knowledge of root and

herb “medicines” by passing it from one generation to the next. In Suriname,

however, the most powerful positions a woman could hold were chieftainess and

tribal mother. Jaja Dandé was a female chief of the Matjau-lo maroons, and

Mama Cató was a tribal mother, political leader and priestess among the Labi-

Dikan clan.110


























































109
Sylvia W. de Groot, “Maroon Women as Ancestors, Priests and Mediums in
Suriname,” Slavery & Abolition 7.2 (1986): 160-174.
110
Ibid.

 82

Other women maroon leaders included Romaine la Prophetesse, Marie-Jeanne,

and Henriette of Haiti and Zeferina of Brazil,111 all of whom played important roles

in maroon defense and spirituality, although few them have been given significant

scholarly attention. Despite the visibility of some maroon women, either as

heroines or victims, the main shortcoming in maroon scholarship is its omission

of their stories altogether. Though his volume on marronage is considered a

seminal work in the field, Richard Priceʼs Maroon Societies pays scant attention

to gender in maroon societies. Several of the passages that involve women are

descriptions of the shortage of women in various maroon communities.

Throughout the book, women are seen as a precious, rare commodity for

(male) maroons. Again, to compensate for this scarcity of African women, Price

and others say that maroon men took Indian women as wives.112 Some historians

have attributed the presence of indigenous Americans in maroon societies solely

to the prevalence of this type of interracial marriage pattern, the un(der)explained

“absence” of African women and indigenous American men in these societies

notwithstanding. Though they did not abscond at the same rate as their male

counterparts, African women did flee enslavement. It is the responsibility of

scholars of marronage and flight to find out to which places the African women

who did not have access to, or whose lives pre-dated the Underground Railroad,

ran.


























































111
Thompson, “Gender and Marronage,” 262-289.
112
Richard Price, “Introduction,” 19.


 83

 As managers of everything from community health (which was of constant

concern to all Africans in slave societies) to the harvest, women offered up

prayers for health and a bountiful harvest. They instructed their children in

spiritual protocol. Those women who were priestesses were known in the West

Indies as obeah and in other places as doctors or conjurers. Hugo Leaming

refers to the Queen of Congo Village as a “soothsayer,” whose specific area of

expertise was interpreting the language of wild birds.113 Again, on the American

side of the Atlantic, these spiritual authorities mainly show up in the historical

record as fearsome participants in resistance activities.

Africansʼ spiritual beliefs, the foundation of their worldviews, caused them to

employ the most potent aspects of their religious praxis to defend themselves

and to attack the system of chattel slavery. As it has already been discussed,

there are numerous records of servile insurrections in which African men and

women are co-conspirators, and even when the women are not identified in

leadership roles, there is strong evidence of their high level of participation.

Women helped to organize and sustain maroon communities, establishing

virtual nations within nations. In the conflicts that arose between Africans and

the state, over the creation and/or defense of these maroon communities—as

with other insurrections of the enslaved—women were strategists and soldiers.

These women rebels were not always arrested, tried, or executed, even when

evidence demonstrated their participation. This was because for some white


























































113
Albert R. Ledoux. Princess Anne: A Story of the Dismal Swamp and Other
Sketches (New York: The Looker-On Publishing Co., 1896), 50.

 84

authorities, it was culturally inconceivable that women would play a role in military

conflict. They had very little understanding of the African social organization of

the enslaved community, and how the concepts of gender and power interacted

in that context.

Despite the commonly held notion that slaveholders had effectively turned

Africansʼ lives into a never ending cycle of work and sleep, womenʼs ritual

expertise proves otherwise. Womenʼs rituals marked each important stage in the

life cycle of an individual. These rituals were brought to the Americas as the

intangible cultural heritage of the Akans and other groups, and should be

assumed to have been re-materialized and actively practiced here, at least

among the African-born and early American-born generations. This assumption

may be a tricky one, but it will stimulate further research into how African people

viewed their life cycles, and how slavery and cultural transformation impacted

these views. Akan cultural heritage was predominant in maroon societies in

places like Jamaica, but in order to identify the specific Akan influence on the

development of black American cultural practices, we must explore the rituals

and beliefs taking place in the Akan societies at this time in history.

With war comes death. What did the Akan women do when warriors fell in

their many battles for sovereignty? Or when one of their loved ones died? They

mourned. Public ritual mourning is a predominately female practice among the

Akan, and it has been since antiquity. Among both patrilineal and matrilineal

African societies, women are typically responsible for providing the deceased


 85

with a proper funeral. In Akan societies, the womenʼs first responsibility is to

protect the spouse of the deceased from any retribution by the deceased. They

believe that the spirit of the deceased may seek revenge for ill treatment during

human life. The lineage women may treat the spouse well or ill, according to how

he/she treated their departed during his/her human life. The first 40 days after a

death, the female lineage ritually maintains the purity of the spouse, especially a

widow, by assigning an elder female to direct all of her actions and words in

society, so as to preserve the delicate mental balance of the widow(er) and

his/her economic stability. The assigned female elder will also provide the

widow(er) with a charm to wear for protection, because he/she is spiritually

vulnerable at this time, as well. Elder women are responsible for cleansing and

laying the body of the deceased in state. They make prayers to Asase Yaa to

allow them to dig into the earth, and also to accept the body of the deceased into

her bosom.

If all of the necessary items and trappings are not in order, the entire lineage

could incur the wrath of the deceasedʼs spirit. At the funeral, women serve as

“seers,” some going into trance and being “mounted by the spirit of the deceased,

who may then deliver messages to the community. This ritual trance may involve

the seer dramatizing significant life events of the deceased, imitating their

speech, dancing or dress. At this time, the seers are elevated to priestly status

and must insure that any instructions given by the deceased are carried out to

the letter.


 86

 Women ritual mourners express the grief of the bereaved family and

community, and also pay tribute to the deceased. They wail loudly, and they sing

dirges from the oral liturgy expressing their grief. Although this ritual emanates

from a natural expression of pain, there is a skill involved, and the goal among

mourners is to perform and recite songs in a way that is especially moving to

their audience. 114 To some extent, in the Americas, loud public displays of grief

and elaborate funerals may not have been practical for enslaved Akans, but there

would be no apparent cause for an abandonment of their attitude towards death,

spirit and commemoration.

Michael Mullin states that women in maroon settlements “conceived, raised

and buried their people in potent territory, as far removed as possible from the

sources of ritual contamination emanating from the coastal estates.”115 To the

puzzlement of both historians and contemporary observers, the Congo Town

maroons of Jamaica returned to the same piece of land several times within a

fifty-year period, despite the siteʼs exposure to whites. Mullins attributes their

reluctance to stay away from the land to the fact that their maroon ancestors

were buried there, a statement which underlines the Akansʼ deep connection to

both the land and the nsamanfo, the ancestors. Leaving behind those who are


























































114
Osei Mensah Aborampah, “Womenʼs Roles in the Mourning Rituals of the
Akan of Ghana” Ethnology, 38.3 (2004): 257-271.
115
Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the
American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1994), 61.


 87

considered “new” ancestors in the Akan/African concept of time is like leaving

behind active members of the community.

In New York, the African Burial Ground provides some useful insights into

how Akan people, specifically women, may have adapted their funerary

practices, but maintained the underlying cultural foci. The Africans enslaved in

this city buried their dead in an area called the Common, and they did so

according to the so-called “Heathenish rites…performed at the grave by their

countrymen,” rather than utilizing the Christian funeral service that was available

to them.116 From the New York example, it seems that the primary adaptations

that were made were to use coffins instead of only cloth shrouds to enclose the

dead, and to move the mourning ritual to nighttime, rather than the all-day,

several-day event that it would be in Asante society. In fact, David Valentine

observed in the 1850s that the Africans at the Commons would bury their dead at

night, amidst “various mummeries and outcries.”117 It is doubtless that these

outcries were by women in ritual mourning, especially since Akan men were

committed to ritual silence at funerals. This burial ground served as African

sacred space, allowing not only Akans, but all Africans to practice their culture

and even to collaborate. Interestingly, one coffin unearthed in 1991 at the African


























































116
Reverend Sharpe, “Rev. Sharpeʼs Proposals,” 255; quoted in Joyce
Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York
City, 1664-1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 122.
117
David Valentine, Manual of the Common Council of New York (New York:
D.T. Valentine, 1865), 567.


 88

Burial Ground was adorned with metal tacks that formed a heart-shaped symbol,

which closely resembles the Akan Adinkra symbol of either sankofa or akoma.118

Another, critical stage in the Akan life cycle is birth. A woman is having her

most important rite of passage at the same time as an ancestral spirit is making

its return to human form. Akans and many others believe that what gives any

person or thing its identity is its name. Akan names, especially day names, are

found throughout the African Diaspora. These names are given to an infant

during a naming ceremony. The Akan typically wait eight or nine days after an

infant is born before giving it a name. This ritual waiting period allows the family

to select properly the names that will be ascribed to the baby, and it allows the

indwelling spirit to decide whether or not it will “stay” in human form, or return to

the ancestral realm. Thus, until it is given a name, the baby is paid very little

attention, and is not considered a full entrant into the realm of the living.119 This

waiting period indicates the Akanʼs means of explaining infant mortality, and

coping with what would otherwise be a grievous loss for a mother (family). It can

be presumed that the harsh conditions of either chattel enslavement or


























































118
This has been identified as Burial #101, and is the coffin of a man, in his
thirties. This burial was discussed in the New York African Burial Ground
Archaeology Final Report, Vol. I, (New York: African Burial Ground Project Office
of Public Education and Interpretation, 2006), 217, 272-274. The sankofa symbol
refers to the adage “Return to oneʼs source,” for to build a good foundation for the
future, one must first know the past. The akoma is a symbol representing
patience and tolerance.
119
David DeCamp, “African Day-Names in Jamaica,” Language, 43.1 (Mar.
1967): 139-149; Osei Mensah Aborampah, “Womenʼs Roles in the Mourning
Rituals of the Akan of Ghana” Ethnology, 38.3 (2004): 257-271.

 89

marronage had a negative impact on childbearing among African women.

The abundance of Akan names among the enslaved, but especially among

the maroons suggests that they maintained their belief in the sacredness of

children and motherhood, even when actually raising their own children was a

duty that they could be easily denied by slave catchers. The Akansʼ ability to

retain their naming traditions far past the first American-born generations is

particularly intriguing, when so many other enslaved Africans were forced to take

names given by their owners. This may indicate another critical aspect of Akan

culture; the deference shown to the “first families” to inhabit an area. Through

oral tradition and ritual, each new generation is socialized to venerate these first

people, usually the African-born, and view them as social models.


 90

CHAPTER THREE: PRIESTESSES CONJURE WOMEN, AND OTHER RITUAL
EXPERTS

In his 1890 book Untrodden Jamaica, Herbert T. Thomas describes Grandy

Nanny, the 18th century Jamaican maroon queen mother, as “possessed of

supernatural powers,” and that she “spirited away the best and finest of the

slaves from the outlying estates.” He goes on to describe her supernatural

powers, as they were used in battle against the British:

She never went into battle armed like the rest, but received the
bullets of the enemy that were aimed at her, and returned them with
fatal effect, in a manner of which decency forbids nearer
description. She kept at the junction of the Nanny and Stony rivers,
at the foot of the precipice on whose brink Nanny Town stood, a
huge cauldron boiling, without any fire underneath; and when the
soldiers and militia drew near to inspect this marvellous [sic]
phenomenon, they fell headlong into it and were suffocated… To
this day, the relics of the siege… are all enchanted, and will vanish
from sight on any sacrilegious hand being stretched out to remove
them from their resting places among the moss and fern. These are
among the most widely current and most devoutly believed of the
many legends in existence”120

Thomas went in search of Nanny Town, for the express purpose of disproving

these “superstitions.” For instance, when he finally reached the area, he found

“Nannyʼs Pot,” a natural pool, about 6 feet in diameter, in which icy, rapidly

moving water from Nanny River collected, giving the impression—from afar—of a

large bubbling cauldron. Several authors, whose focus is on Thomasʼ implication

that Nanny caught bullets with her buttocks and used the same to return fire,


























































120
Herbert T. Thomas, Untrodden Jamaica (Kingston: A. W. Gardner, 1890), 36.

 91

have cited this passage.

Although he refers to her as an “unsexed” “freebooter,” Thomas is the first to

refer to one of Nannyʼs sexualized body parts. To some extent, as Karla Gottlieb

suggests, even the maroons may have taken up this narrative and added it to the

numerous accounts of Nannyʼs bullet-catching. She has been said to catch

bullets with her hands—a fairly common feat attributed to master spiritualists in

many indigenous belief systems. Others have said that she caught bullets

between her thighs. During researcher Leanne Martinʼs interview with a

Jamaican maroon, he re-enacted Nannyʼs bullet-catching, by “flex[ing] his knees

slightly, while saying ʻboomʼ then reached between his legs with both hands and

brought them out cupped together…After doing this three or four times he smiled

broadly and explained that…this action was what made them finally give up

fighting the Maroons.121

Neither Martinʼs nor Thomasʼ descriptions of Nannyʼs bullet catching refer

directly to her behind, and so it is likely that they all may simply be referring to her

thighs. Perhaps Thomasʼs reluctance to describe a woman catching bullets

between her thighs should be read as a reflection of Victorian-era sexual mores,

in which even a womanʼs legs were considered highly sensual, and indecent if

exposed.

In any case, this narrative of Nannyʼs expert use of spiritual “science” brings

out key issues in terms of womenʼs resistance to slavery: 1) That black womenʼs


























































121
Leann Thomas Martin, “Maroon Identity: Processes of Persistence in Moore
Town” (PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 1973), 157.

 92

participation in resistance, and the subsequent interpretations of their actions are

tied to gender and gender ideology; 2) Our definition of organized violent

resistance must be expanded to include spiritual and biological weaponry; 3) This

expansion of the definition of resistance increases the visibility of women as

participants, if not leaders.

This chapter explores the roles played by priestesses, so-called “conjure

women” and other ritual experts, in organized resistance to slavery. Historian

Walter Rucker argues that although traditions like obeah,122 which have been

defined along the same lines as conjure may not be considered “full-fledged

religious system[s], the ubiquity, longevity, and sheer complexity” of these

practices places them on a level above mere “fragments” surviving the cultural

devastation of American slavery.123 Conjure and obeah, are spiritual systems, as

are Santería, Candomblé, and Vodou. What unites these African-based systems

is the belief in the omnipresence of spiritual forces and the ability of human

experts to communicate with spirit to produce certain outcomes, be they

blessings, healing, cleansing, harm, guidance or protection. On the farms and

plantations owned by slaveholders, enslaved women, to whatever degrees they


























































122
Obeah refers to a spiritual system based largely on Akan models of healing,
metaphysical practices, and beliefs. This tradition is found throughout the British
and Dutch Caribbean, mainly among people of African descent.
123
Rucker, River Flows On, 47-48. Rucker is arguing against Jon Butlerʼs notion
that a “spiritual genocide” took place when Africans were enslaved by the British,
leaving them with few African religious ideas after 1760. See Jon Butler, Awash
in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 129-130, 155, 157.

 93

could, utilized the more potent aspects of these spiritual systems in resistance.

No matter where a woman worked, if she had special abilities and knowledge,

she may have been called upon to participate in resistance, though it is often

assumed that the women who worked in white households as domestics were

isolated from their counterparts out in the fields, and much less likely to challenge

slavery. With African cosmologies and their attendant spiritual practices as the

framework, however, a kind of open, flowing continuum between the “big house”

and the fields comes into view. Especially as it relates to direct, aggressive acts

against the white slave owners, there was a great deal of collaboration between

those who worked in the house and those who did not. If they themselves were

not the expert insurrectionists, the cooks, laundresses, and nursemaids were at

least the accomplices who granted access to white bodies and personal property.

This chapter discusses the role played by female ritual experts in organized,

pre-meditated resistance. This may mean small-scale plots like the poisoning of

a slaveholder by just two enslaved people or it may mean large, state or nation-

wide rebellions, as in the case of Antigua, which was discussed in the first

chapter. Whether they were considered royalty or not, African ritual experts

commanded a great deal of respect from both the black and the white

communities. As W.E.B. DuBois states:


 94

 The priest or medicine man represented the power of religion.
Aided by an unfaltering faith, natural sharpness and some rude
knowledge of medicine, and supported by the vague sanctions of a
half-seen world peopled by spirits, good and evil, the African priest
wielded a power second only to that of the chief, and often superior
to it.124

Few resistance movements are named for the African spiritual leaders who

participated, perhaps owing largely to the Judeo-Christian hegemony at work on

all of those same historiographical levels as the patriarchal hegemony, which

obscures female participation in resistance. Still, the presence of male conjurers

and priests like Gullah Jack and Peter the Doctor are well documented in both

the historical record and folk history. Particularly in the U.S., women are not

recognized as key players in slave insurrections, and if there are women found

among the convicts, there is very little information about what they actually did in

these revolts.

I assert that by waging war against slaveholders from within the African

spiritual realm that empowered them, and sometimes, from within white

households, female ritual experts posed a more immediate and elusive threat to

slaveholding society than mainstream American history has previously conceded.

This chapter will discuss several critical functions of priestesses and conjure

women in resistance: makers of charms/protections, poisoners, ritual experts,

and spiritual guides. Akan women, shapers and practitioners of the obeah

tradition, will be the focus of much of this chapter, but with significant discussion


























































124
W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro Church. (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University, 1903), 3.


 95

of women ritual experts from other African traditions.

Poison is one of the more frequently discussed resistance strategies

employed by enslaved women. Perhaps correspondingly, the scholarly discourse

about the use of poisons and other harmful substances has been in very simple

terms, as if almost any enslaved person could have done it, at any time. Scant

attention has been paid to the expertise and logistical work required to

successfully administer these harmful substances. Moreover, while some light

has been cast on the actual plant, mineral and animal materials used in

poisoning by the enslaved, the notion of belief, which was often vital to the

efficacy of a poison or root, has received only brief mention. Most scholars, like

the white slaveholders who wrote about their captives, consider poisoning and

botanical knowledge as separate from spiritual knowledge. For example,

historian Philip J. Schwartz concludes that because “American Indians might

have shared their knowledge of local organic poisons with Afro-American

slaves…in a handful of Virginia cases [of poisoning], the African background is

irrelevant.”125 I assert that the African background is always relevant, especially

as it pertains to interpreting or using the natural world, since nature and spirit, in

African cosmological understandings, are always connected.

Even those enslaved people who learned of the poisonous plant life in the

Americas from the Native American population still had to have the proper


























































125
Philip J. Schwartz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of
Virginia, 1705-1865 (Union, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange, 1988), n.7, p.
98.

 96

training, as well as the trust and faith of other enslaved people who may be a part

of this act. Poisoning was based on very specialized herbal knowledge, but in

many instances, there also had to be a ritual component to bring about the death

of the intended person(s). Some black people thought that because whites did

not believe in the metaphysical power of the conjurer or African priest, any type

of spiritual warfare could not harm them.126 In fact, some enslaved people chose

to poison other enslaved Africans as a form of revenge against their white

slaveholders, not because they were afraid to attack whites directly, but because

they believed that whites were invulnerable to African poisons. White authorities

may not have admitted the existence of sorcery or magic, but they did believe in

it. They certainly punished poisoners, whose skills did cause several white

deaths.

Poisoning was not simply a last resort, used by those who were physically

weak or otherwise powerless. It was, as Schwartz astutely argues, a uniquely

powerful threat, on par with violent insurrections, due to the fact that it was “a

secret attack against which there was no warning and little defense. It was by

nature premeditated as well as efficacious,” not to mention difficult to prove.127 In

other words, enslaved people could mount surprise attacks by either hiding in the

bushes or by feeding the bushes to the enemy.

Poisoning and other metaphysical means of harming, therefore, deserve a


























































126
Slave Religion, 283.
127
ibid, 92.

 97

more central place in the historiography of black resistance. Often considered a

“womanʼs” strategy of aggressive opposition, poison, when situated more

towards the center, will also bring women into the center. This section will

discuss womenʼs use of poison and other “medicines” intended to harm, within

the context of African cosmologies and sacred knowledge. The presence of

enslaved women in the homes of slaveholders made the threat of poisoning a

constant one; they had easier access to whitesʼ bodies as cooks, childcare

workers, and personal assistants.

Proper execution of poisoning required a high level of expertise in plant,

animal and mineral interactions. This expertise was acquired through training. As

with any specialized knowledge, these women may have taught their children

and younger relatives what they knew. There are several examples of

intergenerational and even cross-cultural transfer of knowledge concerning

botanical warfare. Take, for instance the example of a woman named Boukmann,

enslaved in Saint Domingue, who is said to have trained her niece, Marie-Louise,

in the art of poisoning. In 1773, Boukmann, who was 42 years old, was placed in

solitary confinement, and later put to death and burned, but Marie-Louise, who

was 26 years old was spared, on account of her youth and value as a laborer.

François Lory de la Bernardière, the owner of the Cottineau plantation where

these women worked, later expressed his fears that Marie-Louise would poison


 98

the other enslaved people with “herbal concoctions.”128 Interestingly, not twenty

years later, a man named Boukmann would take his place in history as the priest

whose ritual expertise at Boïs Caiman mobilized the enslaved masses to rise up

against the French and dismantle slavery in Saint Domingue.

Before either of the Boukmanns made their mark in Saint Domingue, there

was Mackandal, a maroon leader, who systematically instructed others in the art

of poisoning, intending to wage war on the French, featuring poison as the

primary weapon. His plan was to poison the water supply. He was apprehended

and executed by burning in 1758.129

Mackandalʼs legacy lived on during the Revolt at Saint Domingue: women may

have been the main poisoners responsible for the deaths of scores of French

soldiers camped out at the Galiffet plantation, due to poisoned well water.130

In Akan societies, medicine, aduru, can be good (aduru pa) or bad

(adurubone). Poison (aduto), is in a category all its own.131 In the Americas,


























































128
Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises (Basse-Terre: Société
dʼHistoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), 405, 408, and Gabriel Debien, Plantations et
esclaves à Saint Domingue (Dakar: Publications de la Section dʼHistoire, 1962),
63, 67, both cited in Bernard Moitt, “Slave Women,” 250.
129
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of
Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1992),164. The Mackandal conspiracy caused such alarm
among whites that throughout the French American colonies, deadly poisons or
charms were sometimes called “Mackandals.”
130
Moitt, 252
131
Rucker, The River Flows On, 43.


 99

Akan ritual experts, often called obeah men or women, also used aduru and

aduto to attack their enemies. Medicines intended for harm would have been

administered by a person designated as a healer, odunsini (“one who works with

parts of a tree”), but not a priest (okomfo), since traditionally, priests are not

allowed to harm or kill anyone, except witches (obayifo).132

This fact may also suggest an interesting nuance for the term obeah, which is

thought to have come from the term obayifo (witch): Because Akans defined

witches as those people who have the supernatural ability to take (yi) a womanʼs

(fo-person) child (ba), or her eggs from her womb,133and the fact that physical

and emotional stresses of enslavement, caused a devastating infant mortality

rate in some areas, whites may have been seen as witches, thus giving rise to

the obosombrafo134 function among enslaved priests, whose concern with

catching witches would have been extremely high. Moreover, many other

illnesses among the enslaved were severe and thought to be tied to spiritual

etiologies. Akan healers, however did not cure serious or spiritually-caused

illnesses, priests did.

If obeah were in fact priests, who serve specific spiritual entities, and not

simply healers, the priestly participation in spiritual-medicinal harming may also


























































132
Konadu “Concepts of Medicine.”
133
Ibid., 45
134
These are priests who specialize in witch-catching, empowered to do so by
abosommerafo, spirits who catch witches. Ibid.


 100

be indicative of the transformation of a cultural institution to meet the needs of a

people under duress (enslavement). Whether obeah is a term that more closely

refers to priests or healers, both of them undergo rigorous training, especially

since, as Konadu explains “Akan society...and Akan traditions, in all its

dimensions, allow for the development of specialists or individuals with more than

average competency and knowledge.”135 Edward Long, attempted to explain the

deep trust that black people had in (and his disdain for) obeah and their skills as

poisoners:

The most sensible among them fear the supernatural powers of

African obeah-men, or pretended conjurers; often ascribing those
mortal effects to magic, which are only the natural operation of
some poisonous juice, or preparation, dexterously administered by
these villains…136

This statement indicates that even cultural outsiders, indeed, enemies,

recognized that poison, or “bad medicine” required skill, and with the Akan

context in mind, it is clear that the obeah practitioners could deliver aduto as

expertly as they could deliver aduru pa. In the historical records left by Caribbean

plantation owners, Akan women are perceived as uniquely predisposed to

poisoning, especially the old women thought to be obeah. Many of these women

healers did practice both “good” and “bad” medicine.

There was also a great deal of strategy involved in poisoning. Enslaved


























































135
Ibid. 48.
136
Long, History of Jamaica, 416.


 101

women domestics took advantage of any information they may have had about

their slaveholdersʼ business and/or professional life. This information was

sometimes funneled to the enslaved people who labored outside of the house,

and made for a powerful house-field collaboration against the slaveholders. The

house servants were often the door-openers, if not the actual poisoners. Dolly, an

enslaved woman, probably employed as a childcare worker in South Carolina,

was convicted of poisoning the infant of her owner, James Sands, and for

conspiring with Liverpool, the “Negro Doctor who created the poison, to kill Mr.

Sands in the same manner. Both were burned alive.137

Women who were not necessarily cooks, or who did not have access to easily

ingested poisons, used other methods of subduing whites. Those who were

charged with drawing water could have worked with Boukmann to poison the

local water supply, while housekeepers, laundresses and seamstresses may

have placed poison across doorsills or in white peoplesʼ clothing so that the

poison would be absorbed through the skin. Others made poisons that were to be

inhaled, perhaps by being rubbed into a pillow or a handkerchief.

Not all people who were poisoned died instantly; some people were exposed

to harmful substances over time, so that their murder would look like a gradual

death due to illness. Mark and Phillis were tried and executed in Massachusetts,

for their gradual poisoning of their owner, Captain John Codman, in 1755: “Robin

twice obtained and delivered to Mark a quantity of arsenic, of which the women,


























































137
Rucker, River Flows On, 112. He quotes from the South Carolina Gazette.

 102

Phebe and Phillis, made a solution which they kept secreted in a vial, and from

time to time mixed with the water-gruel and sago which they sometimes gave

directly to their victim to eat, and at other times prepared to be innocently

administered to him by one of his daughters. They also mixed with his food some

of the ʻblack lead,ʼ which Phillis seems to have thought was the efficient poison,

though it appeared from the testimony that he was killed by the arsenic.”138

Several other enslaved people assisted Mark and Phillis, although they were the

only ones convicted of the crime of treason.

Sometimes a poisoning would be scheduled so it would coincide with another

organized resistance strategy, like a revolt or an escape plan. Several female

domestic workers in the largest estate homes of Matanzas, Cuba were recruited

to poison the slaveholders they worked for, in conjunction with the uprising of

1843-1844, and were sometimes given the title of “queen” among the rebels,

owing to their high level of involvement in the rebellion.139 In Trinidad, a

plantation nurse named Thisbe was tortured until she confessed to being a


























































138
Unknown. “The Trial and Execution of Mark and Phillis, in 1755” (reprinted at
the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1883, and taken from
the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature), 4-5. Phillis was sentenced to
burning, making this the only instance of an individual receiving the common-law
penalty for a crime that was considered petit treason. Interestingly, Phebe, the
other woman involved in the poisoning plot, was married to a man with an Akan
name, Quaco (Kweku), which indicates a possible Akan presence—which usually
results in an Akan influence—in this conspiracy.
139
Aisha K. Finch, “Insurgency at the Crossroads: Cuban Slaves and the
Conspiracy of La Escalera, 1841-44,” (PhD diss., New York University, 2007), 69,
242, 329.


 103

poisoner, and a part of a larger insurrectionary plot.140 It was reported that in

Guadeloupe, as a rejoinder to the thwarted rebellion of 1802, several black

women came down “from the hills” and volunteered to work at the military

hospital at Pointe-à-Pitre, so that they could poison the French soldiers being

treated there. When it was suspected that the black nurses were causing the

increasingly high mortality rate among the soldiers, and that they were in

collusion with the free colored in the military, they were “rounded up and shot.”141

These collaborations challenge the commonly held notion that, poisoning was an

individual act of resistance.

Some slaveholders were surprised to discover that their closest, most trusted

house servants were ringleaders in movements to destroy them. In early 19th

century Martinique, the slaveholders were confused and frightened by what they

saw as a transition from the “mysterious African obeah master” poisoner142 to the

supposedly well cared-for overseers, sugar refiners, livestock herders,

chambermaids and childrenʼs nurses.143 These “dutiful” servants became the

prime suspects in all poisoning plots, which were numerous at this point in


























































140
Bush, Slave Women, 76.
141
Moitt, “Slave Women and Resistance,” 252.
142
John Savage, “ʼBlack Magicʼ and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial
Society in Early 19th Century Martinique,” Journal of Social History (Spring 2007):
637.
143
Archives Nationales, Centre d'Archives d'Outre-Mer (hereafter CAOM), FM
SG Martinique 52/430, Rapport du Général Donzelot, September 28, 1822, cited
in Savage, “ʼBlack Magicʼ and White Terror,” 637.


 104

history. White fear had reached such a boiling point that it transformed the

slaveholdersʼ way of life: white women accustomed to being served began to

prepare their own meals, and childcare workers were watched while they nursed

white children. Some formerly trusted house servants were banned from entering

the houses.144 John Savage, in an attempt to explain the motivation of these

domestic workers to poison their owners, cites an “often retold” confession, given

by an accused house servant: “Eh! Itʼs because of your goodness that I

committed so many crimes: things were too good for me…”145 Savage uncritically

accepts the rationale of the majority of slaveholders, that this “class of poisoners

is made up almost exclusively of slaves who are their masters'

favorites ... their crimes are not brought about by despair or excessive labor;

rather it is because of laziness and the special advantages they enjoy."146

This rationale, unfortunately reinforced by Savage, disempowers female

practitioners, even as he reveals their high level of participation in poisoning. He

reinforces the “prose of passivity,” in the sense that the violent actions of

enslaved women are ascribed to some sort of pathological “over-love” for whites,

or simple idleness, rather than frustration, rage and the desire to be free. Savage

completely misses the high probability that the many house servants accused of


























































144
Ibid., 638.
145
Rufz de Lavison, "Recherches sur les empoisonnements," Annales d'hygiène
publique et de médecine légale, 31 (1844): 400, cited in Savage, “ʼBlack Magicʼ
and White Terror,” 638.
146
CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mémoire Rivière, 1829, cited in Savage, “ʼBlack
Magicʼ and White Terror,” 638.

 105

poisoning were masking themselves--resorting to shallow, euphemistic

explanations for their crimes, so as to avoid being punished as severely as they

would if they admitted their true motives. Enslaved women who worked in white

households, could have had any number of motives to poison their captors,

which likely included a desire to put an end to the sexual exploitation they

suffered as easily accessible, unfree persons, and retribution for the stripping of

their maternal rights, while being forced to care for the children of others.

Perhaps future research will reveal more about the gendered nature of

resistance, which is motivated and shaped by the gendered nature of slavery. It

would be interesting, for instance, to learn more about the unnamed sorceress,

aboard a French slave ship, who allegedly caused the shipʼs food and water

supply to disappear and killed several other enslaved Africans aboard the ship.

The shipʼs doctor performed an autopsy on a man who was supposedly killed by

the sorceress, and found his heart and liver dried up and hollow. Shortly after he

beat her severely for her alleged offenses and she swore revenge, the doctor

died a mysterious and painful death; his autopsy revealed that his testicles were

dried up.147 Did the sorceress train her powers on damaging the body parts that

reflected her treatment by each man? Did she shrivel the black manʼs heart

because of unrequited or tainted love? Did she shrivel the white manʼs testicles

because he attempted to rape her? Ultimately, the story indicates that no matter

what interpersonal subplots unraveled on the ship, the sorceressʼ main goal was


























































147
Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
(New York: Basic Books, 2002), 268.

 106

to return to freedom in Africa, and she took steps to make this happen; the ship

was returned to the African coast, and this woman was set free.

In Martinique, the whites felt so surrounded by the invisible threat of poisoning

that they had convinced themselves of the existence of a network of secret

poisoning societies among the Africans on the island, no doubt a reflection of

both their underestimation of the wide impact that an individual poisoner could

have, and residual paranoia about the highly organized poison-based resistance

movement led by Mackandal. Such a large network probably did not exist,

however, studying poisoning from their perspective reveals that Africans did

organize themselves with their cultural knowledge as their bond and the

substance of their resistance.

Akans call a protective charm asuman, or suman. An odunsini works with

sumans to collect medicines, and to facilitate the healing process.148 Among the

predominately Akan maroons of Suriname and French Guiana, the word for a

charm or talisman is asúmani.149 When going to battle with whites, or just going

to work for them, enslaved people felt the need for spiritual and physical

protection. Again, ritual experts were called upon to provide these things (See

Figure 4, an image of a ritual expert in 19th century Suriname).


























































148
Konadu “Concepts of Medicine,” 49.
149
Kwesi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010), table 4.2, p. 115


 107

 Figure 4.
A Spiritual Healer or Medicine Woman, Paramaribo, Surinam, 1839150

In Akan societies, each military unit had its own shrine and priest, who provided

the soldiers with protective powders, charms or amulets, some of which were

thought to make them impervious to bullets.151 Although there is nothing to

suggest that women were more frequently asked to provide spiritual protections

than men, there is nothing that conclusively indicates that they did not do so at

least as frequently as the men. In Cuba, during the 1844 trials of black people

accused of insurrection, charms were mentioned frequently. Aisha Finch writes

that “in the course of the hearings, witness after witness testified to the fact that


























































150
“A Spiritual Healer or Medicine Woman, Paramaribo, Surinam, 1839;” Image
Reference BEN11a, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.
151
Rucker, River Flows On, 42-43.


 108

amulets and other spiritual protections were bought, sold, solicited, and otherwise

provided. It is thus notable that this spiritual arsenal became [one] of the most

carefully hidden, but ironically public weapons of the 1844 resistance.”152 In the

context of organized resistance to American slavery, as in Africa, these charms

were given to enslaved or maroon people to protect them, this time against the

weaponry of the whites.

These charms contained a variety of plant, mineral and/or animal materials,

and were also activated, or charged with sunsum, ashé, or nyama (divine

spiritual energy), through rituals performed by the ritual expert. In the 1712 New

York Slave Revolt, an obeah man called Peter the Doctor gave the insurgents,

largely Coromantees, a powder to rub onto their clothing, which would make

them invincible. In Saint Domingue, these charms were called ouanga. They

could include a variety of items, from candles to bones from a cemetery, to

banana tree roots. In Louisiana, similar protective charms were called gris-gris

from the Mande word, gerregerys, for a negative charm, or zinzin, a Bambara

term for a supportive, or protective charm.153

Towards the very end of the eighteenth century, as thousands of French

planters fled to Louisiana from Saint Domingue with their enslaved servants, the

word wanga, referring to a harmful charm, grew in popularity, although it did not

replace gris-gris. Mackandal himself, described the sacred invocations that were


























































152
Finch, “Insurgency at the Crossroads,” 298.
153
Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 51, 163.

 109

to be said over a charm, in order to make it do its intended work. Gwendolyn

Midlo Hall points out that the “sorcerer” called on both Allah and the Christian

God to activate the charm, and how this reflects the “openness” of the African

religions brought to the Americas. While this assessment is well-reasoned, it is

important to stress that this openness to other versions of the Deity did not

interfere with the Africansʼ interpretation of the Deity. The making of charms

involved prayers of thanksgiving to the spiritual essences of the plant and animal

life that was sacrificed to make the charm. The Judeo-Christian tradition does not

consider plants and animals as beings energized by spirit, hence the distinction

made by some scholars between the major proselytizing faiths and so-called

“animistic” religions. In other words, had the Africans in Haiti, Louisiana, or any

other place where charms were used, truly “added” Muslim and Christian beliefs

to their own, the Africans would not have been praying to them over ouanga!

While charms often involved physical objects and prayers, protective forces

also came in the form of people. Priests, conjurers and herbalists are products of

years of training, but also of their natural spiritual gifts. Some inherit these roles,

and others are simply called by Spirit. Harriet Tubman, often called Moses, was

also referred to as a “charm.” Best known for having delivered dozens of

enslaved people to the free North along the Underground Railroad, Tubman,

credits her 100 percent success rate to her direct communication to heaven. She

never lost a “passenger,” due to the premonitions, visions and dreams given to

her by God.


 110

 In Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister, professor Susan Star Sered describes the

predominance of women spirit mediums, in both male and female-dominated

religions. In the male-dominated religions, especially Christianity, Judaism and

Islam, women are thought to have special sensitivity and receptiveness to spirit

because they are less rational, more impressionable, and generally weaker than

men. Women are associated with nature and spirituality, due to childbirth and

lactation, and men are associated with civilization and culture. In some female-

dominated religions, the same association of women with nature exists, but

instead of being seen as a source of inferiority to men, this connection places

women on a more powerful level than men. Sered also mentions that in Afro-

Brazilian religions—which she categorizes as female-dominated—“natural sites

and materials and culturally constructed sites and materials are equally

sacralized in ritual.154 Hence, Afro-Brazilian female spirit mediums are at least

equal to men, if not in some instances more powerful. This notion of balanced

gender roles in the religious realm is also reflected in what Sered describes as

“fairly even numbers of male and female possessing spirits.”155 To some extent,

Seredʼs observations about the relatively gender balanced nature of Afro-

Brazilian religions can be used to describe Vodou, obeah, and several other

African Diaspora spiritual systems.


























































154
Susan Starr Sered, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by
Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 197-199
155
Ibid., 177. Information is found in Table 3: “The Gender of the Deity.”


 111

 With this in mind, it is certain that enslaved African women who could connect

directly with the spirit realm would have been well respected by their community.

What is more, this spiritual guidance would not have been considered as potent

by those operating in a Judeo-Christian framework (including present-day

historians).

Take, for example, the fact that Harriet Tubmanʼs most recent biographers,

such as Kate Clifford Larson, hypothesize that the dreams and visions are side

effects of a brain injury resulting from a blow to the head she received from an

overseer,156 despite the fact that this theory cannot also explain why each of the

spiritual messages and feelings that Tubman received were accurate, nor can it

explain the myriad other spiritual abilities that she possessed and wielded

successfully in the name of freedom.

Tubman, born in Maryland, sometime in the early 1820s, began her lifeʼs

mission more than one hundred years after Nanny led her maroon soldiers

against the British. Like Nanny, however, Tubman—born with the name Araminta

Ross—was said to be of Ashanti origin. Her maternal grandmother, Modesty,

was born in Africa and brought over on a slave ship, possibly from the Gold

Coast of Africa, from which a significant number of Akan speakers were taken

into slavery in the Chesapeake during the 18th century. Tubmanʼs Ashanti origins

are therefore, a strong possibility. An early 20th century reporter used the


























































156
Kate Clifford Larson, Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait
of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), 42-43.


 112

testimony of the elder women in Tubmanʼs community to support this theory of

her origins:

…the old mammies to whom she told dreams were wont to nod
knowingly and say, ʻI reckon youse one oʼ dem “Shantees,” chile.ʼ
For they know the tradition of the unconquerable Ashantee blood,
which in a slave made him a thorn in the side of the planter or cane
grower whose property he became, so that few of that race were in
bondage.157

While the last point about the small number of Ashanti winding up as slaves is

questionable, this quote provides some additional clues about her origins, or at

least, in what general cultural context her special abilities might be better

understood. One of Tubmanʼs supporters summed up how Tubman is viewed in

an African cosmological context: “De whites canʼt catch Moses, kase you see

sheʼs born wid de charm.”158

First, there are her dreams, which she told to the elder women. While the

writer, Frank Drake, focuses on the Ashantiʼ reputation as rebellious Africans, he

does not explain why the telling of her dreams might have prompted the old

women to label her an Ashanti. Were the Ashanti thought to have special abilities

manifested through dreams, or place some cultural emphasis on dreams? What

were these dreams about? Perhaps rebellion was a recurring theme in the


























































157
Frank C. Drake, “The Moses of Her People. Amazing Life Work of Harriet
Tubman,” New York Herald, Sept. 22, 1907.
158
William Wells Brown, The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement
of the Colored Race (Boston: A. G. Brown, 1874; reprinted in Florida:
Mnemosyne Inc., 1969), 538.


 113

dreams. Before she escaped from slavery, Tubman had dreams of flying like a

bird, and reaching a barrier (a river or fence) above which she lacked the

strength to fly. Just when she felt her strength running out, women dressed in

white would help her across. She said that this dream was a premonition of her

actual flight to freedom, and that when she got there, she met those people who

had come to her aid in her dreams.159 She received an intuition that her brothers

were in danger of being sold further south, and arrived to take them to freedom

the night before they were to be sold. During one of her “Railroad” journeys, she

suddenly felt that the group should change course, and led them through a

rushing river. While the group balked at the risky and difficult path, they followed

her through the water. They found out later that had they stayed on their original

path, slave patrollers would have caught them.160

Because U.S. narratives of slave resistance tend to focus more on flight than

conflict with whites, Tubmanʼs more aggressive methods are downplayed, or

seldom mentioned. For instance, while it is common to learn that she carried a

gun, this gun is only seen as something that was turned on other black people—

the cowards who wanted to turn back to their owners. This gun was for security

and protection, from anyone, black or white. Had she been a pacifist, or against

killing, she would not have been a supporter of the radical, violent approach


























































159
Jermaine O. Archer, “ʼA Breathing of the Common Wind:ʼ Cultural and Political
Expressions of Africa in Antebellum Slave Narratives,” (PhD diss., University of
California, Riverside, 2004), 104.
160
Ibid., 93-95.


 114

taken by John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. According to Tubman, her

prayers could be used as a weapon. She prayed to soften the heart of her owner,

Edward Brodess, and to make him a “good Christian gentleman,” so that he

would not sell her onto a chain gang in the Deep South. When it appeared that he

still intended to sell her, she prayed to God to kill him. “Next ting [she] heard, ole

master was dead, and he died just as he had lived, a wicked, bad man.”161

Tubman fits quite neatly into the resistance tradition of the Akan women before

her. She was unafraid to be a warrior, and she fought with both physical and

spiritual weapons. Her abilities as a diviner would have made her a priestess, but

she also had skills as a healer.

During the Civil War, Tubman nursed diseased soldiers back to health through

herbal and root-based remedies. She cured everything from smallpox to

dysentery, without getting sick herself.162 Spiritual workers were often seen as

immune to common issues and ailments that afflicted the rest of the population.

Their connection to the spirit world afforded them knowledge that could protect

them.

Protection and warfare were not the only uses of a spiritual guideʼs abilities in

resistance. As messengers for the spirit world, some spirit mediums drew people

to participate in organized resistance, by revealing the will of the spirit that they


























































161
Georgia Writerʼs Project, Drums and Shadows (Georgia: University of Georgia
Press, 1940), 24.
162
Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: W.J.
Moses, 1869), 95-98.


 115

do so. Barbara Bush points out that in the French Caribbean, “grand voodoo

priestesses” had an important role, and through spiritual revelations, gave

courage to the rebels.163 John Stedman, described how some women spiritual

mediums in Suriname stirred other enslaved people into battle, or caused them to

run away, by carrying the spirit in “pagan” rituals. He stated that among the

enslaved, there was

…a kind of Sybils, who deal in oracles; these sage matrons dancing

and whirling round in the middle of an assembly with amazing
rapidity until they foam at the mouth and drop down convulsed.
Whatever the prophetess orders to be done, during this paroxysm
is most sacredly performed by the surrounding multitude which
renders these meetings extremely dangerous, as she frequently
enjoins them to murder their masters, or desert to the woods.164

It is clear from this vivid description, that Stedman has discovered the more

threatening aspects of spiritual mediumship, in the context of resistance. DuBois

would have called this type of spirit possession “the frenzy.”165 Spiritual

messengers were not only given messages telling rebels what time and where

to/not to stage a rebellion; the spirits they carried were sometimes the ones

calling for the rebellion!


























































163
Bush, Slave Women, 74.
164
John Stedman, Narrative of a Five Yearsʼ Expedition against the Revolted
Negroes of Surinam, Richard and Sally Price, eds. (1796; reprinted in Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press,1988), 304.
165
W.E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Washington Square
Press, 1970), 155.


 116

 The ritual described in the above quote from Stedman, involving “dancing and

whirling round,” may have been the Komfo ritual, especially if it were taking place

at a river. The Komfo, or Cumfo signified the desire of the enslaved to return to

Africa, if not across the Atlantic Ocean, then at least by crossing the cosmic

divide (both of which were symbolized by the ritual crossing of the river).166 This

ritual is likely linked to the officiant whose title, okomfo is indicated by its name,

thus also linking it to Akan culture. Because in the Africansʼ cosmological view,

every action taken must call on the aid of Spirit, this and other rituals formed the

foundation of black resistance. Theoretically, because women were often equal

participants, if not spiritual leaders, their ritual expertise placed them at the scene

of nearly every organized resistance movement among enslaved Africans.

In Cuba, when an enslaved person was beaten, all of those who witnessed it

would quickly gather, each adding a handful of dirt to a pot. Then, according to

Esteban Montejo, “the master fell ill or some harm came to his family because

while the dirt was in the pot, the master was a prisoner there, and not even the

devil could get him out.”167 Montejo identifies this particular ritual as a form of

revenge used by the Congo people. He does not specify this ritual as a menʼs or

womenʼs ritual, and since both genders were flogged, and both genders were

forced to watch this brutality, it can be comfortably assumed that women were


























































166
Konadu, Akan Diaspora, 146.
167
Esteban Montejo, Biography of a Runaway Slave (1860, reprinted in
Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1994), 27-28. Translated to English by Rice
Hill.


 117

involved in the “Congo revenge” ritual.

In the case of Antigua, in 1736, there were at least two women involved. One

was, as stated Old Queen (mother). The other was a woman named Obbah.

Though each likely played important roles in the revolt, neither was tried,

executed or banished. Obbah is probably a transformation of the Akan name,

Aba. At some point during the planning of the rebellion, Obbah held a feast for

her sister and brought “Dirt from her Sisters Grave…in a Callabash,” which

another person mixed with wine. According to Gaspar, these feasts were

commonly gatherings used to recruit new rebels into the insurrectionary army,

and to swear them to an oath of loyalty and secrecy. In eighteenth century Akan

societies, this oath, the ntam, was routinely administered to the military before a

campaign, binding all soldiers in an unbreakable pact. The dirt taken from the

graves of deceased relatives or other ancestors was used in ritual concoctions to

obligate the oath-takers to the entire Akan community, which consisted of

humans, ancestral spirits and deities.168 They were to each drink the mixture from

the calabash. Obbah facilitated a ritual that was to ensure the safety and stability

of the soldiers.

Moreover, Obbahʼs use of her sisterʼs grave dirt is a ritual acknowledgement

of the spiritual potency of kinship (abusua) and land (Asaase Ya). In this layering


























































168
David Barry Gaspar, “From “A Sense of Their Slavery”: Slave Women and
Resistance in Antigua, 1632-1763,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and
Slavery in the Americas, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 218-238.


 118

of feminine spiritual power, she re-emphasized the distinct sacredness of both

her female blood lineage and the earth over her sisterʼs grave. Indeed, many

oaths and rituals were performed at gravesites, which in the absence of a sacred

grove or clearing, functioned as African sacred space.

Strikingly similar “damnation oaths,” were taken by enslaved rebels in

Jamaica in 1760, and in New York in 1712. “Coromantee” Africans in New York

took blood oaths by sucking the blood from a cut made in each personʼs hand.

Other Akan oath drinks mixed blood, graveyard dirt, and water.169 A violation or

failure to fulfill oneʼs oath brought the ultimate dishonor to an Akan. Although

suicide is considered abominable to Akans, the breaking of the Ntam may prompt

a soldier to kill himself or herself. After the revolt on St. John was thwarted, 36

Akan insurgents committed suicide.170 What can be surmised from each of these

swearing rituals is that no matter what physical materials are available, the ritual

reflects a soul-deep belief in the spiritually-binding power of blood ties and sacred

earth

At these recruitment gatherings, as well on the battlefield, rebels also

depended on women for food, and other kinds of logistical support. One of the

main ritual functions served by women in the context of warfare, both in Asante

and in the Americas, was to perform mmomommme twe, pantomime dances and

sing dirges in support of the warriors. Kwame Arhin describes this tradition thus:


























































169
Rucker, River Flows On, 43-44.
170
Ibid.


 119

 It is unclear whether the dances and songs were expected to have
magico-religious effects on the enemy. But they had the practical
effect of shaming potential war-dodgers known as kôsaankôbi into
joining the war. Women were also authorized to compose songs
that could drive confirmed war-dodgers to suicide. The situation can
be summarized by saying that the essential female military role was
to give encouragement to men. Giving encouragement could,
however, take a dramatic and more positive turn, if a woman of high
status seized arms, or as the Asante called it, bontoa, as an
example to the males in order to arouse their sense of honour and
sharpen their martial ardour.171

It is also unclear as to whether this wartime womenʼs ritual support is the same

as the momome ritual, a cleansing ritual also performed by women, to purify the

community in “moments of impending crisis.”172 Considering the number of

violent attacks, both organized and spontaneous, that were visited upon

slaveholding societies, ritual cleansings probably occurred much more frequently

than we know. In Congo Village in the Dismal Swamp maroon community, the

residents took spiritual baths.173 There is no information available describing the

purpose of these baths, but it can be inferred that if they were used in times of


























































171
Kwame Brempong Arhin, “The Role of Yaa Asantewaa in the 1900 Asante
War of Resistance,” Le Griot, Vol. VIII (Kumasi: Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology, Department of African Studies, 2000).
172
According to an English translation of the abstract for “Exclusion de femmes
de la communauté. Le rituel momome du monde akan,” author Stefano Boni says
that momome is a Sefwi variant, and goes on to describe it as a “response to
wars and epidemics in the pre-colonial setting,” which involved “dresses, spatial
dispositions and movements, chromatic symbolism, metaphoric acts, use of
therapeutic herbs, (and) songs.” This article can be found in Cahiers Dʼ Études
Africaines, Vol. 192.4 (2008). Abstract accessed May 2nd, 2009.
http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=CEA_192_0765#.
173
Hugo Prosper Leaming, “Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the
Carolinas,” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1979), 499.

 120

peace, they were certainly used in times of war.

Because African women drew upon their sacred knowledge and cultural

institutions to resist slavery, their actions added insult to the injuries they gave to

shocked, disgusted, and fearful white observers. It was bad enough that Africans

rebelled at all, but the women participating, indeed sometimes spearheading

these movements, had stepped completely out of their “place.” Women who were

treated like brutes, children, and sex objects, declared themselves queens,

sovereign citizens and sacred. Women domestics collaborated with field workers,

men, deities, and whoever else was interested in freedom. They did these things

on their own terms. In the context of American slavery, African women ritual

experts turned the very idea of power on its head, forcing white slaveholders to

find creative ways to suppress this power, without actually admitting where it

came from. The next chapter is an examination of the judicial and social

measures taken to criminalize, punish, and eliminate African womenʼs resistance,

especially that which incorporated their cultural tools.


 121

 CHAPTER FOUR: CRIMINALIZING AND PUNISHING THE BLACK MAGIC
WOMAN

As the previous chapters have established it, Euro-Americans were well

aware (and afraid) of the use of African metaphysical practices in the resistance

of the enslaved, and thus, were well aware of womenʼs participation. The focus of

the present chapter, takes the idea deeper into Euro-American folk beliefs, back

to the 17th century obsession with witches and witchcraft. This period, often

called the witch craze, solidified Europeansʼ and Americansʼ association of

witches with women, to the extent that 80 percent of those accused of, and 85

percent of those executed for witchcraft were women.174 If in seventeenth century

America, a white witch (woman) was defined as a minion of Satan, then a black

witch (woman) was something worse. Due to what is being called the

“intersectionality” of their race and gender, black women were uniquely targeted

by the American court of public opinion, and by extension, the American criminal

justice system. In fact, between the years 1632 and 1879, 87 percent of the

women executed in Virginia were enslaved. They were executed for the general

crime of murder, as well as for crimes considered to be more gender-specific, like

witchcraft, arson and poisoning.175


























































174
Logan, Rebecca. “Witches and Poisoners in the Colonial Chesapeake.” PhD
Diss., The Union Institute, 2001. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
175
Keith Harries, “Gender, Execution and Geography in the United States,”
Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 74.1 (1992): 24-25.


 122

 This chapter explores the legal and social measures taken by white

slaveholding society to limit African womenʼs use of culturally grounded tools of

resistance. By defining certain cultural practices as “crimes,” and by using torture

to punish “criminals,” slaveholders attempted to decrease these resistance

methods, often—especially in the U.S. context—without admitting their existence

or power. In Flight to Freedom, Alvin Thompson describes the prosecution

(persecution) and punishment of maroons as “judicial terror,”176 and rightly so.

From gibbeting,177 to being ʻbrokenʼ on the wheel, to being burned alive, black

women were given extremely harsh sentences for their crimes, even though they

are not thought to have played a part in organized resistance. The severity of the

punishments also reflects the high level of the threat women posed to slave

societies.

Black women were sometimes punished differently than black men, even for

the same crimes. Take for instance, the case of Mark and Phillis, in

Massachusetts. Both were convicted for poisoning, which was considered petit

treason according to British colonial law. Mark was executed by hanging and


























































176
Thompson, Flight to Freedom.
177
Gibbeting a person involved dangling a convicted personʼs body from a
structure that sometimes resembled a gallows, for public display, until a specified
amount of time passed. A personʼs body or body parts would usually be wrapped
in chains or contained in a cagelike structure. It could be done after a person
was executed, or, depending on the amount of time and how his/her body was
left hanging, it could serve as a form of execution. This display added to the
humiliation of the convicted person, and it functioned as a warning to others not
to commit the same offense.

 123

gibbeting, while Phillis was burned to death.178 The burning of Phillis was highly

unusual; it was a common law punishment, given to the alleged perpetrator of a

high crime (treason). It was, therefore, likely tied to her gender, and if so, was a

direct result of being categorized as a witch by the whites of the Massachusetts

Colony.

According to European folk beliefs about witches, which reached a sinister

height from the mid-1400s through the mid 1700s, a witch was someone who had

given his/her soul to Satan, either by signing it over in a contract, or by having

sexual intercourse with Satan.179 This second belief about the means by which

one becomes an agent of the Devil—who is considered a male—reflects the

belief in European societies that witches are predominately women. Womenʼs

souls were deemed weaker and inferior to those of men, which made them easier

prey for the Evil One, no doubt an idea carried over from the Biblical story of

creation, featuring a pious man, Adam, and an impressionable woman, Eve, who

was tempted by the Devil to eat forbidden fruit. It was also believed that women

could teach their children witchcraft. Like most Africans, Europeans believed that

witches received their power from spirits, although some European witches

confessed to having received spiritual powers from Satan. Satan, however, is a

Judeo-Christian concept that does not exist as such—one all-encompassing

source of evil, personified—in African spiritual cosmologies.


























































178
“The Trial and Execution of Mark and Phillis…1755.”
179
Logan, “Witches and Poisoners,” 11.

 124

 Rebecca Logan points out that the Christian church was anxious about the

source of a witchʼs power, specifically, whether or not it came from the Devil,

while most laypeople were more concerned about how a witch used this

power.180 As it related to women of African descent, whites assumed that since

all black people are born slaves of Satan, the source of a black witchʼs power

was already known. In Cotton Matherʼs popular monograph The Negro

Christianized (1706), he describes a European perspective on Africansʼ

“inherent” Satanism:

Very many of them [enslaved Africans] do with Devilish[sic] Rites

actually worship Devils, or maintain a magical conversation with
Devils. And all of them are more slaves to Satan than they are to
You, until a Faith in the Son of God has made them free indeed.181

Timothy J. McMillan proposes a more appropriate title for a book on New

England witchcraft The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: he says it should be

Devil in the Shape of a Black Man.182 Not only did whites view Africans as linked

to the Devil through heathenish cultural practices, but naturally, by virtue of


























































180
Ibid., 15.
181
Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized : An Essay to Excite and Assist the
Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-servants in Christianity (1706), 14-15.
Mather was a central figure in the prosecution of witches at Salem,
Massachusetts Bay Colony.
182
Timothy J. McMillan, “Black Magic: Witchcraft, Race and Resistance in
Colonial New England,” Journal of Black Studies 25.1 (Sept. 1994): 107.


 125

looking like the Devil. Many witnesses in the Salem witch trials describe Satan as

a ʻblack man.ʼ

Some scholars have suggested that those Black people who were executed

by burning were punished that way because of the colonistsʼ belief that in order

to avoid the spiritual retaliation of a person possessed by the Devil, i.e. a witch,

his/ her body must be burned.183 In his 1992 study, mentioned above, Keith

Harries also reports that death by “judicial immolation,” or burning, was a

punishment almost exclusively meted out to enslaved persons.184 The accused—

and subsequently executed, however, were more likely black women than black

men.

European Christian rhetoric and imagery associated both physical blackness

and cultural Africanness with evil. In a cruel irony, however, many of the negative

aspects that have been ascribed to African-based religious practices may

actually originate in European folk spiritual beliefs. The association of harmful

practices with witchcraft, and the association of witchcraft with African people

and cultures, has contributed not only to historical judicial terror, but it has


























































183
McMillan, “Black Magic,” 106.
184
See Keith Harries, “Gender, Execution and Geography.” In England, women
convicted of high treason were burned at the stake, instead of being drawn and
quartered like their male counterparts, due to the nudity involved in the quartering
of a body, and, ironically, in the name of “public decency.” Still, no white women
were burned at the stake in colonial New England, hub of anti-witchcraft activity.
An enslaved black woman, Maria, was, however, burned at the stake in Roxbury,
Massachusetts, in 1681, for arson. See J. Noble, ed. Records of the Court of
Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay: 1630-1692, Vol. I (Boston:
The County of Suffolk, 1901),198, and McMillan, “Black Magic,” 105.

 126

shaped Western attitudes towards African spiritual cultures until today. Timothy J.

McMillan interprets the witchcraft trial of an African woman named Candy, who

actually confessed to practicing magic, and showed the court several witchcraft

items, including a piece of cloth in which many knots had been tied. Although

Candy assured the court that she learned witchcraft in Salem from her white

mistress, Marguerett Hawks, and not in her birthplace, Barbados, McMillan

insists that the knotted cloth was “obviously a doll to stick with pins or to rend to

inflict pain on others.” While this statement alone is already quite presumptive,

McMillan goes on to assert that Candyʼs use of the doll to harm a specific person

“is common in the sympathetic magic which makes up part of voodoo belief.”185

Not only is this statement geographically inaccurate—the term “voodoo,” being

used by a scholar, at least, should refer to the Vodou religion that would have

been practiced in Saint Domingue at this time, not Barbados or New England—

but it also completely disregards Candyʼs testimony that her magic was learned

from a white woman. Candyʼs testimony supports the argument that has been

repeatedly and effectively made that the use of so-called “voodoo dolls” is a

European magical practice, and not an African one. Daniel Cohen states,

“European colonists in America were sticking pins in dolls made from the clothes

of their enemies without receiving any instruction from African slaves…It may

well have been the slaves who picked up the voodoo doll from their European


























































185
McMillan, “Black Magic,” 107.


 127

masters.”186 Voodoo dolls are definitely not a part of the Vodou tradition, even

though if taken at face value, McMillanʼs essay would serve to reinforce this

erroneous notion.

The belief that African women were naturally witches by virtue of color and

culture is not, however, directly expressed in the laws and criminal trials in the

U.S. Slavery-era law makers and enforcers did not directly address the spiritual

origins of a black personʼs powers; they focused on what was done (or

attempted) with this power.

Take, for instance poisoning. It was considered a particularly dangerous

specialty of witches, and was thought to work magically, not chemically.187 Still,

there is nothing that explicitly states this in either trial records or legislative

documents. To some extent, then, the pre-Christian spiritual beliefs of Europeans

may also provide a context with which to locate spiritual resistance on the part of

enslaved African people. Hence, although the death of Captain Codman was

ascribed to the arsenic, the designation of Phillis as a witch, as evidenced by the

manner in which she was executed, indicates that the poisoning death of the

Captain was thought to be magically or spiritually induced.

This chapter will explore how whitesʼ folk beliefs about women, Africans and

spiritual means of harming (witchcraft) intersected with their fears about

organized resistance from their enslaved laborers, and subsequently informed


























































186
Daniel Cohen, Voodoo, Devils and the New Invisible World (New York: Dodd,
Mead and Company, 1972), 56.
187
Logan, “Witches and Poisoners,” 13.

 128

the legal and social practices meant to eradicate such resistance. Slaveholders,

who had a heavy influence in American judicial systems, if they were not actually

participants in these systems, attempted to limit enslaved peopleʼs capacity to

establish black political leadership. As an incubator for leadership based on

African models, marronage of every type and level was violently repressed.

Furthermore, an assortment of African spiritual and medical practices was

criminalized. The induction of African leadership required ceremonies and/or

rituals, which were curtailed, to some extent, primarily by curfews and bans

placed on gatherings or spiritual observances among black people. As a more

defiant expression of sovereignty, marronage was punished harshly, whether a

person ran away to an urban area, or to a full-fledged maroon society. Although

whites themselves sometimes called on African healers and ritual experts, they

passed laws that prohibited black people from practicing medicine, possessing

certain substances that could be poisonous, and from practicing non-Christian

spiritual traditions.

Known as an “obeah-influenced” rebellion, Tackyʼs War also resulted in the

passing of several laws that would restrict the practice of each of the interrelated

aspects of African social organization: religion, politics, medicine, and education.

White fear of violent Black resistance produced a revitalization of what are often

called “obeah laws,” first seen in Jamaica in 1696. The original laws provided for:


 129

 The prevention of the meeting of slaves in great numbers on
Sundays and Holidays, whereby they have taken liberty to contrive
and bring to pass many of their bloody and inhuman
transactions…no master, or mistress, or overseer, shall suffer any
drumming or meeting of any slaves not belonging to their own
plantations, to rendezvous, feast, revel, beat drum, or cause any
disturbance.188

Clearly, the white slave planters were not ignorant of the rites and

ceremonies involved in the planning of insurrections, which could include,

especially among the Akans, the installation of leaders and organized fighting

units. Akan people were, as it has been established, well known for their fierce

nationalism, which troubled whites greatly. Their allegiance was to a concept of

God and nation that superseded any authority whites could hope to have over

them. If effectively enforced, laws such as this would have prevented the

enstoolment of an Akan queen or king, and thereby limit the rebellious potential

of an Akan religious ceremony. It may have been the violation of this law, which

led to Cubahʼs sentencing to transportation, and eventually to execution.

Had Cubah, in all of her queen motherly regalia, been on another island, say,

in the Danish West Indies, she would have also been guilty of violating

sumptuary laws. Sumptuary laws were designed to restrict the elevation and/or

expression of enslaved black people to a higher social status than slavery had

intended for them. These laws, which existed in many slaveholding societies,

prohibited enslaved people from possessing, and especially wearing, luxury


























































188
Acts of Assembly, passed in the Island of Jamaica, from 1681 to 1737,
inclusive (London, 1743), 35.

 130

items, such as silk, lace, precious metals and precious stones. Jamaica never

adopted any such laws, although a member of the Jamaican Assembly proposed

a bill in 1745.189 The Danish West Indies had this law, which may have, to some

extent, limited the full ritual dress of the Akans who revolted at St. John, or else

drove their ceremonies to establish leadership further underground.

Because these reputed insurrectionists and “troublemakers” also exerted

influence over other enslaved Africans, the threat of expressing Akan sovereignty

was not limited to just their group. Moreover, Akans were increasingly open to

collaborating with other groups in planning and executing rebellions, towards the

latter half of the eighteenth century. Because they still intended to establish new

nations based on Akan cultural and political structures, while incorporating a

larger number of people, these inter-ethnic collaborations made Akan leadership

an even bigger threat to Jamaicaʼs slaveholders. White Jamaican lawmakers

reacted to the 1760 rebellion by suggesting a bill, in 1765, to ban importation of

so-called “Coromantins.” Edward Long, of course, supported this idea:

Such a bill, if passed into law would have struck at the very root of
evil. No more Coromantins would have been brought to infest this
country, but instead of their savage race, the island would have
been supplied with Blacks of a more docile tractable disposition and
better inclined to peace and agriculture.190


























































189
Journal of the Assembly of Jamaica 4 (1745-46): 45. Cited in Steeve O.
Buckleyʼs The Language of Dress, p. 31.
190
Long, History of Jamaica, 471.


 131

Akans were seen as a sort of pest, or pestilence, which afflicted the whites of the

island. This bill would discourage the importation of Akan peoples by placing “an

additional higher duty on all Fantin, Akim, and Ashantee Negroes, and all others

commonly called Coromantins, that should after a certain time, be imported, and

sold in the island.”191 The bill was not passed.

It appears that Akan queens, kings and other types of leaders were

established specifically to galvanize enslaved people around a specific revolt.

People were drawn in by the idea of a new nation, which would replace the

oppressive slave state in which they lived. These expressions of African

sovereignty, however, were not as consistently threatening and destabilizing to

American slaveholding regimes as marronage.

Running away was considered one of the most serious “crimes” an enslaved

person could commit. Being a maroon was, therefore, an even worse offense.

Every slaveholding society attempted to prevent marronage among the Africans

through strict legislation, and by cultivating fear of punishment through torture.

The punishment of maroons was often brutal; these men and women

demonstrated that not only could African people survive without the welfare of

their owners, but they could thrive. The ability of enslaved people to evade

capture, start families, and to even sometimes return to plantations and farms to

steal—supplies or other enslaved people—shed a humiliating light on whitesʼ

delusion that black people could not provide for or govern themselves if left to


























































191
Ibid., 470.

 132

themselves. It disproved the notion that black people had accepted their station

in life and were happy as slaves. Maroons called into question the slaveholdersʼ

way of life, and it shook their sense of security.

The mythology that circulated about Queen Nanny and her aforementioned

magical cauldron shows that whites were not only threatened by maroonsʼ

autonomy and possible thefts, but of their freedom to practice African culture. As

a reputed “woman of science,” a spiritual leader, She was called an “old hagg,” a

witch by outsiders. As such, in the minds of whites, the natural pool near her

community became one of the quintessential Euro-American witchʼs

accoutrements: a bubbling cauldron, in which men, women and children could be

boiled up—and probably eaten. It is also quite possible that maroons themselves

took advantage of white folk beliefs and propagated this myth to discourage

whites from coming to Nannytown. Several maroon societies were known for the

“magic” or “witchcraft” that was practiced by their inhabitants. The maroon cumbe

of Birongo, in Venezuela, still has a strong reputation for its “witchcraft” practices,

which were banned by the Spanish colonial government. In Birongo, the

maroons, or cimarrones, could practice their African spiritual traditions freely, and

it is well known that the abuelas (grandmothers) have all along been the keepers

of these traditions.192


























































192
According to Professor Quito Swan, who has done two research trips to
Venezuelan cumbes, African spiritual traditions are alive and well. Birongo even
houses a settlement called Ganga, which probably comes from the Kikongo term
nganga, meaning healer or priest. (personal communication: June 2010).


 133

 Even in the U.S., which is not commonly thought of as a hotbed of maroon

activity, there was high anxiety about maroons. According to Kwasi Konadu,

between the years 1660 and 1772, the majority of the laws passed “concerning

slavery and the maintenance of this social order focused on runaways and

outlying enslaved Africans (some of whom pursued maroonage)…” 193

The draconian penalties applied to maroons reflected both the high threat and

personal insult that their mere existence represented to whites. They broke and

burned and shredded maroonsʼ bodies, and they attacked the dignity and identity

of people who had fought hard to maintain both. Angry, fearful slaveholders used

a maroonʼs gender against him/her, and especially attacked families.

In Dominica, in 1814, a governor issued a “no quarter” policy towards

maroons: His officers were instructed to execute maroons on sight, regardless of

whether said maroons were men, women, or children. In some instances,

maroon women and children were offered up as a reward to those officers who

could locate and attack a particular maroon settlement.194 This practice evokes

the question “how did these recaptured women deal with their fates as returnees

to the plantations they left, as new ʻpropertyʼ of an unfamiliar man, or as

prisoners destined for torture and/or execution?”


























































193
In Konadu, Akan Diaspora, 175, Konadu attributes most of the Virginia
plantersʼ fear to reports of costly, deadly Maroon Wars in Jamaica, and their
realization that Africans in Virginia could as easily take refuge in its mountainous
regions.
194
Thompson, “Gender and Marronage ,” 262-289.


 134

 Not all of these ʻjudicial terrors,ʼ as Alvin Thompson aptly calls them, were

explicitly outlined in the laws. The French definition of the crime and the

corresponding punishment of marronage in Le Code Noir is quite basic:

The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month from the
day his master reported him to the police, shall have his ears cut off
and shall be branded with a fleur de lys on one shoulder. If he
commits the same infraction for another month, again counting from
the day he is reported, he shall have his hamstring cut and be
branded with a fleur de lys on the other shoulder. The third time, he
shall be put to death.195

This strict, systematized ʻcorrectionalʼ procedure for fugitives did not prevent

French slaveholders from punishing their recaptured “property” in myriad other

creative ways. Women maroons were punished with brutality, and sometimes

rape.196 Those who were mothers suffered more greatly because their children

were sometimes punished along with them. In Guadeloupe, a woman who was

only suspected of having plans to abscond was chained by either the neck or

ankle to her child, indefinitely. Children as young as six years of age were seen


























































195
“Le Code Noir,” Article XXXVIII, 1685. Free online law dictionary.com.
Accessed February 20th, 2010.
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/code+noir.
196
Thomas Thistlewood of Jamaica purchased Sally, a Kongolese woman,, in
1762. He raped her at least 37 times. She repeatedly ran away from him, and on
at least one occasion, Thistlewood raped her as a form of punishment. Found in
Thompson, Flight to Freedom, 75.


 135

walking around bruised and burdened by the same heavy shackles that bound

their mothers, the ʻmauvais sujetsʼ (mischievous subjects).197

These gendered torture methods were not only applied to women. Recaptured

maroon men were sometimes humiliated by being made to dress like women.

Other times, despite legal prohibitions, they were castrated, or they were made to

watch as their wives and/or mothers were tortured and/or killed. Sometimes,

maroons were forced out of hiding by the slow torture of their family members,

which would, ostensibly, only end when he/she surrendered and returned to

slavery.

The maroon couple, Claire and Copena were captured, and on charges of

marronage, bearing firearms, theft, and of carrying off other enslaved people to

their community, were executed. Copenaʼs limbs and back were broken on a

scaffold, and thereafter his body was tied, face up, to a wheel and left “exposed.”

Claire, on the other hand was hanged. The most sinister aspect of their brutal

executions, however, was that their six children, also convicted of marronage,

were sentenced to witness the torture of their parents.198

The goal of the courts was to destroy exactly what the maroons had built:

family. These families had the freedom to raise children according to African


























































197
Bernard Moitt “Slave Women and Resistance,” 248.
198
Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1979), 319


 136

values and practices, which, in the eyes of the slaveholders, made them “wild,”

“outlandish,” and completely unfit for slavery.

Therefore, the courts did not spare children maroons. In Suriname, John

Stedman described the breaking on the wheel of six women, and the decapitation

of two girls, for the crime of marronage. He found their bravery remarkable,

marveling at how they faced their cruel fates “without uttering a sigh.”199

Sometimes, the heads of maroons, like those of other black “public enemies,”

were placed on tall pikes and put on display to warn other blacks against running

away. In Havana, Cuba, severed heads on pikes may not have been necessary.

The screams that could be heard coming from the Depósito Central del Cerro

may have been a significant deterrent to those considering flight. The Depósito

Central was a police prison specifically for fugitives and cimarrones, maroons.

Daniel E. Walker estimates that during the first half of the nineteenth century,

more than 50,000 people were held and punished there.200 The living conditions

in the Depósito Central were deplorable. Some prisoners were quickly claimed by

those slaveholders that they had run from, others were left unclaimed for over a

year, and others were left there on purpose, as punishment for running. A

significant number of maroons died in the Depósito Central, due to critical injuries

they sustained during recapture, and lack of proper medical attention. One of the

most poignant cases discussed by Walker is that of “inmate 1599.” Inmate 1599


























































199
Stedman, Narrative of a Five Yearsʼ Expedition, 67.
200
Walker, No More, No More, 31.


 137

was a baby girl, born to inmate 819, in August of 1844. Sadly, and most likely

because of the harsh conditions, inmate 1599 was pronounced dead less than a

week after she was born.201 Several women were found on the daily ledgers, but

Walker does not give an estimate of what percentage of the prisoners were

women (Figure 5 presents an image of the prison experiences of enslaved

women in Jamaica).

Figure 5.
Treadmill, Jamaica, 1837202


























































201
Ibid., 32.
202
“Treadmill, Jamaica, 1837;” Image Reference NW0196, as shown on
www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the
Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.


 138

 Women maroons were punished in ways that negatively impacted their

bodies, minds, and their offspring. Rape as punishment subverted a fugitive

womanʼs attempt to escape sexual abuse. Coordinated punishment of husbands

and wives reinforced whitesʼ power over enslaved peopleʼs marriages, marriage

being an institution that several maroons reinstituted based on African models—

sometimes to the extent that polygamy was practiced. Punishment of maroonsʼ

children and elderly parents reflected a desire among whites to destroy the

building blocks of these black nations within white ones.

While the former North American British Colonies, later the U.S., do not have

laws specifically banning African spiritual traditions, there were laws that

prohibited certain practices that are, when put into their proper cultural context,

were spiritual in nature. The 1740 South Carolina Slave Code, adjusted in

response to the Stono Rebellion, outlawed several African spiritual practices,

even though they were not described as such:

And for that as it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this

Province, that all due care be taken to restrain the wanderings and
meetings of negroes and other slaves, at all times, and more
especially on Saturday nights, Sundays and other holidays, and the
using and carrying wooden swords, and other mischievous and
dangerous weapons, or using and keeping of drums, horns, or
other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or
notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes…203


























































203
“South Carolina Slave Code,” Section XXXVI. Free online law dictionary.com.
Accessed February 27, 2011 http://legal-
dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/South+Carolina+Slave+Code.

 139

Again, black people are being restricted from gathering and conducting spiritual

observances, especially on their days of worship and/or leisure. Whites were well

aware that these days were often the intended dates of revolts, and that drums

were an important instrument of communication in these resistance movements.

After the 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, however, the laws were structured to target

individuals rather than to ban certain practices.

The obeah man and other spiritual leaders were directly implicated as the

main culprits in crimes against the colonial government. In order to prevent what

they called “the main mischiefs that may hereafter arise from the wicked art of

Negroes going under the appellation of Obeahmen and women,” the Jamaican

Legislature attempted to “protect” those whom they thought were gullible and

“superstitious” enough to believe in the protective powers of the obeah. They

proposed that as of 1761, any Africans or other slaves who “pretended” to have

supernatural powers, or who used materials like “blood, feathers, parrotʼs beaks,

dogʼs teeth, alligatorʼs teeth, broken bottles, egg shells,” or any other such items

for the purposes of witchcraft would be convicted and sentenced to death, or

deportation from the island.204

Still, these Jamaican resolutions were considered so radical in nature they

were rejected by the British crown. Eventually, a different version of these laws

were passed, and still stands on the Jamaican law books as the primary measure


























































204
From “Records of the Colonial Office 139/21,” quoted in Eric Williams
Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press,1938), 18.


 140

against the practice of obeah and other related African-based mystical,

medicinal, spiritual practices. Whites were highly perplexed by the pervasiveness

of obeah, because it indicated that the enslaved feared a higher—and unseen—

authority than them, and while they could prohibit certain objects and practices,

there was not much that they could do about belief. Of course, whites thought

that Africans believed in and worshipped the forces of Evil. Caribbean

slaveholder Monk Lewis proposed that he “should make it a crime even so much

as to mention the word Obeah on [his] estate.”205 Instead of judicial terror, some

took a different approach to the eradication of obeah among enslaved

Jamaicans: Christian conversion.

The 1816 version of these laws, which were incorporated into the Slave Laws

of Jamaica, mandated that all enslaved people be baptized and instructed in the

Christian faith and its corresponding set of duties to God. It also required that all

enslaved people be inside of their quarters between 10 oʼclock pm and sunrise.

Relatedly, nighttime meetings of enslaved people were strictly banned, as was

preaching or teaching without a license.206

These laws sought to change the fundamental beliefs of enslaved Africans, so

that laws like the one in Guadeloupe, which condemned to death anyone who


























































205
Quoted in Bush, Slave Women, 177.
206
Slave Law of Jamaica (London, 1816) 57/3 cap 25.


 141

bought poison, instructed enslaved people in medical arts, or distributed

amulets,207 would be rendered unnecessary.

Other laws were designed to keep Africans from teaching and using their

indigenous knowledge in resistance, specifically that knowledge related to

poisoning. Some laws were formulated to contain the information, by making it

illegal for someone to teach an enslaved person the art of poisoning:

In case any slave shall teach and instruct another slave in the
knowledge of any poisonous root, plant, herb, or other sort of a
poison whatever, he or she offending shall, upon conviction thereof,
suffer death as a felon; and the slave or slaves so taught or
instructed, shall suffer such punishment, not extending to life or
limb, as shall be adjudged and determined by the justices and jury
before whom such slave or slaves shall be tried.208

South Carolina legislators were not a lenient as the ones in Georgia who wrote

the above law. An enslaved person caught teaching another slave about roots or

plants would be convicted of a felony and executed. In this same piece of

legislation, medical professionals were prevented from retaining any enslaved

workers. Furthermore, enslaved people were simply banned from practicing

medicine of any sort.209 These laws created a more complex situation for those


























































207
Moitt, “Slave Women And Resistance,” 249.
208
“Slave Codes of the State of Georgia, 1848” Race, Racism and the Law.
Accessed February 27, 2011
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/slavelaw.htm#19 .
209
The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7: 422-23. Quoted in Rucker, River
Flows On, 112.


 142

whites who relied on the skills of the black midwives who delivered their babies

and the healers who nursed them back to health when Western physicians could

not solve a health problem. The enslaved healer was the prime target of anti-

poisoning laws, and practicing her craft, even with good intentions, could mean

her death. The executions of those suspected of obeah practice and/or poisoning

often involved being burned alive, again, because this practice was thought to be

the same as witchcraft. In Orange County, Virginia, in 1745, an enslaved woman

named Eve was burned alive for allegedly poisoning her owner, Peter Montague,

to death. The place where she was executed was thereafter called “Witches

Hill.”210A similar case happened fifteen years prior to Eveʼs case, in Bermuda. An

enslaved woman named Sally Bassett was accused of poisoning the family who

owned her granddaughter, including Mr. Thomas Forster, his wife, Sarah, and a

domestic servant named Nancey. Sally was drawn and burned at the stake, and

until today, extremely hot days in Bermuda are referred to as “real Sally Bassett”

days.211

These women were considered legal, spiritual and economic threats to

white slaveholding societies all across the Americas. The urgency with which

these laws were passed and enforced underscores the potency of African cultural

practices as tools of resistance, and womenʼs effective use of these skills. Many


























































210
Logan, “Witches and Poisoners,” 151-152, 159.
211
Quito Swan, “Smoldering Memories and Burning Questions: The Politics of
Remembering Sally Bassett and Slavery in Bermuda,” (paper presented at the
American Historical Association National Convention, January 7th, 2011).

 143

women were caught and punished for these offenses against whites, but many

were not. Indeed, although the Haitian Revolution is considered the only

“successful” servile insurrection, when poisonings maroon wars and spiritual

attacks are included in the historiography of organized resistance, more

“successes” emerge. Perhaps even more importantly, African cultural practices

represent the survival of an intact African worldview in the Americas, a

phenomenon that, with respect to the inhumane conditions of chattel slavery,

many scholars claim is virtually impossible.


 144

 CONCLUSION

The priestess/conjure woman was, and still is, the demonized symbol and

perpetrator of voodoo. After legal emancipation, her more militant functions may

have diminished some, yet the memory of her recalcitrant “heathen rites” had

been “preying on the Western mind for nearly 200 years.”212 Hence, while she

continued her everyday work in black communities, the conjure woman—along

with several other demeaning black stereotypes—was also being inscribed into

American racial lore. In place of a more conventional conclusion, I will conclude

this study with an epilogue, of sorts. This section traces the tainted legacy of the

black priestess through time, as it manifests itself in “voodoo” rhetoric and

imagery.

Out of the racist, sexist attacks on so-called “voodoo” and the women who

practiced the African traditions to which the term erroneously refers, came a

totally new, fictional, sensationalized religion. What I have termed the “American

Voodoo Construct (hereafter AVC),” has fascinated both the scholarly and

popular American imagination for years. After experiencing two waves of high

scholarly interest among folklorists, one in the 1880s-1900s and the other during

the inter-War period, the AVC found its way into mainstream American cinema.

Hollywood “voodoo” films, from the 1930s through the present day, represent a


























































212
This is a quote from the 1960 voodoo film Macumba Love. Norman Graham.
Macumba Love. DVD. Directed by Douglas Fowley. USA: Brinter Filmes, 1960.


 145

form of white folklore, based on intersecting white “folk fallacies” about African

spiritual culture and African women.

In the last three decades, however, filmmakers of African descent have

responded to these negative images, and have used their craft to redeem the

historical image of the black priestess/conjure woman. These films are based on

historical research, much like that of the preceding study, and represent the black

folk memory of women like Nanny, Zeferina and Boukmann.

In her 2006 dissertation, “By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and

Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow,” Shirley Moody contends that

soon after legal abolition of slavery in the U.S., segregationist whites rallied

around the rhetoric of folklore to justify “separate but equal” status for racial

groups. In fact, she argues that “folklore studies grew up in the fury over racial

separation and difference” and was “less a coincidence than a destined aligning

of racist ideology with folkloric apparatus.”213

The black conjure woman was a scary amalgamation of the primitive

African witchdoctor and the colonial Euro-American witch. White journalists,

folklorists and random observers painted sensationalized, often gruesome

pictures of her in the mainstream American press, in literary works, and in

scholarly publications. They claimed that she put curses on people, and used

voodoo dolls, charms and poisons to harm those she could not attack in the


























































213
Shirley C. Moody, “By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial
Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow,” PhD Diss., University of Maryland,
College Park, 2006. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

 146

open. She led wild, orgiastic, blood-soaked ceremonies in worship to some sort

of snake god. She proved that black people were primitive, sexually insatiable,

criminally-minded, and thus, naturally unfit for self-governance, much less a seat

at the table of so-called “civilized” races.

Where did these characterizations come from? More critical examination of

the voodoo rhetoric and imagery in American folklore studies points to the

genealogy of the authors themselves. I assert, therefore, that folkloric image of

the black voodoo/hoodoo woman was constructed less from African cultural

understandings and more from European ones. As such, it reflects the racial,

gendered, nationalistic ideologies and folk beliefs of whites, and it serves various

white nationalist agendas, such as the justification of imperialism, colonization,

and the reinforcement of a rigid racial caste system.

In the first place, any religion that is not Christianity is viewed and described in

less than flattering language. Take, for instance this observation made by

Winthrop D. Jordan: “However much Englishmen disapproved of Popery and

Mahometanism, they were accustomed to these perversions. Yet they were not

accustomed to” people who seemed to “have no religion at all.”214 Jordan argues

that to Englishmen—later Americans—encountering “heathenism” was more

about the process of self-definition than any actual “problem.” The appropriate

Christian lifestyle was and is defined by the so-called “heathen condition.”


























































214
Jordan, White Over Black, 23.

 147

 That anything tied to African traditions is considered evil, or negative in some

way, was established in the previous chapter. Not only were African people

thought to have been created in the likeness of the Devil, but white writers, most

of whom had not actually seen African rituals or ceremonies firsthand, described

“voodoo” in terms of the most depraved, sinister activities that they could

imagine. The substance of whitesʼ imaginations, however, came from their own

version of “voodoo:” witchcraft. Indeed, in the process of describing and defining

“voodoo,” whites were defining themselves.

As the antithesis of white Christianity, Satanism was thought to be the core of

African belief systems. It must be stated that in African religions, however, there

is no concept of Satan, or an all-encompassing force of evil, such as can be

found in Judeo-Christian beliefs. If anything, as Yvonne Chireau argues, Africans

believe in the “mixed potential of good and evil” in a given spiritual entity or

practitioner.215 This is why although in black folklore about witches, the witch may

serve Satan, Satan is depicted as more of a sly, mischievous figure than an

uncomplicated force of evil.

These complexities, were of course lost on European observers, so the

association of voodoo with all things devilish continued. In Hayti; or, The Black

Republic, written in 1884 by Sir Spenser St. John, the British Minister Resident

and Consul-general in Haiti, there is a substantial section entitled “Vaudoux


























































215
Chireau, Black Magic, 84.


 148

Worship and Cannibalism.”216 In it, St. John claimed that cannibalism is a

consistent (and persistent) feature in “vaudoux” ceremonies. Early folklorist

William W. Newell, of the American Folklore Society, agreed with the notion that

cannibalism is a prominent practice in “voodoo,” but argues that “vaudoux,” and

its cannibalistic practices originated not in Africa, but in fifteenth century France,

among members of a cult called the vaudois, who later passed it on to enslaved

Africans in Saint Domingue. In his article entitled “Myths of Voodoo Worship and

Child Sacrifice in Hayti,” Newell propagates several other odious aspects of

“voodoo,” which he says were found among the vaudois, including a predilection

for eating white babies, the practice of hunting for babies by turning themselves

into wolves, the wearing of ornate headgear and sandals, and the expert use of

herbs and roots to induce sickness or health.217 Newell not only demonizes

African religion, but he even takes the “credit,” if you will, for having created these

traditions away from black people. Interestingly, Luisah Teish, a New Orleans

native, and Vodou priestess, provides an explanation for the dead white babies,

which were sometimes found wrapped in cloth and left in or near trees. These

so-called sacrificial “goats without horns” were the aborted infants of white

women who went to black midwives and rootworkers for abortifacients—and

confidentiality. Teish asserts that:


























































216
Sir Spenser St. John, Hayti; or, The Black Republic (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1884),182-228.
217
William W. Newell, “Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice in Hayti,”
Journal of American Folklore 1.1 (Apr-Jun,1888): 16-30.

 149

 Even a miscarriage was regarded as evidence of the evil of a
womanʼs body…And it is totally consistent with African belief
systems that aborted babies should be ceremoniously released to
Mother nature. Therefore, those aborted white fetuses may well
have been properly oiled, wrapped in white cloth, and given to a
great tree while nine days of prayer were being done for a more
favorable reincarnation. There is no proof that any form of human
sacrifice was practiced in the Voudou tradition of New Orleans218

His list of grossly misunderstood practices notwithstanding, Newell refutes the

idea that voodoo ceremonies involve “heathen org[ies].” Instead, he describes

them as “parodies” of Christian worship. Newellʼs article clearly reveals his racist

valuation of voodoo as a primitive, debased version of outdated European

practices, and it reflects the prevailing notion of the late nineteenth century

academy, that black cultures are at a less advanced stage of the evolution of

human civilizations than those of whites.

As Kwasi Konadu reasons, due to seemingly “scientific ideas such as this,

plus “the severe hostility and scorn that emanated from white authorities and

missionaries, who translated those practices as demonic and proof of

barbarism,”219 some black people developed ambivalent attitudes towards African

spiritual traditions, if not all-out disdain. Formerly enslaved Henry Clay Bruce

expressed great scorn for those whom he referred to as “conjurers;” he


























































218
Teish, Jambalaya, 170-171.
219
Konadu, Akan Diaspora, 146.


 150

considered them frauds, and was no doubt influenced by his Christian beliefs.220

At the end of the nineteenth century, as more African-Americans gain access

to western educations, largely through Church-affiliated schools, the desire to

assimilate into the American mainstream grew. This growth was directly

correlated with their desire to distance themselves from what they were being

told was their “dark,” backwards African past. Black students and alumni of the

Hampton Institute, later Hampton University, established a Folklore Society, with

the overall objective of collecting black folklore and folk traditions, so that as

African-Americans joined the “civilized races” of humankind, they would have a

record of those “original” traditions. In a circular letter, sent to Anna Julia Cooper,

Booker T. Washington, and even William W. Newell, among others, advocating

for the establishment of the Hampton Folklore Society, in 1893 Alice Bacon, the

white director of the Hampton Folklore Society compared the living black folk

culture to Norse sagas, Homerʼs Iliad, and other ancient European traditions.

The Hampton folklorists were described as “intelligent observers,” who were

uniquely qualified to collect black folklore because they would, by virtue of being

black, make their “ignorant” folk informants feel comfortable with sharing

information, and would not treat them with condescension for their “childlike”

beliefs.”221 Countless “conjure” stories appeared in the folklore collections of the


























































220
Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man. Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine
Years a Free Man (York, Pennsylvania: P. Anstadt and Sons, 1895), 52-59.
221
Alice Bacon, “Hampton Folklore Society Papers” (Hampton University
Archives).

 151

Society, some of whom actually still believed in it, despite their educational

indoctrination against it. Still, the black folklorists were limited in their capacity to

openly identify with these folk traditions, due to the fact that Newell and the

American Folklore Society were in constant contact, and had even requested to

publish their findings in the Journal of American Folklore.222 They had to maintain

what white scholars would have called at this point “scientific” distance from the

subjects, their own people. Hampton folklorists were not the only blacks to

contribute, in a sense, to this social divide between the (aspiring) black middle

class and the black “folk.”

In the popular ex-slave narrative by William Wells Brown, a conjurer named

Dinkie is introduced, and largely portrayed in a comical light. Brown therefore,

indicates his dismissive attitude towards conjure, and similar black spiritual

traditions. Still, Brown offers what might be a hint of subversiveness, when he

narrates Dinkies statement about the reason he became a conjurer, and thus a

servant of the Devil. Dinkie had, at the time, been a servant of the ʻgood and

lovely devilʼ for 20 years. Before his wife and children were sold off he had

served the Lord, "but dat did no good, kase the white folks don't fear de Lord. But

dey fears you [the Devil], an' ever since I got into your service, I is able to do as I

please.”223

Dinkieʼs line of reasoning reflects both the African-American acceptance of


























































222
“Hampton Folklore Society Papers” (Hampton University Archives).
223
William Wells Brown, My Southern Home: or The South and Its People
(Boston: A.G. Brown and Co.,1880), 74.

 152

some white folkloric notions about conjure and its link to Satan, as well as the

retention, on the deep structural level of African ideas about the Devil. He does

not hide or express shame over being in the Devilʼs service, and in fact, levels a

fiery critique at racist, white slaveholding society by pointing out that these so-

called “God-fearing” Christians have not been behaving as such. In fact, Dinkieʼs

statement uses the parallel concepts of fear and worship to call whites “Devil-

fearing;” he thus implies that they only respect the forces of evil: violence,

coercion, etc.

The American Voodoo Construct is the metaphor for all of these evil values. It

reflects Euro-Americansʼ racial ideologies about Africans, but more specifically, it

reflects their gendered racial ideologies. The “heathen orgies” mentioned by

Newell are not rejected by other scholars, and are in fact, a recurring theme in

the AVC. Black “voodoo” is the opposite of white Christianity, and it is gendered

female, in direct contrast to the implicitly male (dominated) Western world. Thus

the image of the vicious voodoo woman is deployed every time Americans need

a reminder of who they are (not).

Nowhere is this more apparent than the “big screen.” The racist language and

imagery of “voodoo,” originating during slavery, and further cultivated during the

advent of folklore studies, found its fullest, most effective expression in film.

The evil black voodoo priest, male or female, has been a stereotypical image

in American film since the 1930s. In fact, blogger and black horror film aficionado

Mark H. Harris lists the “Voodoo Doer” as one of the more popular “black horror


 153

movie types,” on his website www.blackhorrormovies.com. He describes this

character thus:

Somewhere between the primitive and the mystical darkie lies the
voodoo doer, who combines the dress and malicious intent of the
malignant primitive with the magical powers of the mystical darkie.
The voodoo doer is generally more civilized than the primitive, as
he may not act unless he feels he's been wronged, and he may
actually not speak gibberish! He tends to hail from the Caribbean
and often occupies a venerable, if feared, position amongst his
people for his ability to be a prick.224

Black voodoo priestesses are not treated any more tenderly because of their

gender, and in fact, it is their femaleness that facilitates more shameful onscreen

depictions. Out of 39 “voodoo” films reviewed in Bryan Sennʼs book Drums of

Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema,”225 19 feature a female “voodoo” practitioner.

Considering that several of the films do not actually feature a voodoo practitioner

at all, these 19 constitute a majority. The cinematic black voodoo woman,

perpetuates both the AVC and the other, more well-known black female

stereotypes, namely the Sapphire, the Jezebel, and the Mammy.

No film exemplifies the black voodoo Sapphire better than Pocomania,

otherwise known as The Devilʼs Daughter (1939). Originally shot for British

audiences in 1935, as Ouanga, white screenwriter George Terwiliger reworked


























































224
“Black Horror Movie Stereotypes,” Blackhorrormovies.com. Accessed
February 28th, 2011. http://www.blackhorrormovies.com/types.htm.
225
Bryan Senn, Drums of Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema (Baltimore: Luminary
Press, 1998).


 154

the film for American audiences. Both films feature a conniving, power-hungry

black woman, who claims to be a voodoo priestess. In The Devilʼs Daughter, this

role was played by the legendary Nina Mae McKinney, whose character, Isabelle,

runs a Jamaican plantation, and does not want to share it with her “citified” sister,

who has returned from Harlem to claim her stake in it. Isabelle, however, is a

fraud. She is a reflection of the criminalized black woman, who is a natural thief

and liar. She schemes to put her sister “in the Obeah sacrifice thatʼs gonna make

her so scared that sheʼll leave this island and never come back.”226

Although the story takes place in Jamaica, land of obeah infamy, Isabelle wields

the more potently evil reputation of “voodoo,” reminding her sister that her mother

is from Haiti. There is a fake “voodoo” ceremony—fake on two levels, owing to

the culturally inaccurate “obeah” ritual performed by the extras—and the end

result is that Isabelle exposes her own lie. Ultimately, the sisters learn to share

the plantation. The viewers, however, do not emerge from this film quite as

unscathed. Isabelle has reinforced two major stereotypes about black women;

that of the pathological liar and the Sapphire, who is known for her insatiable

(unnatural) lust for power. This character also warns against placing any stock

with those who profess expertise in African spiritual traditions, because it is likely

that they are merely charlatans. This elides the historical realities of the African

priestess as a fair and just leader, who often used her power for the

advancement of a collective, and not for personal gain.


























































226
George Terwiliger. The Devilʼs Daughter. DVD. Directed by Arthur H. Leonard.
USA, 1960.

 155

 Black womenʼs morality remains in question with the voodoo Jezebel. A

product of the long-standing European view of African women as sexually

licentious and “hot-blooded,” The cinematic voodoo woman is sometimes shown

practicing highly sexual rituals and orgies, in the name of her religion.

Orgies and overtly sexual acts were not acceptable to 1930s viewing

audiences, but once the 1950s came, the sexual overtones came out in voodoo

films. As black actors were experiencing a somewhat dry period in Hollywood,

the cinematic voodoo woman lived on in the body of white actresses with an

overdose of stereotypical black/African hypersexuality. In the 1957 film The

Disembodied,227 white actress Allison Hayes plays Tonda, the adopted “voodoo

priestess” among the natives of some unnamed African jungle village. Not only

does Tonda cut out a personʼs heart during a ritual, she shamelessly throws

herself at a white man who gets lost in the jungle. This film is a perfect example

of (propagator of) the AVC, replete with voodoo dolls, zombies, sensual dancing,

and human sacrifice.

The voodoo Jezebel resurfaces in her rightful black womanʼs body in the

1970s, in a blaxploitation “voodoo” film, Sugar Hill (1974).228 Even as this film

critiques white menʼs sexual objectification of black women—the protagonist,

Sugar Hill, a curvaceous woman who wears nothing but skin-tight clothing,


























































227
Jack Townley. The Disembodied. DVD. Directed by Walter Grauman. USA:
Allied Artists Pictures, 1957.
228
Tim Kelly. Sugar Hill. DVD. Directed by Paul Maslansky. USA: American
International Pictures, 1974.


 156

repeatedly blocks the sexual advances of white male characters, and is even

foiled against a white “trash” woman, who is depicted as sexually available to

them—Sugar Hillʼs very motivation for using voodoo is based on her love for a

man. Her lover is killed by the mob, and she resurrects an army of Louisiana

zombies to help her kill off his murderers, one by one. Her “sexy” ways are

somewhat balanced out by some culturally accurate Vodou traditions, and a

decent modicum of intelligence.

In the 1980s, however, the voodoo Jezebel is taken a step backward with the

character of Epiphany, a young voodoo priestess, played by actress Lisa Bonet,

in Angelheart (1987).229 Epiphany meets the protagonist, a detective named

Johnny Angel, and within a few days, is seen participating in a voodoo ritual in

which she slices a chickenʼs neck and bathes in its blood, while, as Senn puts it,

“writh[ing] in orgiastic abandon.”230 Later, the detective has aggressive and

violent sex, which looks more like rape, with the 17-year-old priestess, who may

actually be his daughter. When they discuss a previous ceremony, in which she

says she had sex with the Devil, she describes it as “the best fuck I ever had.”

This film brought voodoo, and black women to an excruciatingly low point in the

American (black and white) imaginary. Harris actually lists Bonetʼs character as

the “Seductress” stereotype, which he describes as someone who is “hard to

resist” when she “shakes her mocha latte in your face, but try not to take a sip.


























































229
Alan Parker. Angelheart. DVD. Directed by Alan Parker. USA: Carolco
International N.V., Winkast Film Productions, Union, 1987.
230
Senn, Drums of Terror, 235.

 157

Chances are, she's either a vampire, a werewolf, a voodoo priestess, or has

crabs.”231

The most popular and lasting black women stereotype reinforced by cinematic

voodoo, however, is the voodoo Mammy. In the 1930s, the voodoo films took

place on plantations, and the voodoo priestesses in these films were usually

domestic servants to whites. The 1930s is also the end of a decades-long U.S.

occupation of Haiti. U.S. Marines, as well as a host of explorers and

anthropologists flooded into Haiti, to learn more about the mysterious “voodoo,”

that up until that point, only those in scholarly circles knew much about. Several

exaggerated, racist descriptions of Haitian Vodou were exported back to the

mainland, the most popular of these being The Magic Island by William

Seabrook.232 In it, women are discussed in connection with “voodoo” almost more

frequently than men. White Americans sought, as they had with the U.S. Mammy

imagery, to control black women, and to keep them, at least in some form, in their

kitchens. Thus, there was a predominance of Haitian plantation Mammies in

voodoo films. The difference between the U.S. Mammy and the Haitian one,

however, was what whites saw as the difference between the United States and

Haiti: one (the U.S.) was Christian, civilized, peaceful and controllable, while the

other (Haiti) was “voodoo,” savage and chaotic. Inevitably, the voodoo servant

does something bad; either as a result of warped, pathological mothering


























































231
“Black Horror Movie Stereotypes.”
232
William Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Paragon House, 1989). He
dedicates this book to Maman Celie, an informant of his in Haiti.

 158

tendencies towards her white employer(s), or the naturally wicked, unexplained

evil influence of “voodoo.” She embodied Americansʼ anxieties about their ability

to maintain control over Haitian economies and politics, not to mention the

resistance they faced from the Haitian peasantry.

In The Face of Marble (1946),233 a Haitian woman servant named Maria, in

her efforts to help her mistress by poisoning another woman using poisonous

smoke, accidentally turns her into a zombie, then uses her to kill people, and is

herself killed by the smoke.

Another cinematic voodoo Mammy is found in the swamps of Florida, in the

film Chloe, Love is Calling You (1934).234 Hoodoo Mandy causes calamity with

her wicked ways, all in the name of keeping her daughter with her, and avenging

the lynching death of her husband. She actually collaborates with another

disgruntled man, who claims to be “voodoo, too!” In a simplistic voodoo

ceremony, these two cast what ends up being a totally ineffective spell on the

whites in the community who have wronged them. It is discovered that Mandyʼs

daughter is not really hers, and is actually white. Neither Mandyʼs harmful roots,

nor her voodoo doll, nor her swamp rituals can change that. The forces of

“voodoo” lose in the end, as they always do.


























































233
Edmund Hartmann, et. al. The Face of Marble. DVD. Directed by William
Beaudine. USA: Monogram Pictures, 1946.
234
Marshall Neilan. Chloe: Love is Calling You. DVD. Directed by Marshall
Neilan. USA: Pinnacle Productions, 1934.

 159

 Eventually, as race relations transform, and political correctness gives some

the impression that African-Americans have embraced their white neighbors, the

voodoo Mammy becomes what Harris and other call the “Mystical Darkie.” This is

the kinder, sweeter, fangless version of the voodoo Mammy, taken almost

completely out of any specific African cultural context, this character operates

using not intelligence, but some generalized intuitive abilities. Harris defines this

character as someone who has “a soft spot in [his/her] heart for the white lead

character, whom the mystical darkie invariably helps, even at the expense of his

[or her] own life.”235

In recent years, however, those in the artistic community have tried their hand

at presenting historical narratives, giving voice to those perspectives that are

usually silenced by the master narrative of history. They assert that sometimes,

African spiritual traditions have triumphed. Furthermore, these filmmakers

validate the oral tradition as a methodology and affirm its value in the

transmission of history of African people; (1) by illustrating the use of the African

oral tradition in the films, and (2) by structuring the films themselves as oral texts.

Gerima has commented on the political agenda behind one of the most popular

American slavery films, Roots (1977), and why most American films on slavery

have not dealt with the concept of marronage:


























































235
“Black Horror Movie Stereotypes.”

 160

 “Roots” is, you know, a political film… “Roots” was about creating
harmony between Black and white people. But to me, harmony
comes from facts, not delusions. And so while “Roots” did portray
certain aspects of slavery, thereʼs this false human union between
white plantation owners and Black people. And to me, thatʼs not
what history testifies.236

What has come to be known popularly as the “Hollywood” formula in U.S.

filmmaking, is frequently criticized for its obsession with presenting “feel-good,”

“pro-establishment” movies, even when it comes to presenting a history of

enslavement. For instance, although most American slavery films present the

“peculiar institution” as a negative system, they are seldom without the inclusion

of at least one benevolent white primary character. The Hollywood school of

filmmaking usually refers to this person as the “point of entry” into a plot, the

character that is necessary for American viewers to “relate” to a film.237 These

characters are there to impact the way Americans in this society understand

slavery, the past in general, and especially the present. It is frequently claimed

that films about the history of slavery are made to serve the purpose of “racial

healing” in this country. If this is the case, then the question that must be asked

is: what are the implications of viewing African liberation as based solely on the

kindness of a handful of whites?

With regards to people of African descent, Haile Gerima identifies the

relevance of history as “the only weapon the African race has.” He believes that


























































236
Pamela Woolford, “Filming Slavery,” Transition 64 (1994): 92.
237
Ibid., 101-102.


 161

“history exorcises, history heals, the African people,” and that memory and

history have the power to heal.238 Gerima spent over nine years making Sankofa,

several of which included historical and cultural research. He studied the

traditional historical documents of slavery, explored and excavated maroon

settlements and plantations, and consulted with experts. Furthermore, there is

very little difference between his research methodologies and those of an

academic historian. Renowned historical documentarian Nina Seavey reminds

academic historians that “the practice of even the highest form of written

scholarship about the past is as equally highly constructed as a carefully crafted

film.”239 Sankofa is an example of a carefully crafted film as such.

Haile Gerima attempts to tell the story of Africansʼ resistance to enslavement

through the prism of a character whose story seems based upon the life of Nanny

or Cubah, or Queen. “Nunu,” also an Akan-speaking woman, is brought to the

Americas as a young girl and forced to work on a sugar plantation. This parallels

the real historical situation in Jamaica, which was primarily a sugar-producing

British colony at this time. Nunuʼs mother was an influential medicine woman in

Africa, and her father was a powerful warrior. Nunu brings the qualities and

responsibilities that she has inherited from her parents with her to the plantation.

Although she is a humble person, Nunu holds the position of highest esteem

among her fellow laborers. For example, when she must perform the


























































238
Woolford, “Filming Slavery,” 100.
239
Ibid., 119.

 162

extraordinary task of saving the unborn child of a pregnant woman who was

whipped to death, several head slaves are appointed to surround Nunu with rifles

aimed. Nunu simply calls the other field laborers, the “warriors,” who gather

around her with their machetes and protect her as she tries to save the child. If

only temporarily, her leadership as a queen mother figure gives them the courage

that outweighs their fear of the plantation establishment that surrounds them with

guns. Before she performs the impromptu C-section with her machete, she calls

on the help of Akyemfo, an Asante ancestral spirit, to help her. She sings a series

of proverbs that urge the spirit of the mother to allow the child to remain on earth.

After completing both the spiritual and medical components of this process,

Nunu turns directly to the young womanʼs hanging body and makes an oath to

her that one day the slave system that creates such horrifying circumstances will

be overturned: “One day, men will be made women!” Perhaps as a result of this

tragedy, some of the enslaved people at this sugar plantation initiate the revolt

that they have been planning in secret for some time.

Nunu is there, presiding over the preparatory ceremony, wearing a red head

cloth and cowry shells. She pours libation to the ancestors of her homeland, and

then swears each rebel into secrecy. With obeah men like the character,

“Shango,” on her side, the battle commences. Director Gerima was undoubtedly

familiar with the history of the Akan people, their political structure, their religious

structure, and their patterns of warfare. More importantly, his goal in making this

film was to tell the story from the Africansʼ perspective, and his research allowed


 163

him to be successful in this endeavor. This film is a compelling illustration of the

extent to which several key aspects of Akan culture may have been incorporated

into the slavery situation, and it shows, more specifically, the type of power that

an ohemaa may have been able to exert among her peers in times of crisis.240

One of the most important historical feature films that depicts maroon

societies is Quilombo (1984) by Carlos Diegues. In attempting to convey the

larger concept of slave resistance in the film, director Diegues used marronage

as a central theme. This section is an investigation of the ways in which this

filmmaker has told a historically legitimate history of the maroons, in large part

due to his depictions of maroon women. Diegues demonstrates an understanding

that the African cosmological views of maroons were the organizing principles of

their lives, and that from their perspective, the roles of maroon women are

critical.

As with the other films analyzed in this paper, Quilombo241 is treated as a

work of folk history, presented in cinematic form. What is considered to be

African mythology or legend by historians and other scholars is actually a

historically valid oral text. Maroon communities existed, and still do today. If a

historian wants to understand why/how the definition of the terms “maroon,” or

“cimarrón,” evolved as they did, all he/she has to do is to refer to some


























































240
Haile Gerima. Sankofa. DVD. Directed by Haile Gerima. USA: Mypheduh
Productions, 1993.
241
Carlos Diegues, et al. Quilombo. DVD. Directed by Carlos Diegues.
USA/Brazil: CDK, 1986.

 164

slaveholderʼs records. This, however, does not take him/her much closer to an

understanding of who maroons actually were as people, nor what intangible

cultural heritage they brought with them from Africa. It simply reiterates a

historical understanding from the perspective of the slaveholding class.

Filmmaker-historians can use cinema as a means of filling in the gaps

between a very lopsided body of records. The most critical tool at their disposal is

the use of information found in the oral history among the descendants of the

maroons, as well as the larger society. Although Diegues is himself not a

descendant of enslaved or maroon Africans, the narrative is based on the oral

history of Afro-Brazilians. Diegues explains how his film captures and then

transmits the collective memory of Brazilians of African descent:

So I think that a movie like this plays a very important role in

rescuing our historic conscience, changing what is taken as a joke,
discussed in the privacy of family, in bars, at cafes, to a naked,
clear, and public reality.

In Quilombo, the venerated maroon ancestors, those whose essences are kept

near by the calling of their names in the recollections and stories of their

descendants, are brought back to colorful life on screen.

From the very first scene, maroon women are shown to be key players in the

establishment of maroon societies, as mothers and as warriors. Dandara is a

character, named no doubt, for the real historical woman. She enters the story as

the trusted personal assistant to a slave trader, who is leading a group of

Africans in chains to some rendezvous point in the sugarcane fields. Once the


 165

group reaches the clearing, the Africans revolt, and Dandara immediately grabs

the slave traderʼs sword and impales him with it. She and the other rebels run to

the hills of Palmares, and for a brief time, Dandara is the lover of one of the

leaders of the group, Abiola. Dandara is a solider par excellence, and throughout

the film, exemplifies the essence of the Yoruba deity, Oya-Iansa, who while

known for her capacity to care for and inspire men, is a fierce warrior in her own

right. Dandara shares leadership of Palmares with Abiola, or Ganga Zumba, as

the former leader of Palmares, the elderly queen Acotirene, gives him this title.

Acotirene, also based on a real woman, embodies the wisdom of the deity of

motherhood and the Oceans, Yemonja. Acotirene goes to join the ancestors, but

is called upon in the spirit realm throughout the movie, with cries of “mother!”

Motherhood is a highly valued role in the film. Unlike the pathological

motherhood that Hollywood has associated with African religious practice, true

motherhood is depicted in Quilombo, as guided by African values. Gongoba

raises her son, Zumbi, until he is kidnapped at age five by the Portuguese, in an

attack Palmares. Although a Catholic priest subsequently raises Zumbi, he never

forgets the teachings of his mother and his home. He returns to Palmares as a

young adult, and quickly reintegrates himself into the African society. He

eventually rises to the top military command, and with Dandara as his mentor,

leads Palmaresʼ military into several successful battles with the Portuguese.

When Ganga Zumba accepts a treaty with the Portuguese, Zumbi and

Dandara refuse to go along with it. Palmares is split over this issue. Those who


 166

remain with Zumbi continue to fight, and with their success, Zumbi rises to

legendary status. In Palmaresʼ last major stand against the Portuguese, an aging

Dandara commits suicide, rather than surrender to the Portuguese. She, like

Zeferina, and the other maroon queens, is remembered as a brave and loyal

fighter until the end.

The images of African women in these two films are vastly different from those

produced by Hollywood. The AVC, perpetuated in American mainstream films

has even had a negative impact on films in other parts of the globe. Today,

“Nollywood” films often portray those who practice African spirituality as

practitioners of “witchcraft,” and they are always defeated in the end, usually by

the “light of Jesus Christ.”

Moreover, the negative images of African spirituality in the popular media has

real material consequences for black people. Most recently, in Haiti, in the

aftermath of the devastating Earthquake, Pastor Pat Robertson made the

statement on his nationally televised Christian program that the Haitians had won

their independence from their French slave masters by signing a pact with the

Devil, and implied that the earthquake was Godʼs retribution.242 Missionary

groups, who had come to deliver aid to the earthquake victims—unless, of

course, they renounced their African religious beliefs, consequently denied

Haitian Vodou devotees food and provisions. Other devotees were attacked, and


























































242
Associated Press. “Pat Robertson Calls Quake ʻblessing in Disguiseʼ”
Youtube.com. Accessed February 28th, 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TE99sAbwM&feature=related.


 167

their shrines and sacred objects were desecrated, in the days following the

earthquake.243

These events make a strong case for the argument that to a very real degree,

the threat of African spiritual culture to white supremacy and oppression is

remembered in American society. Due to the fact that negative images of black

women spiritual practitioners, and of African spirituality in general, have

experienced an uninterrupted thread of existence throughout American history,

this memory is more than simply a psychic one; it is a part of our socialization as

citizens in an implicitly Christian American society.

I have attempted to shed light on these maligned women, whose desire for

liberty and expertise would have made them heroes in a different context. I have

attempted to move the discussion of the history of African peopleʼs resistance

closer towards that context: African spiritual cosmologies. From here, the legacy

of black women comes into fuller view.


























































243
Wade Davis “Haiti Earthquake and Voodoo: Myths, Ritual and Robertson,”
National Geographic Daily News online, January 25th, 2010. Accessed February
28th, 2011. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100125-haiti-
earthquake-voodoo-pat-robertson-pact-devil-wade-davis/.

 168

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