4 - Afro-American Slave Culture

Abstract

It is known that slave-owners were the major obstacle to slave wellbeing; however, an understanding of slave systems controls and oppression is not sufficient for understanding the goals and values of slaves and the institutions they built to accomplish them. This chapter focuses on the history of two interrelated aspects of Jamaican slave culture and society — the transformation of various African ethnic groups into a pan-African society and the role religion played in that process. The existence of strong ethnic solidarity among African slaves, and even their descendants, led to self-defeating disunity that hindered their ability to mount a united front against their common oppressors. That striking feature of many slave societies has puzzled scholars. Most scholars of the African diaspora have had to grapple with the phenomenon of African and Afro-American or Afro-Caribbean religions. It used to be quite common and still is to a disappointing extent to interpret African religion as the emotional resort of frustrated and marginal people, emphasizing its escapist or cathartic or spiritually comforting functions almost entirely to the exclusion of its socio-political functions. Therefore, it is encouraging to see scholars, especially the historians of North American slavery, (preceded, for the most part, by their Caribbeanist and Brazilianist colleagues) recognize African religion's holistic approach to human existence and pay particular attention to the significance of sorcery beliefs and anti-sorcery practices in North American slave society.