HOWARD UNIVERSITY

Black Magic Woman: Towards a Theory of

Africana Womens 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

All rights reserved

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3460670
Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346

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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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, womens 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 Africanbased spiritual traditions indicate whites 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 Africans struggle to maintain their humanity, the presence of
womenas half of the human wholeincreased the threat and revolutionary
potential of these movements.

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, 183961
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 womens histories. Yet much more work is still needed to understand
womens 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 worlds
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).

our understanding of black womens leadership roles2 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 womens
power and leadership roles shaped their resistance to enslavement in the
Americas.
Black womens 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. Elgersmans Unyielding
Spiritsa comparison of the experiences of enslaved black women in Canada
and Jamaicaalso adds marronage to the categorical analyses of enslaved
womens 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 Elgersmans 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 womens 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, Big Mamas and Queen Mothers: The Origins of Black
Womens Leadership in the African Diaspora, in Emerging Voices and
Paradigms: Black Womens Scholarship, eds. Ida E. Jones and Elizabeth ClarkLewis (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).

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
womens experiences, and womens 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
Jamaicas 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
womens resistance. A key theme in black womens 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
womens 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 maroons 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 precolonial African societies and the limitations placed on womens 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 femaleheaded 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 womens power
and authority within the domains perceived as spiritual can assist in our efforts to
unpack and reformulate womens leadership and resistance in the Americas.

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

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 practicesespecially as they were used in acts of rebellionit 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 themto 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

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

to excavate womens 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
institutions8 through ritualand the adaptation of ritualswhich 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 peoples 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

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. Womens 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.

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 exslave narratives and black folklore. The exceptions to this rule are those exslave 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.

Ophelia Settles Egypt, Ophelia Settles Egypt Papers (Washington, D.C.:

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Manuscript Division).

The first part of the study establishes three key categories of black womens
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 womens 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 suggestor at least imaginewhat the historical
narratives on enslaved Africans 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 the other but part of the human same.
Each gender constitutes the critical half that makes the human
wholeEach 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.

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

reactions to Africans 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 Universitys 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
Universitys 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 womens
ethnobotanical expertise and access to whites 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
womens cultural tools were used, often to great effect, in organized resistance
movements throughout the Americas. Indeed, this invisibility to outsiders is what
made womens 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 EuroAmerican 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 womens 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, Koromantyns14 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: Coromantyn, Coromantee,
Caramantee, Coromantin, Coromantine, as well as some spellings that begin
with a K: Koromantee, Koromantine, Koromantin, and Kromanti, 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
They say, most blacks were from the Koramantee strainvery 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 Tutus
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 womens 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 Morgans.
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. Raboteaus 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, Chireaus 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 womens 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 womens spiritual empowerment. The
closest she comes is a brief reference to Albert Raboteaus invisible institution.

20

Even the title points to this scholarly blind spot, which, in fairness to Dr. CollierThomas, 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 religion.
Rebecca Halls 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 womens participation
in organized rebellions. She makes an important critique of the scholarly
community and its ignoranceeither willful or unwittingof womens 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 mens 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
mens empowerment did not necessarily depend on womens disempowerment.
In her words, the Prose of Passivity deconstructs the passive negro by
constructing the passive negress.
Halls methodology for locating womens roles in slave revolts by using African
culture as the interpretive framework is useful. She explores African womens
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 Bantuspeaking 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 Halls 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 womens participation than Hall might have
imagined.
Renee K. Harrisons Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in
Antebellum America (2009) is another work that explores womens 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. Ruckers 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 rebels resistance strategies, and as such, must be the foundation of
any scholarly analysis of these insurrections. Resistance is also a major theme in
Konadus 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
womens 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 strategiesat 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
womens 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 Bachofens theory, and
supporting Diops assertion that societies in which women exercise poweron
several levelsare 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 movementsthose based not
necessarily on military action, but on spiritual actionto the lists of slave revolts.
The ensuing chapter focuses on womens 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 Africans
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 Africans
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
Tackys 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 chiefs 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 daughters
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 womens interests at the state
level, she does symbolize the height of womens influence on political matters,
and as such, regulates womens 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 Konadus 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 unitAsante 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. Johns.
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 Courts chiefdom. In an effort to take Gaspars 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 Courts 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 Horsmandens 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
Comforts 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 mens
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 Comforts 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 Comforts 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 severalif not allof 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 islands
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 Queen of
Kingston 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 Longs description of this woman, each from a slightly different
perspective. At times, Cubah provides an example of a heroine, whose
leadershipas demonstrated through elaborate ritualwas 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 Cubahs significance
as a Queen Mother, from the perspective of the Akan rebels, during a critique of
Edward Longs narrative. He reasons that Longs dismissal of Cubah as
peculiar is a reflection of both his own prejudices and of colonial societys
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 Cubahs 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 Eves 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, Cubahs 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, Cubahs 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 Tackys War in actual combat positions, though none were
given significant treatment in the trial records.
Interestingly, Cubahs 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

Cubahs 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 rebels
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 Nannys 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 nameeither 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 reestablishing 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 Copenaprobably from the Akan name, Kwabenaa woman and a man
who led an uprising together, in French Guiana in 1748.52
Nannys 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 Nannys 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 Thicknesses 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 ornaments55

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 Quaos 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, Thicknesses 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, Thicknesses story is useful to us as historians, in
that it indicates that Nannyif the obeah woman was, in fact, Nannywielded 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 maroons 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 timeeither 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
womens 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 Bos Caiman, which initiated the enslaved
Africans 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

womens 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 Dahomeys
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 Queen Mother 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 kpojitos 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 families
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 leopards
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 Bos Caiman gave the pigs 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 Gomancie lancienne Cte des Esclaves, (Paris:
Institut dEthnologie, 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 Candombl (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 90.

51

had caused the decline of the kpojitos 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 Piraj. 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 Zeferinas power
as a female maroon leader. Barbosas work focuses on the matrilineal structures
found in pre-colonial Angolan culture and creates the link to Brazil through
enslaved Africans 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
Nzingas 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.
Zeferinas mother, Amlia 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 Nags, 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
Reconstrua Histrica Poltico-Social (PhD diss., Universidade Metodista de
So Paulo, 2003),176.
70

Ann M. Pescatello, Prto Power, Brazilian Style, in The African in Latin

America, Ann M. Pescatello, ed. (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1975), 218. See
also Joo Jos 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 queen.71 Bows, arrows, guns and machetes were not the only means of
making war for Zeferinas people.
After the battle, soldiers searched a house of candombl, owned by a mulatto
man named Antnio, which was located at Urubu. In it, they found several
religious items, which Joo Jos 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 Antnio were
eventually arrested and sentenced to hard labor. Today, she is commemorated
during the Dia Nacional da Conscincia Negra in Brazil, alongside Zumbi dos
Palmares, and during an annual festival in Piraj. She is thus alive in the
individual and collective memory of Piraj 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 oppressors 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
cimarrn, 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 unbroken73 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 publicin museums, historical films or in textbooksthe 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 societiesand on
African resistance in generaldoes 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 longterm 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 womens 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 denizens78 of these settlements, while the men are more transient, being
frequently concerned with hunting and maintaining security. Still, womens 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 recordkeepers 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 maroons day-to-day lives, but their roles as nationbuilders 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 Libert (Paris: Editions de lcole, 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
Pattys 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 womens 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 maroons 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 womens 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 Longs
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 Polim 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 Polim, 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 Dallas 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 Edwards
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 Christianitypolygamy 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 bothyou
say me mus forsake my wife.Only one of them.Which dat
one? Jesus Christ say so? Gar amighty say so? No, no massa;
Gar amighty good; he no tell somebody he mus forsake him wife
and childrenNo, massa, dis here talk no do for we.91

91
The (*) refers the reader to Dallas footnote, which simply reads: Edwards.
The latter portion of this quoted section was Dallas 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 Analysis 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 individuals soul. According to the Akan concept of the
human soul, there is the kra, the persons life force, or true soul, given by
Nyame, the sunsum, an individuals personality, which he/she gets from the
ntoro, the patrilineal line, and the mogya, literally a persons 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

96

J. B. Danquah. Akan Laws and Customs (London: Cass, 1928), 194.

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 womans 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 heritageboth
tangible and intangiblefrom 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 womens 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, With Grains in Her Hair: 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 mens 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 womens martial traditions in Africa and
suggests that these same martial traditions can be found in womens
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 negressesthe

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 enslavementeveryone 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 maroons spiritual beliefs as a valid interpretive
framework and uses them to evaluate Nannys roles as both a military/political
leader and a spiritual leader. Gottlieb draws a distinction between Nannys
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 Gottliebs 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 womens 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. Womens 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 womens 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 Dand was a female chief of the Matjau-lo maroons, and
Mama Cat was a tribal mother, political leader and priestess among the LabiDikan 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 Prices 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.
Africans 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 communitiesas
with other insurrections of the enslavedwomen 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
Africans lives into a never ending cycle of work and sleep, womens ritual
expertise proves otherwise. Womens 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 womens 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 deceaseds 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 sites 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 Akans deep connection to
both the land and the nsamanfo, the ancestors. Leaving behind those who are

114
Osei Mensah Aborampah, Womens 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 ritesperformed 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. Sharpes 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 Akans 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 ones 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, Womens 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 Akans 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 existence120

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
Nannys Pot, a natural pool, about 6 feet in diameter, in which icy, rapidly
moving water from Nanny River collected, giving the impressionfrom afarof a
large bubbling cauldron. Several authors, whose focus is on Thomas 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 Nannys 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 Nannys bullet-catching. She has been said to catch
bullets with her handsa 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 Martins interview with a
Jamaican maroon, he re-enacted Nannys bullet-catching, by flex[ing] his knees
slightly, while saying boom then reached between his legs with both hands and
brought them out cupped togetherAfter doing this three or four times he smiled
broadly and explained thatthis action was what made them finally give up
fighting the Maroons.121
Neither Martins nor Thomas descriptions of Nannys bullet catching refer
directly to her behind, and so it is likely that they all may simply be referring to her
thighs. Perhaps Thomass 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 womans legs were considered highly sensual, and indecent if
exposed.
In any case, this narrative of Nannys expert use of spiritual science brings
out key issues in terms of womens resistance to slavery: 1) That black womens

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 Santera, Candombl, 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 Butlers 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 nationwide 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
slavesin 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

womans strategy of aggressive opposition, poison, when situated more
towards the center, will also bring women into the center. This section will
discuss womens 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 whites 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.
Franois Lory de la Bernardire, 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 Bos 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
Mackandals 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 franaises (Basse-Terre: Socit
dHistoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), 405, 408, and Gabriel Debien, Plantations et
esclaves Saint Domingue (Dakar: Publications de la Section dHistoire, 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 womans
(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 villains136

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 slaveholders 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 peoples 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 black lead, 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 presencewhich usually
results in an Akan influencein 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--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 childrens 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, Black Magic 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 Gnral Donzelot, September 28, 1822, cited
in Savage, Black Magic and White Terror, 637.

104

history. White fear had reached such a boiling point that it transformed the
slaveholders 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! Its because of your goodness that I
committed so many crimes: things were too good for me145 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'hygine

publique et de mdecine lgale, 31 (1844): 400, cited in Savage, Black Magic
and White Terror, 638.
146

CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Mmoire Rivire, 1829, cited in Savage, Black

Magic 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 ships food and water
supply to disappear and killed several other enslaved Africans aboard the ship.
The ships 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 mans heart
because of unrequited or tainted love? Did she shrivel the white mans testicles
because he attempted to rape her? Ultimately, the story indicates that no matter
what interpersonal subplots unraveled on the ship, the sorceress 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 asmani.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, ash, 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 Africans 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 femaledominated 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 AfroBrazilian religionswhich she categorizes as female-dominatednatural 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,
Sereds observations about the relatively gender balanced nature of AfroBrazilian 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 Tubmans 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 lifes
mission more than one hundred years after Nanny led her maroon soldiers
against the British. Like Nanny, however, Tubmanborn with the name Araminta
Rosswas 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. Tubmans 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 Tubmans community to support this theory of

her origins:

the old mammies to whom she told dreams were wont to nod
knowingly and say, I reckon youse one o dem Shantees, chile.
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 Tubmans supporters summed up how Tubman is viewed in
an African cosmological context: De whites cant catch Moses, kase you see
shes 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 Ashanti 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, Tubmans 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, A Breathing of the Common Wind: 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 guides 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 Writers 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 Years 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 Africans 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 mens or
womens 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 Gravein 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, Obbahs use of her sisters 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 sisters 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 persons hand.
Other Akan oath drinks mixed blood, graveyard dirt, and water.169 A violation or
failure to fulfill ones 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 ksaankbi 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 womens 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 communaut. 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 D tudes
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 womens 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 womens 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 Europeans and Americans 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 womens 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, oftenespecially in the U.S. contextwithout 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 broken 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 persons body from a

structure that sometimes resembled a gallows, for public display, until a specified
amount of time passed. A persons 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 Devilwho is considered a malereflects the
belief in European societies that witches are predominately women. Womens
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 suchone all-encompassing
source of evil, personifiedin African spiritual cosmologies.

178
The Trial and Execution of Mark and Phillis1755.
179

Logan, Witches and Poisoners, 11.

124

Rebecca Logan points out that the Christian church was anxious about the
source of a witchs 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 witchs power
was already known. In Cotton Mathers popular monograph The Negro
Christianized (1706), he describes a European perspective on Africans
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 black man.
Some scholars have suggested that those Black people who were executed
by burning were punished that way because of the colonists 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 Candys 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 inaccuratethe 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 Candys testimony that her magic was learned
from a white woman. Candys 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 slavesIt 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, McMillans 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 persons 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 whites 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 peoples 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, Tackys 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
transactionsno 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 Cubahs 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 Jamaicas 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.
Buckleys 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
stealsupplies or other enslaved peopleshed a humiliating light on whites
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 slaveholders
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 maroons
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 witchs
accoutrements: a bubbling cauldron, in which men, women and children could be
boiled upand 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 maroons bodies, and they attacked the dignity and identity
of people who had fought hard to maintain both. Angry, fearful slaveholders used
a maroons 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 property 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
planters 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 judicial terrors, 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 correctional 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 mauvais sujets (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. Copenas 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 Depsito Central del Cerro
may have been a significant deterrent to those considering flight. The Depsito
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 Depsito 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 Depsito 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 Years 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
womans attempt to escape sexual abuse. Coordinated punishment of husbands
and wives reinforced whites power over enslaved peoples marriages, marriage
being an institution that several maroons reinstituted based on African models
sometimes to the extent that polygamy was practiced. Punishment of maroons
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 purposes203

203
South Carolina Slave Code, Section XXXVI. Free online law dictionary.com.
Accessed February 27, 2011 http://legaldictionary.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, parrots beaks,
dogs teeth, alligators 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 higherand 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 oclock 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 antipoisoning 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 Eves 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 womens 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 womanalong
with several other demeaning black stereotypeswas 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 Englishmenlater Americansencountering 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 whites 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 abortifacientsand
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

womans bodyAnd 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. Newells 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, Homers 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 good and
lovely devil 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
Dinkies 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 Devils service, and in fact, levels a
fiery critique at racist, white slaveholding society by pointing out that these socalled God-fearing Christians have not been behaving as such. In fact, Dinkies
statement uses the parallel concepts of fear and worship to call whites Devilfearing; 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-Americans 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 Senns 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 Devils 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 Devils 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 thats gonna make
her so scared that shell 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 ceremonyfake on two levels, owing to
the culturally inaccurate obeah ritual performed by the extrasand 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 Devils Daughter. DVD. Directed by Arthur H. Leonard.
USA, 1960.

155

Black womens 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 persons 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 womans body in the
1970s, in a blaxploitation voodoo film, Sugar Hill (1974).228 Even as this film
critiques white mens sexual objectification of black womenthe 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
themSugar Hills 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 chickens 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 Bonets 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 Americans 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 Mandys
daughter is not really hers, and is actually white. Neither Mandys 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, theres this false human union between
white plantation owners and Black people. And to me, thats 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 Africans 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. Nunus 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 womans 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 Africans 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
cimarrn, 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

slaveholders 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 traders 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 Palmares 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 Palmares 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 Gods retribution.242 Missionary
groups, who had come to deliver aid to the earthquake victimsunless, 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 blessing in Disguise
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 peoples 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-haitiearthquake-voodoo-pat-robertson-pact-devil-wade-davis/.

168

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source Materials

Published Sources:
Acts of Assembly, passed in the Island of Jamaica, from 1681 to 1737, inclusive
London, 1743.
A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua. 1737,
Dublin; reprinted in New York: Ayer Co. Publishers, 1972.
Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. Philadelphia,
1771-1772.
Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters,
Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge, 1977.
Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea,
Divided into the Gold, the Slave and the Ivory Coasts. London: J. Knapton,
D. Midwinter, B. Linton, G. Strahan, J. Rand, E. Bell, 1721.
Bradford, Sarah H. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Auburn, NY: W.J.
Moses,1869.
Brown, William Wells. My Southern Home: or The South and Its People (Boston:
A.G. Brown and Co.,1880.
----------------------------The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of
the Colored Race. Boston: A. G. Brown, 1874; reprinted in Florida:
Mnemosyne Inc., 1969.
Catterall, Helen T. Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro.
5 vols. Washington, DC, 1924-26.
Dallas, Robert C. 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.
Darkwah, K. Ampom and B.C. Obaka, eds. Ashanti Stool Histories, Vol. 1 & Vol.
2. Agyeman-Duah, J., recorder. Legon: University of Ghana Institute of
African Studies, 1976.

169

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: New
American Library, 1968.
Drake, Frank C. The Moses of Her People. Amazing Life Work of Harriet
Tubman. New York Herald, Sept. 22, 1907.
Dunham, Katherine. Island Possessed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969.
Edwards, Bryan. History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the
West Indies, in Three Volumes. 1793; reprinted in London: Adamant
Media Corp, 2005.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Radford, VA: Wilder
Publications, 2008.
Georgia Writers Project, Drums and Shadows. Georgia: University of Georgia
Press, 1940.
Greenberg, Kenneth, ed. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related
Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.
Guild, June Purcell. Black Laws of Virginia. Richmond, 1936.
Hening, William Waller. The Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of All the Laws
of Virginia. 13 vols. Richmond, 1809-1823.
Horsmanden, Daniel. Journal of the Proceedings Against the Conspirators, at
New-York in 1741. New York: Southwick & Pelsue, 1810.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935; reprinted in New York: Harper
Perennial, 1990.
----------------------------Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. 1938;
reprinted in New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Isichei, Elizabeth. Igbo Worlds: An Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical
Descriptions. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978.
Jackson, Bruce, ed. The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth Century
Periodicals. Austin: American Folklore Society, 1967.

170

Ledoux, Albert R. Princess Anne: A Story of the Dismal Swamp and Other
Sketches. New York: The Looker-On Publishing Co., 1896.
Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica: Vol. II. London: T. Lowndes, 1774.
Mather, Cotton. The Negro Christianized : An Essay to Excite and Assist the
Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-servants in Christianity . Boston,
1706.
Montejo, Esteban. Biography of a Runaway Slave. 1860, reprinted in Willimantic,
CT: Curbstone Press, 1994.
Mullin, Michael, ed. American Negro Slavery: A Documentary History. New York,
1976.
Newell, William W. Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice in Hayti.
Journal of American Folklore 1.1 (Apr-Jun,1888): 16-30.
New York African Burial Ground Final Reports. New York: African Burial Ground
Project Office of Public Education and Interpretation, 2006.
Noble, J., ed. Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the
Massachusetts Bay: 1630-1692, Vol. I. Boston: The County of Suffolk,
1901.
Pearson, Edward, ed. Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the
Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999.
Pitman, Frank Wesley. Fetishism, Witchcraft, and Christianity Among the
Slaves. The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct., 1926): 650-668.
Puckett, Newbell Niles. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1926.
Rawick, George P. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 41 vols.
Westport, CT, 1972-1979.
Seabrook, William. The Magic Island. New York: Paragon House, 1989.
Slave Law of Jamaica. London, 1816: 57/3 cap 25.

171

Stedman, John. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted

Negroes of Surinam. Richard and Sally Price, eds. 1796; reprinted in
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,1988.
St. John, Sir Spenser. Hayti; or, The Black Republic. London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1884.
Stroud, George M. A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several
States of the United States of America. 1856; rpr. New York, 1968.
The Trial and Execution of Mark and Phillis, in 1755. Reprinted at the
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1883.
Thicknesse, Philip. 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.
Thomas, Herbert T. Untrodden Jamaica. Kingston: A. W. Gardner, 1890.
Valentine, David. Manual of the Common Council of New York. New York: D.T.
Valentine, 1865.
Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves. edited by Charles L.
Perdue. Charlottesville, 1976.
Winfree, Waverly K., ed. The Laws of Virginia: Being a Supplement to Henings
The Statutes at Large, 1700-1750. Richmond, 1971.

Manuscripts:
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University- Washington, DC
Ophelia Settles Egypt Papers

Hampton University Archives

Hampton Folklore Society Papers

172

Films:
Diegues, Carlos, et al. Quilombo. DVD. Directed by Carlos Diegues. USA/Brazil:
CDK, 1986.
Gerima, Haile. Sankofa. DVD. Directed by Haile Gerima. USA: Mypheduh
Productions, 1993.
Graham, Norman. Macumba Love. DVD. Directed by Douglas Fowley. USA:
Brinter Filmes, 1960.
Hartmann, Edmund, et al. The Face of Marble. DVD. Directed by William
Beaudine. USA: Monogram Pictures, 1946.
Kelly, Tim. Sugar Hill. DVD. Directed by Paul Maslansky. USA: American
International Pictures, 1974.
Neilan, Marshall. Chloe: Love is Calling You. DVD. Directed by Marshall Neilan.
USA: Pinnacle Productions, 1934.
Parker, Alan. Angelheart. DVD. Directed by Alan Parker. USA: Carolco
International N.V., Winkast Film Productions, Union, 1987.
Potter, Lou. A Great and Mighty Walk. Directed by St. Claire Bourne. USA: Black
Dot Media, 1996.
Terwiliger, George. The Devils Daughter. DVD. Directed by Arthur H. Leonard.
USA, 1960.
Townley, Jack. The Disembodied. DVD. Directed by Walter Grauman. USA:
Allied Artists Pictures, 1957.

Websites:
Akan Cultural Symbols Project online
Maroon Cultures in the Americas online exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution
National Geographic Daily News online
Smithsonian Institution Folklife Maroon Educational Guide online
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/

173

www.blackhorrormovies.com/types.htm.
www.slavevoyages.org
www.slaveryimages.org
www.youtube.com

Secondary Source Materials

Unpublished Secondary Sources:
Diouf, Sylviane. American Maroons: Exploring the Lives of African Americans
Living in the Southern Woods During Slavery. Paper presented at Rutgers
University Center for Historical Analysis Black Atlantic Seminar, April 14th,
2009.
Swan, Quito. 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.

Books:
Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International
Publishers, 1993.
------. Nat Turners Slave Rebellion. New York: Grove, 1966.
Bailey, Anne C. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Beacon
Press, 2005.
Barrett, Leonard. Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion. Garden
City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974.
Beckles, Hilary McD. Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle Against Slavery,
1627-1838. Barbados: Caribbean Research and Publications, Inc, 1987.
Bilby, Kenneth and Filomena Chioma Steady, eds. Black Women CrossCulturally. Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981.

174

Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of
the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., 2010.
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972.
Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder: Gabriels Revolt, Virginia, 1800. New York:
MacMillan, 1936.
Brawley, Benjamin. A Social History of the Negro, Being a History of the Negro
Problem in the United States. New York: MacMillan, 1921.
Buckley, Steeve O. The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accomodation in
Jamaica, 1760-1890. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004.
Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990.
Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Campbell, Mavis C. The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of
Resistance, Collaboration, & Betrayal. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
1990.
Childs, Matt D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion and the Struggle Against Atlantic
Slavery. Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Chireau, Yvonne. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring
Tradition. University of California Press, 2003.
Cohen, Daniel. Voodoo, Devils and the New Invisible World. New York: Dodd,
Mead and Company, 1972.
Cole, Johnnetta B., ed. Anthropology for the Nineties: Introductory Readings.
New York: The Free Press, 1988.
Collier-Thomas, Bettye. Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and
Religion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery
and the Burning of Old Montreal. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2007.

175

Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West
Indies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Creel, Margaret Washington. A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and CommunityCulture among the Gullahs. New York: New York University Press, 1988.
Danquah, J. B. Akan Laws and Customs (London: Cass, 1928
--------------------The Akan Doctrine of God. London: Cass, 1968 (1st ed., 1944).
Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History and the Gods. Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1995.
DuBois, W.E.B. The Negro Church. Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University, 1903.
-------------------- The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Washington Square Press,
1970.
Elgersman, Maureen. Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early
Jamaica and Canada. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
Ferguson, Leland. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America,
1650-1800. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
Fett, Sharla. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave
Plantations, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Finch, Charles. Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden.
Decatur, Georgia: Khenti, Inc., 1991.
Forde, D. ed. African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideals and Social
Values of African Peoples. London, New York: 1963.
Fouchard, Jean. Les Marrons de la Libert. Paris: Editions de lcole, 1972.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
Fry, Gladys-Marie. Night Riders in Black Folk History. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2000.

176

Gaspar, Dave and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More than Chattel: Black Women
and Slavery in the Americas. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Gehman, Richard J. African Traditional Religions in Biblical Perspective. Nairobi,
Kenya: East African Educational Publishers, 2005.
Gomez, Michael. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. London:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Gomez, Michael. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998.
Goodfriend, Joyce. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New
York City, 1664-1730. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Gottlieb, Karla. The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the
Windward Jamaican Maroons. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc.,
2000.
Grayson, Sandra. Symbolizing the Past: Reading Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust
and Eves Bayou as Histories. Lanham, Maryland: University of America
Press, 2000.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1992.
---------------Slavery and African Ethnicity in the Americas: Restoring the
Links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade.
New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Harrison, Renee K. Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum
America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Herskovits, Melville. Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, vol. 2. New
York, 1938.
Heywood, Linda, ed. Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the
American Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Isichei, Elizabeth. The Ibo People and the Europeans: The Genesis of a
Relationship to 1906. New York: St. Martins Press, 1973.

177

James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo
Revolution. 1938; revised ed., London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
Jones, Ida E. and Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, eds. Emerging Voices and Paradigms:
Black Womens Scholarship. Washington: Association of Black Women
Historians, 2008.
Jordan, Winthrop T. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550-1812. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968.
Kadish, Doris Y.,ed. Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant
Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2000.
Kaplan, Flora Edouwaye S. ed. Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and
Power: Case Studies in African Gender. New York: New York Academy of
Sciences, 1997.
Konadu, Kwesi. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
Kulikoff, Alan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Culture in the
Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill, 1986.
Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of
an American Hero. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.
Leaming, Hugo Prosper. Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the
Carolinas. New York: Garland, 1995.
Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press,
1977.
Matory, James Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and
Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candombl. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
Maupoil, Bernard. La Gomancie lancienne Cte des Esclaves. Paris: Institut
dEthnologie, 1943.
Mbiti, John S. Introduction to African Religion. 2nd ed. Johannesburg: Heinemann
Publishers, Ltd., 1975.

178

Morgan, Philip. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century

Chesapeake and Low Country. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998.
Mullin, Gerald (Michael). Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in EighteenthCentury Virginia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the
American South and the British Caribbean 1736-1831. Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1992.
Oppong, Christine, ed. Female and Male in West Africa. London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1983.
Pescatello, Ann M.. ed.The African in Latin America. Alfred A. Knopf: New York,
1975.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in
Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Price, Richard, ed. Maroon societies: rebel slave communities in the
Americas. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1996.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum
South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Reis, Joo Jos. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Roberts, John W. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and
Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Rucker, Walter C. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity
Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2007.
Schwarz, Philip. Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia,
1705-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Senn, Bryan. Drums of Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema. Baltimore: Luminary
Press, 1998.
Sered, Susan Starr. Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by
Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

179

Shepherd, Verene and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds., Caribbean Slavery in the
Atlantic World: A student reader. Kingston: Randle Publishers, Ltd., 2000.
Shepherd, Verene and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds., Caribbean Slave Society and
Economy. New York: New Press, 1993.
Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in
Gabriels Virginia, 1730-1810. New York: Cambridge University
Press,1997.
Singleton, Theresa A. I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of AfricanAmerican Life. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya: The Natural Womans Book of Personal Charms and
Practical Rituals. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1985.
Thompson, Alvin O. Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the
Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006.
Walker, Daniel E. No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana
and New Orleans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Walsh, Lorena S. From Calabar to Carters Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave
Community. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
Wilks, Ivor. Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and Kingdom of Asante.
Athens, Ohio: 1993.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC, 1938, p. 18.

Articles:
Agorsah, E. Kofi. Archaeology and Resistance History in the Caribbean. African
Archaeological Review 11 (1993): 175-195.
Aborampah, Osei Mensah. Womens Roles in the Mourning Rituals of the Akan
of Ghana, Ethnology, 38.3 (2004): 257-271.
Aptheker, Herbert. Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States. The
Journal of Negro History 24.2 (Apr. 1939): 167-184.

180

Arhin, Kwame. The Role of Yaa Asantewaa in the 1900 Asante War of
Resistance, Le Griot, Vol. VIII. (2000): Kumasi: Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology, Department of African Studies.
Boni, Stefano. Exclusion de femmes de la communaut. Le rituel momome du
monde akan. Cahiers D tudes Africaines, Vol. 192.4 (2008). Abstract
accessed online at
http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=CEA_192_0765# (May
2nd, 2009).
Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame. The Romanticization of the Asante Kingdom: A
Critique. Africana 1.2 (2008): 94-120.
Carney, Judith A. With Grains in Her Hair: Rice in Colonial Brazil. Slavery &
Abolition, 25.1 (2004): 1-27.
Chambers, Douglas B. My Own Nation: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora, Slavery
and Abolition 18 (1997): 72-97.
-----. The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to
Northrups Myth Ibo. Slavery and Abolition 23 (2002):101-120.
DeCamp, David. African Day-Names in Jamaica. Language, 43.1 (Mar. 1967):
139-149.
Eltis, David. "New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade." Special Issue,
William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 16-17.
Handler, Jerome S., and Kenneth M. Bilby. On the Early Use and Origin of the
Term Obeah in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery and
Aboliton 22 (2001): 87-100.
Harries, Keith. Gender, Execution and Geography in the United States.
Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 74.1 (1992): 21-29.
Klein, Herbert S. Slaves and Shipping in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 5 (1975): 383-412.
Kulikoff, Alan. The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and
Virginia, 1700-1790. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978): 226259.
Lane, Suzanne. Black Thunders Call for a Conjure Response to American
Negro Slavery. African American Review 37.4 (Winter 2003): 583-598.

181

McMillan, Timothy J. Black Magic: Witchcraft, Race and Resistance in Colonial

New England. Journal of Black Studies 25.1 (Sept. 1994): 99-117.
Mullin, Michael. Women and the Comparative Study of American Negro Slavery
Slavery & Abolition 6 (1985): 25-40.
Northrup, David. Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World,
1600-1850. Slavery and Abolition 21 (2000): 1-20.
Ogunleye, Tolagbe. African American Folklore: Its Role in Reconstructing
African American History. Journal of Black Studies 27.4 (Mar. 1997): 435455.
Pendleton, Louis. Notes on Negro Folk-lore and Witchcraft in the South. The
Journal of American Folklore 3.10 (July-Sept. 1890): 201-207.
Pitman, Frank Wesley. Fetishism, Witchcraft and Christianity Among the
Slaves. The Journal of Negro History 11.4 (Oct. 1926): 650-668.
Rucker, Walter. Conjure, Magic and Power: The Influence of Afro-Atlantic
Religious Practices on Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Journal of Black
Studies 32.1 (Sept. 2001): 84-103.
Savage, John. Black Magic and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial
Society in Early 19th Century Martinique, Journal of Social History (Spring
2007): 635-662.
Sidbury, James. Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and
Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800. Journal of Southern History 63 (1997):
531-552.
Suttles, Jr., William C. African Religious Survivals as Factors in American Slave
Revolts. The Journal of Negro History 56.2 (Apr. 1971): 97-104.
Thompson, Alvin O. Gender and Marronage in the Caribbean, The Journal of
Caribbean History, 39.2 (2005): 262-289.
Walsh, Lorena S. The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African
Origins, and Some Implications. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58
(2001): 139-169.
Woolford, Pamela. Filming Slavery. Transition 64 (1994): 92.

182

Unknown. Ashanti Influence in Jamaica. The Journal of American Folklore

47.186 (Oct.-Dec., 1934): 394.

Dissertations/Theses:
Archer, Jermaine O. A Breathing of the Common Wind: Cultural and Political
Expressions of Africa in Antebellum Slave Narratives. PhD diss.,
University of California, Riverside, 2004.
Barbosa, Silvia Maria Silva. O Poder de Zeferina no Quilombo do Urubu: Uma
Reconstrua Histrica Poltico-Social. PhD diss., Universidade
Metodista de So Paulo, 2003.
Chambers, Douglas B. He Gwine Sing He Country: Africans, Afro-Virginians,
and the Development of Slave Culture in Virginia, 1690-1810. PhD diss.,
University of Virginia, 1996.
Fandrich, Ina Johanna. The Mysterious Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux: A Study
of Power and Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans.
PhD diss., Temple University, 1994.
Finch, Aisha K. Insurgency at the Crossroads: Cuban Slaves and the
Conspiracy of La Escalera, 1841-44. PhD diss., New York University,
2007.
Fountain, Daniel L. Long on religion, short on Christianity: Slave religion, 1830
1870. PhD diss., The University of Mississippi, 1999.
Green, William H. Tumultuous Meetings and the Fury of Freedom: Rethinking
African American Religion. PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2004.
Hall, Rebecca. Not Killing Me Softly: African American Women, Slave Revolts
and Historical Constructions of Racialized Gender. PhD diss., University
of California, Santa Cruz, 2004.
Hamby, Erin Brooke. The roots of healing: Archaeological and historical
investigations of African-American herbal medicine. PhD diss., The
University of Tennessee, 2004.
Heckscher, Juretta Jordan. All the Mazes of the Dance: Black Dancing, Culture
and Identity in the Greater Chesapeake World from the Early Eighteenth
Century to the Civil War. PhD diss., The George Washington University,
2000.

183

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.
Lane, Suzanne Therese. Conjured bodies, trickster voices: Transforming
narrative, history, and identity in the literature of slavery. PhD diss.,
University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2000.
Leaming, Hugo Prosper. Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the
Carolinas. PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1979.
Logan, Rebecca. Witches and Poisoners in the Colonial Chesapeake. PhD
diss., The Union Institute, 2001.
Malcolm-Woods, Rachel. Igbo Talking Signs in Antebellum Virginia: Religion,
Ancestors, and the Aesthetics of Freedom. PhD diss., University of
Missouri at Kansas City, 2005.
Martin, Kameelah L. Conjuring moments and other such hoodoo: African
American women and spirit work. PhD diss., The Florida State University,
2006.
Martin, Leann Thomas. Maroon Identity: Processes of Persistence in Moore
Town. PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 1973.
Moody, Shirley C. By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial
Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow. PhD Diss., University of
Maryland, College Park, 2006.
Pearce, Laurie E. The Cowrie Shell in Virginia: A Critical Evaluation of Potential
Archaeological Significance. M.A. thesis, College of William and Mary,
1992.
Samford, Patricia Merle. 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.
Young, Jason Randolph. Rituals of resistance: The making of an African-Atlantic
religious complex in Kongo and along the Sea Islands of the slave South.
PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2002.

184