Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures

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Central Africa in, tkt C&ribbe&K

Central Africa

in the Caribbean Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures

Maureen Warner-Lewis

University of the West Indies Press Barbados • Jamaica • Trinidad and Tobago

University of the West Indies Press 1A Aqueduct Flats Mona Kingston 7 Jamaica © 2003 by Maureen Warner-Lewis All rights reserved. Published 2003 07

543

CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Central Africa in the Caribbean: transcending time, transforming cultures / Maureen Warner-Lewis p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 976-640-118-7

1. Caribbean Area - Civilization - African influences. 2. Caribbean Area - Social life and customs. 3. Africa, Central - Social life and customs. 4. Caribbean Area - Religious life and customs. 5. Africa, Central Religious life and customs. I. Title. F2169.W382003

972.9

Benta drum illustration in chapter display by Robin Goodfellow. Maps by Leonard Notice, Department of Geology and Geography, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Musical scores by Merle Albino-deCoteau. Cover illustration: Agostino Brunias, A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in Dominica, c. 1810. Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. Book and cover design by ProDesign Limited, Red Gal Ring, Jamaica.

Printed on acid-free paper. Printed in Canada.

To David and 'Bisi Oke, and the late Doreen Ojurongbe, my earliest initiators into a live appreciation of Africa

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix List of Songs

xii

Acknowledgements xiv Introduction xix Abbreviations xxxiii Symbols xxxv Orthographic and Typographic Practice

xxxvi

Chapter 1 West Central Africa after European Contact 1 Chapter 2 Experiences of Enslavement 28 Chapter 3 Central Africans as Individuals in Community 57 Chapter 4 Economic Skills and Domestic Activity 84 Chapter 5 Interpersonal Relationships: Courtesies and Rites of Passage 108 Chapter 6 Religious Cosmology and Praxis 138 Chapter 7 Christianity and Associated Religions 776 Chapter 8 Accessing Power: Ritual War and Masquerade 199 Chapter 9 Pleasurable Leisure: Games, Dance and Music Chapter 10 Speech Culture 264 Chapter 11 Language Legacy 303 Chapter 12 Conclusion 330 Notes 345 References Index 386

360

227

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Illustrations

Maps 1 Language families of Africa

xviii

2 The Caribbean xxi 3 Outer limits and provinces of the Kingdom of Koongo in the sixteenth century 4 4 Ethnic groups in north-west Central Africa

8

5 Some Koongo sub-groups 16 6 Ethnic groups in south-western Angola 19 Figures 1.1 Portrait of "Congo" male 25 1.2

Portrait of "Benguela" male 25

1.3

Portrait of "Angola" male 25

2.1 2.2

Mavis Morrison of East Coast Demerara, Guyana 33 George Adams of West Coast Demerara, Guyana 41

2.3

West India Regiment private with Brown Bess musket, 1815 51

2.4

West India Regiment soldier in Zouave uniform 51

3.1

Princess Hinds Drakes of East Coast Essequibo, Guyana 63

3.2

The Field Negro wearing an ntanga 71

3.3

Some Ovimbundu tattoo patterns

4.1

A Chokwe chief's water-pipe 86

4.2 4.3

A Rastafari bamboo "sip", Jamaica, 2001 86 A pipe-smoking Guadeloupe vendor of herbs, early 1900s 87 One type of Koongo house in the Koongo-Angola region, c. 1910 90

4.4

75

ix

Illustrations

4.5

Rope-making in La Bonga, Colombia, 1990s 91

4.6

Plaiting a sleeping-mat in La Bonga, Colombia, 1990s 91

4.7

Mortar and pestle for pounding starches to a paste 95

4.8

The oil palm caterpillar 98

5.1

Vaneza Sinclair of West Bank Berbice, Guyana, 1994 118

6.1

An nkondi type nkisi 164

6.2

Koongo makuta 165

6.3a

Wrapped nkisi, Congo 165

6. 3b

Haitian paquette 165

6.4

Cazuela of the mayombero

6.5

Some forms of the Koongo sacred diyowa 167

6.6

Mokongo sign in Abakua religion, Cuba 167

6.7

Pétro vèvè, Haiti

7.1

Single bells 179

7.2

Double bells 179

165

167

8.1a-b The Cuban mani choreographed 201 8.2 A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in Dominica 204 8.3

Trinidad stickfighter in negjardin costume

8.4

A major jonc of Haitian Kara

9.la

The paabula move in the beele 229

9.1b

The bulikisa position in beele 229

9.2

Dancing the bongo croisée, Trinidad 234

9.3

The limbo, Trinidad 243

9.4

The kata as slit drum, Cuba 246

9.5

Blowing vaccines., Haiti

9.6 9.7

Inside of the "hog" or friction drum, Guyana 253 The benta, its gourd resonator, and kata stick percussion, Jamaica 254

9.8

The biti 259

9.9 10.1 10.2

The madiuma 260 A Guadeloupe basket-seller, early 1900s 274 "Propping sorrow", a pose in a dance by the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica 283

X

216

218

251

Illustrations

10.3 Male basket weavers in Zaire, c. 1970 294 11 .la-b Brother and sister of Koongo, Hausa and Vincentian descent 305 11.2

The millipede, curling and coiled in self-defence 317

11.3

Banana and plantain 319

11.4

Ochro 320

11.5

Pigeon or gungu peas 320

11.6 11.7

Imogene Kennedy, Sligoville, Jamaica, 1997 322 The cachimbo drum of the Cuban yuka and tumbafrancesca ensembles 326

xi

vStJUEf "Nkuumbu ntele" 30 "Kwamina" 55 "Njebele"

36

"Nkonkwe" 37 "Vitu" 37 "Malongwe yaya" 40 "Mboz e" 54 "Kyele" 88 "Bangale" 96 "Pussy" 118-19 "Ye mongo delange" 119 "Kongama"

119

"Kuuma" 121 "Yenge" 125 "Kobi"

150

"Malele" 151 "Tala mukinji"

182

"Elupwa" 184 "Whobarmi'bani'" 272

"Jab se yo neg" 212 "God, you is a white man" 2/2 "Me neg-la vye"

2/2

"U tan Elai move" 213 "When I dead"

277

"La vi mwe insho" 217 "Mooma, mooma" 217 xii

Songs

"If I die I die"

277

"Anbatai-la" 217 "The length of mi' wood" 217 "Mukila we" 261 "Soca Dancer"

262

"E mame" 269 "E mwaname" 270 "Tilika" 277 "Ngabila" 275 "Mbembe" 275 "Kimponde" 276 "Bon ju, makume" 277 "Freddie" 278 "Jongandwe" 279 "Buddy Georgie" 279 "Dumba Nkoongo" 280 "Mwana" 281 "Ba mbale" 313-14

xiii

v$? ckKwttlttniCKtf The genesis of this study goes back to 1966, when I began fieldresearching the memory of African languages among elderly people on my native island of Trinidad. That search continued intensively in the summers until 1972, and texts in Yoruba, Kikoongo, Hausa, Fon and Arabic were collected. The analysis of the compilation of Yoruba language inventories of words, phrases, prayers and songs was my doctoral dissertation accepted in 1984, and revised as the book Trinidad Yoruba: From Mother Tongue to Memory (1996, 1997). Prior to that, Yoruba Songs of Trinidad (1994) had appeared. The historical background to, and sociological overview of, nineteenth-century African immigrants to Trinidad had been published since the 1970s in issues of the African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletin, and subsequently republished in my collection of essays, Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture (1991 a). In this book, I turn my attention to the Koongo language data collected simultaneously with the Yoruba corpus, and to the sociological data that came out of those Trinidad interviews. These have been supplemented by unpublished data on Tobago kindly accessed from Dr J.D. Elder (Elder 1995). I have, however, opted to broaden the perspectives opened up by the Central African presence in the two sister islands, and to treat them comparatively with information from other Caribbean locales. To acknowledge the assistance of many persons over an almost fortyyear period would be difficult. But I may begin with Hilaire Thister of the Republic of Congo, a fellow boat passenger to West Africa, who in 1968 assured me that Arthur Sampson's Trinidad Koongo songs were in a language vraiment Koongo, as also was his vocal singing style. Professor Salikoko Mufwene, when on staff at the University of the West Indies in the 1970s, put me in contact with Charles Oilman, then pursuing linguistic research in Zaire, who secured well-considered xiv

Acknowledgements

interpretations of several Trinidad songs from Leon Lubanazadi Sokolua. Professor Mufwene again referred me to a fellow Zairean, Dr Yeno Matuka at Ball State University in Indiana, who brainstormed one weekend in 1994 through these songs, in addition to providing linguistic analyses of the modest Koongo lexicon and sentences that had been solicited from second- and third-generation descendants of Central African immigrants, to reproduce what I call Trinidad Koongo. Before that, in the 1980s, Professor Hazel Carter, then attached to the University of Wisconsin, had also helped with interpretations of personal names and songs. The Jamaican data proceeds from my own field interviews and observations, as well as the researches of the Hon. Edward Seaga, Professor Kamau Brathwaite, Dr Laura Tanna, Professor Carter, Cheryl Ryman, Professor Monica Schuler and Dr Kenneth Bilby. Guyanese data derives from the field researches of Dr Adeola James and her students at the University of Guyana, and from tape recordings made by Dr Ian Robertson, which were kindly made available to me. In addition, on my Guyana field trip, the support of Dr Edwin Carrington, Dr James, Dr Doris Rogers, Dr Dennis Canterbury, Dr Joycelynne Loncke, Brother Eusi Kwayana and Kidackie Amsterdam was invaluable, enabling me to accomplish much in a short space of time. Dr James's help, several years later, in verifying some of my documentation, is additionally appreciated. I have also been able to draw on a large body of documented research on "Congo" influence in Cuba. To this has been added my interviews with Abelardo Larduet, a Cuban religion specialist, in Santiago in 1988, for which Dr Bernardo Garcia, of the Casa del Caribe in Santiago, and Martha Corbett served as translators. Further data from Larduet, elicited in a 1995 interview, were kindly obtained through the translation and facilitation of Niurka Maya Vidal of Santiago. A 1995 workshop co-sponsored by the Casa del Caribe in Santiago, and the Caribbean Religions Project headed by Dr Patrick Taylor of York University in Ontario, allowed insightful visits to shrines of Central African religions in Cuba. Travels to Guadeloupe, St Lucia, St Kitts and Antigua in the late 1990s have further added to my store of oral, visual and printed information. My first extended work on transcribing my Central African data from the Caribbean, and documenting Central African history and XV

Acknowledgements

ethnography, came during a Fulbright fellowship at the Department of Asian and African Languages and Literatures, University of Florida at Gainesville, in 1989-90. The remarkable facilities afforded by a fellowship to the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina during 1994 made it possible to access recondite library material, and to begin the draft of this present study. A short-term fellowship attachment in 1996 at the National Anthropological Archives of the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, allowed me access to film footage on Jamaica's Africaderived religions shot in the 1950s. Finally, a University of the West Indies (Mona) Research Fellowship begun in September 2000 has, thankfully, allowed me time to concentrate on finishing this manuscript, so long in gestation, and the financial support for travel and technical expenses. Library work has been done at the West India Reference Library of the University of Guyana in 1994; at the Main Library and the Elsa Goveia Reference Library of the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies; the West Indiana holdings of the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies; the University of Miami's Richter Library and Pick Music Library; the libraries at the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; and the libraries of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College, Chicago, at the African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, and the National Library of Jamaica, Kingston. The assistance of librarians at these institutions, and of Kezia Page and Natalie King-Pedroso, who kindly accessed data from libraries on my behalf, is greatly appreciated, especially given the stymieing of my plans to visit Brazzaville in 1994 because of political instability in Congo Brazzaville, Zaire and Angola. Scholars such as Dr John Thornton, Dr David Geggus, Dr Hein Vanhee, Dr Ama Mazama, Professor Monica Schuler and Professor Joseph Miller have been helpful in sending me their articles, and in suggesting various references. Similarly, thanks are due to the art historians Rosalie Smith McCrae and Dr Judith Bettelheim for their suggestions, to Geri Augusto for alerting me to Angolan popular music, to Marjorie Whylie, Dr Lorna McDaniel and Merle Albino-de Coteau for their musicological analyses, to those who readily gave permission for use of their material, to Dr Jay Haviser of Kura Hulanda Museum xvi

Acknowledgements

in Curasao, to Jahlani Niah for assistance in artefact accession, and to Sandra Graham, Joseph Bell, Leonard Notice, Kojovi Dawes, Ruben Nunes, Errol Stennett, Michael Cooper and Pansy Benn for their technical support. Special thanks go out to my colleagues in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, who have allowed me time and mind-space to travel my own peculiar path towards decoding Caribbean historical experience and society, and as well to my husband, Rupert Lewis, who has played an important role by his support, emotionally and practically, of my intellectual work and who has either accompanied me on overseas stints or has gracefully endured my absences. Similarly, to my children, Yewande and Jide, who have tolerated an intellectually preoccupied mother and who have kept house admirably and responsibly during my frequent and sometimes lengthy trips abroad. Without a caring and sharing home, time, motivation and energy would have been much more difficult to access.

xvii

Map 1 Language families of Africa

$Ktr00iKCtt9K This book attempts to synthesize information concerning the Central African presence in the Caribbean and, in so doing, analyses and identifies some of the main lineaments of the Central African cultural legacy in the region. For the purposes of this study, the Caribbean is defined as the islands of the Caribbean Sea and circum-Caribbean areas in Central and South America. Within this broad ambit I try to range as widely and eclectically as the available data have allowed, guided first and foremost by the dictates of comparability between Africa and the Caribbean, and by inter-Caribbean correspondences. Unfortunately, limited access to data from some parts of the Caribbean region has meant that some countries have been omitted altogether, while others have received minimal treatment. Furthermore, by excluding northern Brazil and the southern seaboard of the United States, it was hoped to keep the material within manageable proportions. Not unexpectedly, however, it proved difficult to altogether omit reference to Brazil (see chapter 8) in a work which constitutes as much a study of the networking of cultural forms within the Caribbean Basin itself, and its contiguous geo-cultural zones, as a cross-comparison of Central Africa and the Caribbean. This exposition utilizes, in complementary fashion, both primary and secondary evidence regarding the Central African presence in the Caribbean throughout the plantation and post-plantation eras. The work's two nuclei are: (a) printed observations and impressions by sixteenth- to twentieth-century observers concerning Central Africans in the Caribbean; and (b) the oral recall by associates and descendants of this group regarding the Central African population in the region. The oral records include literary material such as folktales, proverbs and songs, which utilize phrases from Central African languages either wholly or partially. The oral testimonies at the core of this study were variously sourced. Most of the Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana oral data come from my own taped interviews with informants, but I was also fortunate to xix

Introduction

access interviews from other researchers, as credited in my acknowledgements. In addition, the printed oral resources of Cuba's Lydia Cabrera and Esteban Montejo have been invaluable. Other primary sources of information on the behaviour of Central Africans in the Caribbean came by way of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury observations made by planters, administrators, missionaries and travellers. It may be argued that third-person documentary sources, with which the oral narratives are juxtaposed, are often unreliable because of the jaundiced perspective from which they present the "other". For this reason there are limitations to the data advanced by commentators and analysts, both in the past as well as the present. But all sources, whether oral or scribal, are limited by the speaker's universe of knowledge, by bias and preoccupation, and reflect multiple agendas: religious, trade, genetic, ethnocentric, pseudo-scientific and academic. In general, I have tried to skirt judgmental commentaries and adhere to expository discourse, but favourable and unfavourable judgmental matter almost unavoidably obtrudes within the expository material. Opinions aside, these sources constitute the only reclaimable evidence available post hoc facto, since Africans did not document their own societies in scribal, widely diffusible form; and, in any case, the views quoted are either corroborated by the oral sources tapped in the Caribbean or, given more recent African documentation on "traditional" values in their societies, express opinions which seem to me not far off the mark. Asserting specific Central African sourcing of particular Caribbean cultural features is not a simple matter. This is so because, as will be surveyed in chapter 1, African ethnic identification could in several cases be multiple, given internal migrations and enslavement, as well as political upheavals; ethnic labels underwent radical change under the dispensation of transatlantic slavery, added to which differing European traders, over time, devised new shortcut signifiers. This means that "Congo" as used in the West Atlantic is not necessarily BaKoongo, just as what is labelled "Angolan" is not certifiably either Koongo or Mbundu. This uncertainty is vitiated by culture-zone correspondences, so that even where one may not robustly ascribe a custom or concept to one particular ethnic group, one can with some assurance indicate a spectrum of parallels within the geographical area recognized as West Central Africa. XX

Map 2 The Caribbean

Introduction

A further litmus test has been to identify West Atlantic terms with Central African cognates. Both the terms and the concepts which they embody are then taken as indicators of Central African presence or influence. On the basis of such etymological hypotheses, an investigation follows with regard to the Central African significances and contexts of such terminologies. I am well aware of the reservation that "[a] 11 too often . . . the historical connections [between the Caribbean and Africa] are simply inferred from a small number of formal similarities, with lexical items, for example, playing a major role in 'documenting' alleged relationships" (Mintz and Price 1992, 15). However, in the first place, knowledge of the historical connections between Africa and the Americas is not a matter of conjecture.Second, I advance the proposition that the survival and/or continued use of even one African lexical item in a West Atlantic location is evidence of an integral link, at some point in time, between the particular ethnolinguistic group - or even one individual of this group - and the practice and belief to which the term relates. In the words of a Caribbean novelist: "Some words control large spaces. They sit over large holes. These holes might be dungeons with hairy half humans living in them. Then again they may be underground worlds ..." (Brodber 1994, 43). While even one word can become a doorway to a treasure trove of facts and emotions and histories - subterranean worlds - Brodber reminds us that they may lead to entrapments. One such trap, in an enterprise such as this, is the replication in several parts of the African continent of the same, or similar, emblems, beliefs, idioms, practices and so on. I have declared, wherever it is within my knowledge, where such parallels qualify my attribution of a cultural feature to West Central Africa. One therefore has to acknowledge overlaps of African cosmology and praxis, while indicating that a West Central African component does exist in the West Atlantic reformulations of convergent African systems. By these methodologies I seek to explicate, illuminate and interpret Caribbean thought and practice by comparison with Central African world view and custom. Considerable use has thus been made of secondary observations and analyses of Caribbean history, demography and culture forms on the one hand, and, on the other, of corresponding and complementary data from areas of Central Africa. That region may be defined as particularly those areas settled by the Koongo, the xxii

Introduction

Mbundu and the Ovimbundu. The focus on the areas settled by these three ethnic groups has been dictated by their significance as slave trading zones, bolstered by the weight of oral and scribal evidence regarding the presence of the Koongo and Mbundu in the Caribbean, and further, in the case of the Koongo, by the weight of the linguistic survivals from this group in the twentieth-century Caribbean, whether by lexical contributions to European-lexifier languages of the region, or by the use in scattered pockets of the Caribbean of arcane Koongo verbal texts. The modern-day locations of these three ethnic groups extend through Congo (Brazzaville), Zaire or Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola. A study such as this fills part of the vacuum that exists relative to an understanding of Caribbean cultural identity and intra-Caribbean cultural links. It also seeks to push beyond the presently prevailing limits of our historical past. In the United States, the Franklin Frazier hypothesis of African cultural erasure among African-Americans has in the last two decades yielded to a revalidation of the Melville Herskovits position that aspects of African cultures had survived the Middle Passage.1 While the latter thesis is ideologically welcome as a marker of difference to many African-Americans - an embattled minority in the American demographic amalgam - in the Caribbean, by the reverse, the stigma of slavery and black pigmentation, the effectiveness of colonial brainwashing, the psychological insecurities of economically and technologically dependent peoples, and the complacency born of majority demographic status, have made the issue of Africa more subtly tortured for its peoples. The result is that both at academic and popular levels in the Caribbean there remains resistance to the suggestion or assertion of African-Caribbean linkages. This position flies in the face of historical fact, but is fed by the construct of Africa effectively propagated by racist and pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century scholarship and imperialist rhetoric. This current of thought does not acknowledge an ignorance of Africa: there is nothing to know. But omission of Africa from the Caribbean cultural paradigm also short-circuits an arena of study perceived as difficult or off the beaten track. The ease of reference and access in respect of things European contrasts with the mental and physical distance suggested by Africa, now that in the twentieth century ships no longer ply the Middle Passage, air routes between the two land xxiii

Introduction

areas are indirect, and lack of control over telecommunications networks and the electronic media have placed Africa and the Caribbean at the margins of the subjective concerns of the North. Thus Caribbean scholarship, whether in the arts or social sciences, very often posits the genesis of our societies in the plantations of this region, the assumption being that there had been no prior socialization of the African labour force, and that there had been no previous theatre of history before the slave ship. This postulation, significantly, applies only to its African peoples: thus the notions of the African Caribbean's cultural amnesia, and a metonymic transference of the slave's physical nudity on the auction block with a psychic nakedness and dispossession. Over the past three decades new understandings and sensitivities have impacted on the historiographical perspective of this issue, as evidenced in the seminal work of the poet/historian/essayist (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite, who cautioned in the mid-1960s against the popular misconception of the Middle Passage merely as "a traumatic, destructive experience, separating blacks from Africa, disconnecting their sense of history and tradition" and who proposed instead that it be recognized as "a pathway or channel between this tradition and what is being evolved, on new soil, in the Caribbean" (Brathwaite 1981, 7). Since then, the writings of Barry Higman on Caribbean slave populations, of Robert Stewart on the religious life of Caribbean slaves, of John Thornton and David Geggus regarding the St Domingue slaves, of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on Louisiana slaves, and of Brian Moore on Guyanese cultural history, are among several which reveal this understanding of the dynamic and creative interplay between the skills and world views the Africans brought with them, and the new conditions, diets, tools, clothes, cultures and moral bases into which they were inducted on this side of the Atlantic. Despite these advances, the impact of some of the theoretical positions taken by influential thinkers in the field of African diaspora studies still has to be addressed. For instance, in a seminal article on "The African Heritage in the Caribbean", M.G. Smith, the Jamaican sociologist, makes an apparently innocuous observation in his argument: "The African qua African was imported as a slave. He was not so much a person as property until emancipation was enacted in 1838" (1957, 38-39). While the slave was indeed chattel and treated as such, the xxiv

Introduction

slave was only property from the perspective of the master and the master class. Smith's statement therefore partakes of the assumptions held by the plantocracy regarding the slave. From any other perspective, the slave was very much a person. The particular bias in Smith's perspective results in a conclusion that follows logically from that bias, for the thrust which underlies Smith's thesis in the article is that "despite formal parallelism between specific or general African arrangements and certain West Indian practices, African cultural persistence cannot be predicated for these forms simply because of the massive historical discontinuities which slavery produced" (1957, 44). It is only possible to arrive at a conclusion privileging a high level of discontinuity if the slaves, to modify Smith's phrasing, were conceived of as less persons than things. Even those who do not consciously subscribe to the theory of cultural nakedness indirectly, do so by virtue of their subscription to the extremist arguments of the anti-slavery campaign, which depicted the slave condition as one in which the victim was bereft of family, name, country, personal identity and individuality. Slavery was epitomized by lack, loss, dereliction and degradation. This vacuous identity of "the slave" in abstract is still overwhelmingly the image purveyed, both by negrophobes and by Afrocentrists, and even sympathetic commentators overlook the fact of a slave's personality and personhood. Indeed, it is again by interrogating the slave experience beyond and before the opprobrium of the slave ship that one comes to realize that slavery, whether African domestic or transatlantic, was a state or condition which a person acquired because of circumstance; it was not an inherent construct of the person's identity. When analyses of Caribbean life, history and culture begin on the plantation, this dimension of personhood and identity prior to enslavement is lost, and one is left to grapple with notions of deficiency and pathology. On the other hand, within the conclave of the extraordinarily imaginative, there are those, like novelist/essayist Wilson Harris and the Nobel laureate poet/dramatist/essayist Derek Walcott, who seek to go "past the confrontation of history" and the confrontation with history by recreating history not as "time" or "memory" but as myth (Walcott 1974, 2). In Walcott's case, this ideological position attempts less to deny continuity than to privilege the societal result as the historical beginning. Walcott, whose medium is the double vision, in the same XXV

Introduction

essay that mentions the Haitian tradition of syncretistic Dahomeyan/ Catholic gods (1974, 12), affirms "the amnesiac blow" (Walcott 1969, 35) of the Middle Passage in the formulation: "In time the slave surrendered to amnesia." But in view of his abrogation of either the exploitative or oppressed statuses inscribed in the European and African ancestral histories, he goes on to embrace such amnesia as "the true history of the New World", ambiguously worded as "a new nothing, a darkness which intensified the old faith". This "new nothing" allows the imaging of the American as "a second Adam" and the structuring of post-Columbian life as "the re-creation of the entire order, from religion to the simplest domestic rituals" (1974, 4, 5). An ethnographic parallel of this position is taken by the formidable team of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1992). They concede humanity and a past to the enslaved, affirming that "immense quantities of knowledge, information, and belief must have been transported in the minds of the enslaved". However, their academic focus is not to examine such knowledge, but rather to explore the creativity of the new Caribbean inhabitants, a creativity which arises in response to new social conditions: "In order for slave communities to take shape, normative patterns of behavior had to be established, and these patterns could be created only on the basis of particular forms of social interaction." The catalytic role that they grant to the new bases of social interaction, formed through co-optation by or resistance to the plantation, suppresses the usefulness of the prior knowledge possessed by the enslaved. The trope of nakedness is thus connoted, and is even indeed stated in the declaration that "What the slaves undeniably shared at the outset was their enslavement; all - or nearly all - else had to be created by them" (p. 18). This virtual cultural nakedness is premised on two factors. One is that "The Africans who reached the New World did not compose, at the outset, groups. In fact; in most cases, it might even be more accurate to view them as crowds, and very heterogeneous crowds at that" (Mintz and Price 1992, 18). While the heterogeneity of the ethnic sources of transatlantic slaves is not in dispute, a misconception has hardened that ethnic solidarity was systematically and successfully undermined by the plantocracy. This was reputedly achieved by separating slaves who spoke the same language. It is one of the assumptions of Mintz and Price that "the initial aggregates of slaves in particular New World xxvi

Introduction

enterprises usually did not constitute speech communities" (p. 20). To my knowledge there exists no information that while purchasing slaves, owners queried sellers or the slaves themselves as to whether the slaves understood each other's language! But, that half-flippant critique notwithstanding, there might be some truth to this virtual axiom regarding the securing of ethnic incompatibility among slaves, but it must have been an ideal more honoured in the breach than the observance. Indeed, it was a goal that might have been more rigidly identified at times of social upheaval, since laws to this effect were passed in response to threats and realizations of slave rebellion. But in real life we know that there are frequently gaps between laws and their implementation. Open-minded reading of the conduct of slave society reveals, in fact, that some planters actually recommended, as an agent of the seasoning process, the mentorship of new slaves by experienced slaves of the same language community. Indeed, despite the wide variety of African ethnic groups which yielded members to the slave trade, the preference of European traders for particular slave ports and sources, the regularity of these patterns of slave ship calls, the preference of planters in specific Caribbean regions for particular ethnicities of slaves, are some of the factors that militated in favour of slaves from the same speech community being present on plantations at the same time period. The larger the plantation, the greater the likelihood that "two or three" and even more were "gathered together". The very fact that there were such ethnically based political actions (Schuler 1970; Debien 1974; Moliner Castafieda 1986a) is testimony that ethnic bonds did exist within and across plantations. Furthermore, the notion that slaves functioned as individuals rather than groups overlooks evidence of shipmate ties sealed during the Middle Passage and carried into plantation life. Such ties were based both on language cohesion as well as the experiential community of the slave ship voyage.2 A further caveat to argument against communal consciousness concerns the fact that the social life of the enslaved was not limited to the estate on which they lived but extended to neighbouring plantations, which together functioned as a constellation of villages whose inhabitants paid mutual visits for purposes of funerals, dances, sport and social concourse. The second premise which underpins the Mintz and Price position is that they "conceive of culture as being closely tied to the institutional xxvii

Introduction

forms which articulate it" (1992., 14). I read this as an overstatement of fact, for the institutions which they specify, such as status systems, priesthoods and temples, courts and monarchies (1992, 15), all constitute formal, public areas of socio-cultural life. Songs, games, proverbs, cooking methodologies - these are private/personal areas of cultural expression, but the definition of culture which Mintz and Price establish for their argument allows these expressions no space. Of a truth, this restricted definition appears specifically constructed to counter the Herskovitsian notion that some elements of African culture survived intact in the Americas, a position still held by some scholars. Mervyn Alleyne, for example, argues (1993, 171) that not only "entire functioning languages" but also "entire religions were carried to Jamaica". Such a notion derives from a concern with purity, holism and monism which have dominated European cognitive theorizing since the Enlightenment. It is an outgrowth of the dedication to a scientific world view, a reductive urge to codify, but carried to such an extreme of rigidity-that the unruliness of reality is too often forced into neat, mentally manipulable categories, as if such constructs can account for all emotional, physical and psychic data. On the other hand, concepts of purity fit uneasily with the multiethnic, multivalent nature of social and psychological reality in the Americas, as Raymond Smith's theory of Caribbean Creole societies was to show, and the polygenetic origins of Caribbean Creole languages were to manifest.3 In addition, Herskovits, Mintz and Price wrote before postmodernism would expose the epistemological distortion intrinsic in totalizing and monolithic notions. For their part, to counter the argument regarding the transference of intact traditions, Mintz and Price adduced two supports. On the one hand, they asserted, quite logically, that [n]o group, no matter how well-equipped or how free to choose, can transfer its way of life and the accompanying beliefs and values intact from one locale to another. The conditions of transfer, as well as the characteristics of the host setting, both human and material, will inevitably limit the variety and strength of effective transfers. (Mintz and Price 1992, 1) But they then go further, to formulate a definition of culture composed of "traditional institutions" together with their "human complement" xxviii

Introduction

(1992, 19), a position that is so totalizing that African social organizations - were one to erroneously suppose them to be monolithic, static or invariant - become incapable of transference. If, on the contrary, one recognizes the private domains of cultural thought and practice, and if one accepts that institutional systems can atomize into constituent elements under a disruptive contact situation, then it is possible to perceive of the possibility of cultural continuities, even though, as I will argue in my conclusion, the cultural elements that survive do not, and cannot, reconstitute themselves in the same molecular fashion as they held prior to dislocation and succeeding cultural contacts.4 Another argument in the Mintz and Price arsenal against involvement in continuity identification is to question the Herskovitsian notion of African culture zones.5 Thus they declare: We do not believe . . . that those Africans who were enslaved and transported to the New World can be said to have shared a culture^ in the sense that European colonists in a particular colony can be said to have done so. ... A primary contrast, then . . . is between the relatively homogeneous culture of the Europeans in the initial settlement of any New World colony, and the relatively diverse cultural heritages of the Africans in the same setting. (Mintz and Price 1992, 2-3) In this they concur with M.G. Smith's reservation regarding Caribbean-African comparative culture, given what he sees as "the problems of marked cultural dissimilarities within the West African regions" which cause "reference to or definition of a cultural pattern as characteristic of this area to remain highly suspect" (Smith 1957, 39, 40). Indeed it would be unnatural if, given the multiplicity of ethnic groups within large geographical areas, there were not to be differences, for instance, in burial patterns and marriage traditions. Such differences are based on region, clan or ethnic group. Yet despite cultural variation in Africa, I wish to suggest that a culture zone approach is underpinned by the working validity of a Caribbean as against a specific island identity and culture, or for that matter, the concept of European as opposed to English, French or Russian reality. If one can speak of European dress, food and culture, despite ethnic divergences, why then can one not speak of similar African applications? While acknowledging cultural xxix

Introduction

differentiation as a given, then, for purposes of analysis, those regions which constitute a culture zone are recognized as sharing a particular type of historical formation, are usually geographically adjacent, and/or through culture contact over substantial periods share aspects of their culture forms. In other words, neither the concepts of particularity or of commonality are mutually exclusive. Thus, if one were to attempt to identify the specificity of West Central African culture, one would seek to isolate patterns which appear to characterize the area, whether by exclusivity or by intensity of usage. Sometimes word cognation is a clue to cultural parallels within the region, and in several instances, because of Bantu6 language genetic relationships, it is possible to satisfactorily establish links in world view and cultural praxis. In other cases, lacking terminological evidence, one notices the recurrence of symbols and artefacts throughout the geographical area, such as mats associated with burial, disinterment of corpses thought to house troublesome spirits, along with the attribution of supernatural energy to human bones and skulls, the importance of basketry among the region's art forms and occupations, the use of bark cloth and the weaving of cloth from straw and tree fibres, baskets associated with diviners, trees linked with chieftaincy, and fire sacralizing communal events and marking calendrical periods. In addition, notions of curative and malignant manipulation of supernatural forces are realized in differing orders of priesthood; periodic cleansing of communities and restoration of individual spiritual aura are institutionalized in the activity of secret religious cults; maize and cassava dominate food culture; characteristic drums are tubular and held between the thighs, while shorter more bulky ones are laid horizontally on the ground and straddled. The western Bantu language area is thereby seen to constitute a culture zone. It is therefore not surprising that Hambly should remark in the 1930s that "the old culture of the Congo and northern Angola bears a strong resemblance to (Ov)Umbundu culture at the present day" (Hambly 1968, 119). Despite his caveat against the culture zone theory, Smith does concede fruitfulness to "specific attribution, . . . the ascription of cultural traits to particular cultures in Africa, as Bascom has done with AfroCuban divination practices (1952) or Herskovits (1937) and Deren (1970 [1953]) have done with certain spirits and rituals of Haitian vodun" (Smith 1957, 40). XXX

Introduction

Inasmuch as this study is based on primary data provided by descendants of Central Africans and on secondary data which specifies a Central African subject, or accredits a Central African identity to an individual or group in the Americas on the basis of linguistic evidence, I propose that the cultural data presented for comparative purposes here do in fact meet Smith's criterion of ethnic specificity. The modus operandi implemented here thus serves to identify aspects and areas of Central African history, ethnicity and custom which have exerted an influence on the course of Caribbean history and culture over some four centuries. In this regard the study furnishes details relative to aspects of the lifestyle and conceptual perspectives of Central Africans who came to the Caribbean. While the primary accounts relate to the nineteenth century and even the early decades of the twentieth, they do provide us with a refracted image of certain ways of life and the possible cosmovision of Caribbean-based Central Africans during earlier periods, that is, under slavery. In a similar manner, while Smith points to the potential inaccuracy of "using contemporary ethnographies of [African] regions as evidence of the cultural conditions from which the [Caribbean] migrants were drawn" (1957, 39), one has to credit ethnic groups with some modicum of cultural continuity and identity, especially when collaborative evidence suggests that a culture trait present in the seventeenth century, say, is reported as still operative, even in the changed socio-political circumstances of the twentieth century.7 Which brings one to sociological issues which surround the consideration of culture contact. Smith advanced the view that it has been a great source of confusion in the study of our African heritage to classify forms in terms of hypothetical acculturative processes. If our enquiry in this field is to advance, we must distinguish carefully between three aspects, attending to each separately and in turn. Form is one thing, function is another; process, the third, is the ultimate goal of our analysis. (1957, 41) Not considering it necessary for an individual researcher to shoulder an exhaustive agenda, I declare the parameters of this work as identifying personal names, lexical cognates, food types, conceptual, artistic and motor behaviours which link the Caribbean with Central Africa and xxxi

Introduction

which replicate themselves at varying points in Caribbean space. Form is the primary focus, with variations in form and function being indicated in the attendant commentary, whether or not the material to hand allows insight into the processes which accompany or have accompanied change. By its scope this book is meant to contribute to the hunger for transatlantic comparative data that is felt by researchers and performers in the arts, by religious thinkers, and at all levels of the education system in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the Americas. This compilation of concrete and particularistic evidence of ethnic links and cultural continuities between one culture area of Africa and the Caribbean, comes at a time when the climate of both popular and academic opinion is more favourable and receptive to this approach to Caribbean definition. Yet the demands of transcultural comparative study and investigation are daunting, with the result that insufficient work of this scope is as yet available to provide a groundwork for understanding the events, nature and processes of cultural contact and cultural engineering.

xxxii

&&&rtYtAft$Kf

Be CuKo dial. emph. Eng f. fn. Fr FrCr gen. GuadKo GuyKo imp. indef. JC JaKo Ko m. Mb MKo My N n. NE neg. pers. pi. Po pr.

Bembe Cuban Koongo dialect emphatic English feminine footnote French French Creole genitive Guadeloupe Koongo Guyana Koongo imperative indefinite Jamaican Creole Jamaica Koongo Koongo masculine Mbundu Martinique Koongo Mayombe northern Koongo noun north-eastern Koongo negator person plural Portuguese pronoun xxxiii

Abbreviations

Pr2 Pr3 S SB sg. Sp subj. TE TKo Urn Vi W Y

xxxiv

second-person pronoun third-person pronoun Southern southern Bembe singular Spanish subject Trinidad English Trinidad Koongo Umbundu Vili Western Koongo Yoruba

Svni>@tf < >

~ + [] // ~

n

g

8 0

derived from becomes/became variant of, alternating with followed by phonetic pronunciation phonemic representation nasalized vowel ny, as in "near:" ng, as in "sm^" mid front vowel, as in "set" as in "0r"

XXXV

Vrtk9tr*,ikic &M( Tyl®tr&ikic *3*r&ctic€ In this text, Central African words, whether confirmed or putative, are in bold type, though they may not be so rendered in quotations which did not demarcate these words by special type. Words in other languages are given in italics. Central African words are spelt phonemically, with long vowels indicated by doubling, but tone marks are omitted. Phonemic spelling is also used to indicate pronunciations delivered in interview contexts. French Creole words are also rendered phonemically rather than in accordance with French orthographic practice, except where the quoted source applied the French convention. 6 represents [o], e represents [e], and n after a vowel signals nasalization of the vowel. English Creole is rendered using a mix of English, popular and phonemic spellings.

xxxvi

Chapter 1

West Central Africa after Enropeasn Contact Politics and Economy Before the arrival of the Portuguese, the Bantu world faced inland with its back to the sea. Although the coast had deposits of salt, which was one of the chief commodities of pre-European trade, and of shells widely used as currency, the sea was regarded by the Bantu mainly as a barrier to further westward expansion. When the Portuguese opened trade-routes across the ocean the attentions of the peoples of the region swung round and began to focus on the new coastal trade outlets. (Birmingham 1965, 3) Waves of people who settled West Central Africa had dispersed southward over land and river out of the region of Cameroon from about 3000 BC. They farmed cereals, banana, yam, oil and raffia palm, beans, gourds, pepper, groundnut, and various vegetables including amaranthus, unlike the hunter-gatherer pygmy indigenes whom they displaced in their southerly migrations. Iron and copper mining and smelting diffused both with them and to them from East as well as West Africa from around 1000 BC. This enabled greater efficiency in agriculture and war, stimulated trade and set new bases for wealth and prestige, thus allowing for the consolidation of powerful individuals, lineages, states and kingdoms (Vansina 1990, 52-60).1

1

Central Africa in the Caribbean

The European world intruded on this Central African scenario in 1482 when the Portuguese Diogo Cao dropped anchor at the Zaire River and made contact, first with the king of Nsoyo (Soyo ~ Sonyo), and then with Nsoyo's overlord, the king of Koongo, Nzinga Nkuwu. The Koongo kingdom had been founded in the late fourteenth century, reaching its height of expansion in the sixteenth. Contact between Portugal and Koongo began with mutual diplomatic recognition and the proffering of Portuguese technical aid, including the teaching of literacy and the introduction of food crops, in exchange for their acquisition of trade items such as ivory and cloth. But within decades Portuguese interest had shifted to the slave trade. By the 1530s the number of slaves exported from the Kongo port of Mpinda was already estimated to be 4,000 to 5,000 a year.... As the demand for slaves grew, the traders had to travel increasingly further inland to find them. The actual capture of the slaves was organized chiefly by the king of Kongo who conducted wars and raids and then sold the captives to the Portuguese. (Birmingham 1965, 7) Apart from this involvement by the king of Koongo, the Portuguese themselves adopted a proactive policy to court African rulers, both within and beyond the borders of the Koongo-speaking area. Those chiefs who were able to develop direct lines of communication with the overseas traders grew wealthy out of the commercial links, and their new diplomatic and economic strength undermined the importance of the Koongo monarchy. A weakened and contracted Koongo still existed in the late nineteenth century, but between 1859 and 1866 a Portuguese military force occupied Mbanza Koongo - the Koongo royal seat and political centre which the Portuguese called Sao Salvador - to put down civil war and establish a king on the throne (Johnston 1908, 1:75). Sao Salvador sustained a declining population during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, consisting mainly of state officials and their relatives. The population declined even further during periods of interregnum, since it was not uncommon for the city to be sacked and burned during succession struggles (Broadhead 1979, 628). Indeed, the Koongo kingdom had been undermined from within and without, one result being that sub-kingdoms which previously acknowledged loyalty to the Koongo king eventually established 2

West Central Africa after European Contact

their independence, and also sought to take control of one another. For example, by the eighteenth century Kakongo felt itself equal to Koongo, and Soyo claimed Ngoyo (Proyart 1776, 162). Indeed, since Kakongo, Ngoyo and Soyo were coastal, they had an advantage over land-locked Mbanza Koongo (in Mpemba province) in terms of access to foreign trade. The main exception to the general rule that Europeans did not penetrate the African interior and play a direct role in the rivalries of African kingdoms, was the activity of the Portuguese in Central Africa. Although they started by limiting themselves to buying slaves supplied from wars carried on by others, they later took to conducting campaigns of their own. In the early sixteenth century, Portuguese settlers on the islands of Sao Tome and Principe, which lay on the sea route to Koongo from other Portuguese trading posts such as the Gold Coast and Benin, established trade centres there in slaves, cattle, salt and cloth. These colonists also opened up sugar plantations which they worked using enslaved mainland Africans. They developed a pattern similar to that instituted in Upper Guinea, where they consorted with indigenous women and married into local nobility, fathering mulatto children and fostering a planter and commercial elite (Miller 1983, 131; Rodney 1970, 71-94, 200-204). Over time this Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese community spread from Sao Tome to Koongo itself, then to Luanda, and to Benguela. These settlers and the administrative agents of the Portuguese crown rapidly undermined the authority of the king of Koongo "by assuming extra-territorial rights and establishing, with the help of missionaries, parallel judicial and administrative authorities". The dual system worked moderately well until about 1540, when it began to degenerate rapidly. A weakened Koongo was eventually overrun by Jaga invaders from the east in the late sixteenth century. The latter "expelled the Portuguese and ended their experiment" (Gray and Birmingham 1970, 21), while the Koongo monarchy attempted to recoup its strength by alliances with a faction of the Mbundu led by Queen Nzinga, and with the Dutch. But Nzinga died in 1663 and the alliance was decisively defeated by the Portuguese in the battle of Ambwila in 1665. The king of Koongo died in the conflict, precipitating further factionalism. A new line of kings was not re-established till the second half of the eighteenth century, and did not last long. The 3

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Map 3 Outer limits and provinces of the Kingdom of Koongo in the sixteenth century royal capital was abandoned, and despite efforts to revive the court and kingdom, the centralized monarchical system passed into a mythologized ideal, a Utopia which the Koongo continually longed to revive (Broadhead 1979, 627). Even as processes of state consolidation in resistance to the Portuguese were attempted in various locations, throughout the region power was passing from centralized kings to local chiefs, thus facilitating easier European colonial intervention, the election of puppet monarchs, and European consolidation of large tracts under their sovereignty. 4

West Central Africa after European Contact

This pattern was widespread throughout West Central Africa. For instance, in 1575 the Portuguese established a bridgehead at Luanda, south of the Koongo-speaking area. From there they courted the ngola or king of the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo. Ndongo "owed its strength;, if not its very origins" to control of the trading system of the Kwanza valley, where the main commodity was "high-quality rock-salt mined in Kisama and carried in natural slabs far into the interior" (Gray and Birmingham 1970, 15). So crucial was this trade that a series of armies was organized by the kings of Ndongo to protect their salt and its trade supply routes from Portuguese takeover. The Portuguese were also intent on discovering silver mines, but by 1605 slave capture by the Portuguese army was given priority over the search for the elusive metal (p. 16). By the early decades of the seventeenth century the Portuguese succeeded in imposing upon the Mbundu a form of indirect rule through a puppet king of Portuguese choice. In 1671 they deposed the king and began building a fort at the coastal town of Luanda. Thus Ndongo became the first African colony of a European state. The following years brought wars and the gradual subjugation of the territory to which the Portuguese would give the umbrella designation of Angola. Luanda was to become an important slave port, retaining this identity into the nineteenth century. For the Luanda-based traders the slave business was profitable, since by the nineteenth century the "average price of a full-grown, healthy man or woman was about three pounds in cloth or other goods, and as low as five shillings for a little nigger" (Monteiro 1875, 2:182). The profit was ten-fold when the slave was bought in Cuba. Similarly, "traders at Ambriz and farther north . . . received hard cash in Spanish gold, at a profit of two to three hundred per cent for the goods of pious Manchester and Liverpool, with which almost every one of the thousands of slaves shipped were bought" (pp. 183-84). Benguela became a new Portuguese colony in the late eighteenth century, though Luso-Africans at Luanda had opened a slave market there around 1615 (Miller 1983, 134). From Benguela, they and the Portuguese penetrated the Ovimbundu kingdoms of the Bihe plateau, so that "the flow of slaves from Benguela increased until by the end of the eighteenth century the trade was as important as that of Luanda" (Birmingham 1965, 43). Well into the nineteenth century it continued 5

Central Africa in the Caribbean

to be one of the major slave trading ports. The main peoples leaving from Benguela were Ovimbundu, who had organized themselves in segmentary chiefdoms, with the Biye and Kakonda chiefdoms being militarily aligned with the Portuguese from the end of the eighteenth century. But the Ovimbundu, in turn, raided further eastward for slaves among various peoples whom they dismissively generalized as "Ngangela". Of the Ovimbundu, the most commercially astute came from the chiefdoms of the Bihe ~ Biye ~ Viye and the Mbailundu ~ Bailundu. So that by the middle of the nineteenth century "Ovimbundu were travelling throughout the area bounded by the Congo River, the Great Lakes and the Kalahari, and even transcontinental journeys were made" (Edwards 1962, 5). In barter for ivory, slaves, beeswax, corn and palm oil, the Ovimbundu obtained from the Portuguese cloths, guns and rum (Monteiro 1875, 2:182). Another significant port for the export of slaves was the kingdom and port of Loango, which lay north of Kakongo and Ngoyo. Loango was the major port of the Vili ~ Lari people. It lay on the coastal strip north of the Nzadi River, and its contact with the Portuguese began in the 1570s. The Portuguese traded cloths, rugs, mirrors and beads for ivory, elephants' tails, palm-cloth, redwood, skins and copper. Redwood or camwood (nkula [Ko]) was a dye and cosmetic powder much used by Central African peoples that, together with a velvet-like cloth woven from palm fibre, was acquired by the Portuguese in exchange for ivory and slaves in other Central African ports of call. In fact, palmcloth in two sizes - lubongo and tnpusu - was one of the currencies of the region, another being nzimbu shells, and yet another, salt cones or bars. The nzimbu were not cowries (mbesi, Cypraea moneta), which came from Zanzibar, Mozambique and India, all washed by the Indian Ocean; rather, they were little spiral-shaped greyish-white Olivancillaria nana. They were collected along the coastline of the Koongo, but especially on Luanda island in Luanda Bay. At the time of the Portuguese contact with Koongo, the collection of these shells was a monopoly of the king of Koongo (Balandier 1968, 40). European and Asian cloths were another form of currency. At Loango, slaves were paid for by "pieces", largely of cloth, but a "piece" was a notional value. In other words, one piece of cloth could be valued at two or three "pieces", whereas another "piece" would be computed as several items taken together (Proyart 1776, 152). One slave could be 6

West Central Africa after European Contact

sold for thirty "pieces". Similarly, at the ports of Malimbe in Kakongo and Cabinda in Ngoyo, slaves were sold for "merchandise", a system equivalent to that in Loango. "Merchandise" was a piece of cotton or madras, ten to fourteen aunes long. Fifteen of these could buy a slave. But in addition to this, there was a package of goods which covered the whole deal, and which consisted of three or four guns, as many sabres, fifteen jars of eau-de-vie, fifteen pounds of cannon powder and several dozen knives (Proyart 1776, 151). Luxury items and military hardware increased the prestige of chiefs and their officials, attracting dependents and increasing their power (Vansina 1990, 203). Apart from the Portuguese, the Dutch also traded with Loango, which was in fact the Dutch foothold in Central Africa. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, they established slave forts at the two principal ports of Loango - Loango Bay and Mayumba. The Dutch also traded further south, with the kingdoms of Kakongo and Ngoyo (Martin 1970, 140). The extension of their slave supplies arose because of the labour needs of sugar plantations in Pernambuco and Paraibo, in north-eastern Brazil, which had been seized from the Portuguese by the Dutch in the 1630s (Birmingham 1965, 43). The slaves bought by the Dutch were largely bartered for textiles from Holland and Asia, and for household items such as pots, pans, knives, clocks, locks, iron bars, mirrors, jewellery and alcohol. The last item, along with guns and gunpowder, increased in significance over the centuries (Postma 1990, 104-5). The English and French became major traders on the Loango coast during the eighteenth century (Birmingham 1965, 43). The French had established missionary footholds on the Kakongo arid Loango coasts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Johnston 1908, 1:91), all the while continuing to pursue slave acquisition; the trade in ivory, monkeys, parrots and like goods had become peripheral by the end of the eighteenth century (Birmingham 1965, 43). Some of the slaves reaching Loango and the more northerly port at Mayumba, hailed from the area drained by the Ogowe and Nguni rivers. Masango, Mitsogo, Nzabi, Simba, Pove and Sangu people were traded by the Punu, Yaka and Kele, while the Mpongwe and Orungu around the Gabon estuary to the north exported Apinji, Aduma, Eshira, Fang, Bakalai and Shekiani out of Cape Lopez and the Gabon River (Patterson 1975, 76, 85; Mumford 1991, 1:118; 7

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Map 4 Ethnic groups in north-west Central Africa

Raponda-Walker 1967, 229). They were traded along with ivory, wax, honey and dyewood - red dyes being in great demand for British and French soldiers' uniforms during the 1793-1815 Napoleonic Wars (Patterson 1975, 35, 38). But Loango was a more significant catchment port for slaves than the Gabon River outlets. Trade caravans between the hinterland and the Loango coast proceeded on foot in the dry season to Teke or Bobangi or Yanzi country at Mpumbu (Stanley Pool). "Another trade8

West Central Africa after European Contact

route led from Loango in a north-easterly direction, crossing the Niari river and climbing the Sibiti plateau to the Yaka." Another "reached the coast at Mayumba, having followed the Nyanga river". Southerly routes crossed Kakongo and Ngoyo; another reached San Salvador (Mbanza Koongo) through Nokki and Boma on the Nzadi. Yet other routes extended to "the Mbundu state of Matamba on the west side of the upper Kwango river" (Martin 1970, 150-52). Boma, located within Loango or Yombe country on the estuary of the River Congo, was to become Cabinda's main supplier of slaves in the nineteenth century.2 The geographical region around the mouth of the Congo River, Loango Bay and Cabinda grew in importance during the nineteenth century. It lent itself to the stealth required by the British slave trade embargo enunciated in 1807. But the mouth of the Congo River was "ideal for escaping capture. The many creeks, islands and mangroves provided cover where slave-ships could hide until the cruisers were out of sight; then they made a quick escape by means of the fast Congo current." In this environment of stealth, piracy became a modus operandi for old slavers and enterprising natives new to the business. Pirates lurked in the numerous creeks between the islands of the estuarine Congo and the mainland. When strong enough, they attacked isolated trading stations, or boats and small steamers passing up or down the Congo Johnston 1908, 1:83). Because, on the one hand, as "the antislave-trade campaign on the African coasts became more effective", and, on the other, the British and French naval patrols were unable to completely seal off the sea routes out of Africa, the value of a slave soared (Martin 1972, 142). Eventually, however, the slave trade died out towards the close of the nineteenth century because of harassment by anti-slave patrols off the coast of Cuba and in the Brazil-bound sea lanes, and also because of the extension of the embargo secured by an Anglo-American agreement in 1862 allowing ships carrying the American flag to be searched. Given this international pressure and the uncertainty in trade which it bred, Spanish slave-dealers in Cuba, for instance, no longer sent cash and vessels to Angola for the purchase and shipment of slaves, and the consequence was that the proceeds of several cargoes shipped at the expense of the Portuguese traders on the coast were entirely appropriated by the 9

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Spaniards, who did not even vouchsafe an acknowledgment of the cargoes, but left the captains and supercargoes to think themselves lucky that they escaped with their lives. (Monteiro 1875,2:183) From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, then, slave trading had become the principal basis of the economy along the West Central African coast and in its hinterland. A change from this economic system was therefore not easy to implement. As Western mercantile interests began to direct the African economy back into agriculture and mineral extraction, slave captives from the interior were retained on the coast in labour-intensive enterprises similar to the high-pressured cultivation and exploitation of manual labour that had been devised for the West Atlantic centuries earlier. European and American cotton plantations and oil palm stands in Africa were geared towards the extraction of oil for machine lubrication, and for candle and soap manufacture (Martin 1972, 150). Meanwhile, power had everywhere passed from the centralized kings to local chiefs, one of the factors that laid the basis for European colonial intervention, their securing of the election of puppet monarchs, and consolidation of large tracts under European sovereignty.

Densities of the Slave Traffic As a proportion of the total Atlantic trade between 1519 and 1867, virtually the total period of the recorded traffic, recent analyses submit that Central Africa yielded a significant number of the human cargo: 44.2 per cent, that is, 4,887,500 out of a total of 11,062,000. This export calculation starts with 221,200 between 1519 and 1600, rising to 461,900 in the first fifty years of the seventeenth century, falling off significantly thereafter, to balloon again from 1726 to 1750 at 552,800, and peaking to 816,200 between 1776 and 1800, maintaining levels in excess of 700,000 for the first half of the nineteenth century, and dropping to 155,000 between 1851 and 1867 (Eltis 2000, 35). From 1662 to 1867 Barbados is thought to have received Central Africans as 15.6 per cent of its intake, the British Leewards 15.1 per cent, Cuba 30.9 per cent, the Danish islands 28.6 per cent, Guadeloupe 30.5 per cent, South America - French, British and Dutch - 27.6 10

West Central Africa after European Contact

per cent, the Windward islands 13 per cent, and St Domingue, between 1701 and 1800, 49.5 per cent.3 Between 1655 and 1807 Central Africans accounted for 17.5 per cent of Jamaica's slave acquisitions (Curtin 1969, 160), and between the 1650s and 1795, 32 per cent of Suriname's slaves came from this region (Price and Price 1999, 278). The Harvard database team, of which Eltis was a member, examined in the 1990s some 27,233 transatlantic slaving voyages. The team's dissection of ship movements to the hispanophone Americas, as tabulated in Miller (1998, 27) are given below. In this table, "Angola" serves as a generic designation for all Central African exit points during the earlier eras of the slave trade, with specific ports of call being identified after the 1770s. The omnibus term "Spanish Central America" would have included, among several others, Vera Cruz in Mexico as well as Cartagena in Colombia, and Portobello in present-day Panama, previously part of Colombia. Table 1.1 Denominations of Central African Slaves Delivered to Spanish American Territories Spanish American Territory Spanish Central America

Dates 1590s-1630s 1650s 1680s 1700s-1730s

1740s 1750s-1770s 1800s

Denomination of Origin in Africa "Angola" "Angola" "Angola" "Angola" Loango Cabinda Cabinda "Angola" Cabinda Benguela

Number of Ships

140 1 1 23 9 8 1 4 2 1

Santo Domingo

1780s

Ambriz

1

Puerto Rico

1760s

"Angola"

4

Cuba

1790s-1810s

Loango Ambriz Congo Ambriz Luanda Benguela Ambriz Benguela Malimbo

9 3 44 4 4 1 3 1 1

1800s 1830s

1850s 1860s

11

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Within these overall profiles there were fluctuations from one period to another. In his periodization of slave inflows to Jamaica, Patterson indicated a concentration on the Senegambia, the Windward Coast,4 and the Gold Coast, as slave sources in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century there was a shift to the Slave Coast,5 33 per cent, and along with sizeable numbers from the Gold Coast, 25 per cent, an accessing of 27 per cent from the Windward Coast and Angola. In the second half of the eighteenth century there was a concentration towards the Niger and Cross deltas, but between 1790 and 1807 the "most striking feature of this period was the rapid increase in the number of slaves exported by the British from Southwestern Africa, especially in the region of the Congo and Angola" (Patterson 1967, 128-31). Even so, some of the earliest slaves to be landed in Jamaica, in 1598 while the island was under Spanish control, were 155 "Angolans" (Carey 1997, 64). For the erstwhile Danish West Indies a parallel shift was noted, away from a dominance in Akan slaves from the Gold and Ivory Coasts during the early part of the eighteenth century towards a sourcing of "Congo" importations during the later decades of the century (Hall 1992, 71). This combination reflects the pattern of some slave trading concerns in the mid-seventeenth century, for example the Dutch West India Company, which took on provisions and slaves at Elmina on the Gold Coast "and then cdrop[ped] below the Line' [Equator] to Sao Tome or Angola for the bulk of the slave cargo" (Mumford 1991, 1:136). The Dutch, who traded out of the Loango coast after 1670, and briefly out of the Angola coast during the mid-seventeenth century, conducted 25.8 per cent of their trade out of these areas in the first four decades of the eighteenth century (Postma 1990, 101, 114), shipping large numbers of slaves to St Eustatius "for resale to French and English planters on nearby islands", as well as to Suriname. The English suppliers of Central Africans had increased their activities from the start of the eighteenth century, with 33,600 slaves transported, rising to 89,930 by 1740, falling off from that peak in subsequent years, to balloon between 1790 and 1799 to 128,390, with 80,320 recorded for the first decade of the nineteenth century. The French had posted figures above 40,000 slaves in the mid-eighteenth century, climaxing between 1780 and 1789 at 116,460 (Miller 2002, 64-65). By 1817, therefore, in St Kitts, 46.7 per cent of African slaves 12

West Central Africa after European Contact

were from Central Africa, and slightly less than half that amount from the Niger Delta/Bight of Biafra region. The almost exact reverse was the case with St Lucia in 1815, while Trinidad in 1813 had 41.2 per cent from the Biafra area as against 19.1 per cent from Central Africa. The numbers of the latter in Berbice were somewhat higher, 22.5 per cent, with 22.2 per cent from the Bight of Benin or Slave Coast, and 16.5 per cent from the Bight of Biafra. Anguilla in 1827 had 43.4 per cent from the Senegambia, and 41.5 per cent from Central Africa (Higman 1984, 127). There were further inequalities in the concentration of ethnic groups within territories. In the early 1790s, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, "West-Central Bantu constituted more than two-fifths of the Africans in the northern plain, indeed one-quarter of all slaves in the North Province" of Haiti (Geggus 1994, 145). Elsewhere, the same analyst indicates that in the 1780s, Central Africans accounted for almost 60 per cent and Aja-Fon for only 12 per cent of the slaves in the North and South Provinces. "In the plains of the West Province AjaFon and Yoruba each then formed sixteen per cent of the Africans; Central Bantu thirty-two per cent, and in the surrounding mountains, fifty per cent." Geggus points out that this "prominence of 'Congos' was not solely a late colonial phenomenon. As far back as records currently go (that is, the 1720s), they formed one of the major ethnic groups in Saint Domingue, while at no time did the Aja-Fon constitute more than twenty per cent of the African slaves" (Geggus 199 la, 36). Aja-Fon cultural influence has been highly visible through vodun in Haiti, which has led to a common assertion of their numerical advantage. But, as analysed in this author's study of the Yoruba in Trinidad, numerical dominance is neither a necessary nor an exclusive factor in cultural influence (Warner-Lewis 1997a, 35-36). A similar overstatement of the numerical strength of an ethnic group in a particular Caribbean location has occurred with respect to Jamaica. There, the apparent dominance among the Maroons of the Akan ethnic group, which includes Fanti, Koromanti and Ashanti, has bred notions of a numerical preponderance of this group among Africans throughout Jamaica generally.6 In the first place, cultural dominance ought not to be considered as necessarily the result of numerical superiority, though it is likely to be a factor. Second, Maroons constituted a minority in the slave colony and are not therefore representative of the larger whole. 13

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Third, as indicated earlier, demographic studies show that the proportion from Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra over the entire history of the slave trade to Jamaica amounted to 46 per cent (Higman 1976, 76). Furthermore, in the post-emancipation period, between 1840 and 1864, about eight thousand Africans were recruited as indentured labourers for Jamaica, the majority of whom were "Congo", "Igbo" and "Yoruba", the last known as Nago (Schuler 1980, 68-69).

Central African Populations in the West Atlantic Reinterpreted Ethnic Identities Ethnic identity is both internally generated and externally ascribed. As will be further examined in the following chapter, severance and/or alienation from one identity and space, followed by incorporation into another, was part of the life experience of many Africans, whether as direct personal experience or recalled as the experiences of parents or grandparents. Alienation from a previous identity would have been caused by the dislocation of war or by migration, necessitated by ecological vicissitudes, communal or family disagreements, or provoked by forced or even pragmatic alterations in political and economic allegiances. The adoption of new identities fostered the acceptance of new ideological perspectives, sanctioned new exogamous relationships, and created links between peoples who were once strangers or even hostile groups. One result of physical population shifts and expanded sexual access was miscegenation (Harms 1981, 30). These patterns were to be repeated in the processes of resocialization and identity re-formation among wave upon wave of enslaved persons who crossed the Atlantic. As the ethnic identities of Africans were so multifarious, and since many persons came from small villages and segmentary bands of agriculturalists and fisherfolk, far from the hegemony of centralized state formations, both African and European strangers imposed new amalgamating designations to refer to Africans from various regions. Furthermore, since slaves were collected at central points in the hinterland or on the coasts, it was a matter of convenience for their captors to use shorthand referents. Their captors had little personal interest in their captives, and in many cases did not understand the languages they 14

West Central Africa after European Contact

spoke. So the enslaved were not likely to have been consulted as to their own identifying labels; in any case, identity was probably plural, given the heterogeneous scenario above. Identity was also contingent: selfidentification with a village would yield to a wider self-labelling the further from the village the individual moved, and the more intense the encounter with persons with whom they discovered regional affinities. As such, "Congo" became an omnibus term for several peoples from Central Africa. The term not only covered Koongo-speaking subgroups but also non-Koongo-speakers as well. Among Koongo language sub-groups were the Yombe along the north-west Congo River approaches to its confluence with the Atlantic; along the Atlantic Coast itself were the Loango, also known as Vili ~ Laadi ~ Lari; south of these were the Ngoyo ~ Woyo, and on the southern bank of the Zaire lived the Soyo ~ Sonyo, the Kakongo, Nsundi, Bungu, Bembe, Fuumbu, Nyanga, Kunyi, Kamba, Kenge, Dondo ~ Ndundu, the Gangala, Ntandu, Suku, and the Mbata who later were called Zoombo. Among the Koongo-speaking sub-groups recorded in Cuba are Munsombo ~ Ensombo ~ Zoombo, Makuta from just north of the Zoombo, the Munsundi ~ Nsundi, the Mumboma ~ Mboma ~ Boma, the Yombe ~ Mayombe, the Kabinda, Mpangu, Vili, Biringoyo - an amalgam of Vili and the kingdom of Ngoyo, Mpemba, Kasamba, Musoso ~ Soso ~ Nsonso, and Mumbata ~ Mbata. Mu- originally indicated reference to a single person. Terms like Entotera < ntotila, an honorific for the king of Koongo, and Angunga < a 'of + ngunga 'bell' - a reference to the Catholic churches which typified Mbanza Koongo - were perhaps ancillary ways of identifying Congos reales 'royal Koongo', or persons from the royal city of Mbanza Koongo. Their cabildos in Havana, Santa Clara, Sancti Spiritu, Remedios, Sagua and Santiago de Cuba were important societies (Cabrera 1986a, 15). In Jamaica, by comparison, there is a certain prestige attached to the labels "ring Koongo" or "ring-born Koongo" (that is, "real" or "trueborn" Koongo, the terms probably also deriving from the association between Mbanza Koongo and bells, thus 'ring'), and they are applied only to those who come from a long line of Kumina devotees and are very knowledgeable in the tradition of the Kumina religion. However, the "Congo tribe", or "Congo Nation", is sometimes held to be synonymous with the "Bongo Nation" - the entire "African Nation" which practises Kumina (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 9-10). Bongo ~ Bungu ~ 15

Map 5 Some Koongo sub-groups

West Central Africa after European Contact

Vungu designates the Yombe sub-group of Koongo from an area close to Roma, and claimed in some accounts as the birthplace of the Koongo nation (Vansina 1966, 38; Balandier 1968, 32). But this is an unlikely etymon, given that Bungu as a kingdom was militarily conquered by the Yaka in 1623, though the town remained. Bongo was also a name for the Mbaka, or pygmies, the first inhabitants of the region between Malebo or Stanley Pool and the Atlantic, who remained in scattered groups throughout the region (Martin 1972, 6). But more probable is that bongo is an abbreviation of the term for 'bought slave' - muntu a nzimbu, or muntu a mbongo 'person for whom one has paid much' (Laman 1957, 2:56). The 'bought slave' interpretation gains strength from evidence that non-Central African descendants in St Mary parish, Jamaica, used bongo to refer to African descendants in general (Haughton 1998), just as in Cuba the term occurs in generalized phrases such as yaya mbongo and tata mbongo, 'old lady' and 'old man', respectively (Larduet 1988). On the other hand, for savants of the Kumina religion of Jamaica "Bongo nation" has a narrower denotation, though inclusive of several Bantu peoples. For them, the Bongo nation is comprised of the following "tribes": Koongo, Munchundi ~ Anchumbi ~ Nanchundi (Nsundi), Muntwente (perhaps Bwende), all the preceding being Koongo-speakers, and, in addition, even non-Koongo-speakers. In the latter category fall the Muyanji ~ Munayandi ~ Yansi ~ Yanzi, also known as the Teke ~ Anzico ~ Bobangi from east of Koongo in the Kwango River valley, and also dispersed in the plateaux of the Niari River basin north of the Zaire River (Schuler 1980, 70). The Yaka from the Kwango River valley, as well as the Mumbaka (Mbaka) and Kimbundu (Mbundu), who are both Mbundu or Ndongo peoples, were also included. Opposed to this very inclusive configuration is the category Mudongo ~ Mondongo to refer to "Jamaicans not descended from the 'Bongo Nation', as well as those who are descended from it but have 'strayed' and lost contact with the Kumina tradition and ritual language. . . . Among Kumina people, the word 'Mondongo' is often defined precisely as 'stranger' " (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 12-13). The basis of this differentiation is that "Mondongues" or "Madungoes", both for coastal Central Africans and in Caribbean parlance, was a generic name for people from deep in the interior, usually to "the north and east of the Congo mouth", in some cases serving 17

Central Africa in the Caribbean

as a collective name for the Teke, or for peoples neighbouring on the Teke, or for subject peoples of the Lunda kings (Martin 1972, 132). The reason for this generic term is that the Mbundu or Ndongo had been seized as slaves by the Koongo, so much so that Ndongo meant 'slave' in Koongo, and came to be applied across the board to foreigners and enslaved persons.7 Another ethnonym seems to have been applied in Curasao in the sense of "foreigner", the term being Makamba, the Kamba being one of the Koongo sub-groups. Paradoxically, it was a term once used for Europeans, and later for "those transients who did not speak Papiamento and who lived off the island without adapting themselves to its customs" (Saher 1949, 11). By the 1940s it meant anyone who was not a native of Curasao. However, the term had an even earlier application, because it denominated a type of song typical of Curasao and containing obscure words, probably African, and called kantika di Makamba (Leonora 1988, 70). But Makamba, also spelt Macamba, was one of several Central African ethnicities in eighteenth-century Curasao, among them "Timbo, Angora . . . Louango", very likely Tembo, Angola and Loango (Domacasse-Lebacs 1982, 146). Indeed, the folkloric expressions in rhyme, idiom and song which form part of the linguistic heritage of the neighbouring islands of Bonaire and Curasao, along the northern coast of Venezuela, are called Gueni, lenga di Loango 'Guinea, Loango language', in addition to the appellation kantika di Makamba or kanta Makamba (Martinus 1996, 182). Trinidad informants used nomenclatures like Congo Angol and [sengol] (FrCr < Fr les angoles 'the Angolans') to allude not only to persons from the Portuguese colony of Angola but also "same Congo", meaning Koongo-speakers generally. On the one hand, this formulation reflected the reality that Luanda had, since the end of the sixteenth century, become a Portuguese enclave, and, on the other, the fact that some Koongo sub-groups inhabited the northern sector of the Portuguese colony. However, "Angola" was an omnibus trade name used by the French and English to conceal their encroachment on areas officially understood as the exclusive market of the Portuguese; this meant that persons identified as "Angolan" may well have come from ports not only south of the Zaire but also north of it (Miller 1994, 82, 84). Among the "Angolans" would have been the Ndongo, or Mbundu. Their king was the ngola, their language was KiMbundu, 18

West Central Africa after European Contact

and the Portuguese used the title of the Mbundu king to name the entire territory they occupied. In Trinidad, mention was also made of the Mumbaka (Mbaka) and the Libolo, both northerly sub-groups of the Mbundu, just south of Koongo, and also under Portuguese suzerainty by the nineteenth century. The St Lucian community of Piaye claims descent from, among some other African groups, "Congo", "Angola" and "Awanda" (Simmons 1963, 47). Given the other forms of Lunda, such as Ruund, Runda and Arunda (Redinha 1962, 14), perhaps it is this ethnic group

Map 6 Ethnic groups in south-western Angola 19

Central Africa in the Caribbean

from the hinterland, east of the Ndongo and Matamba in the upper Lulua plains, to which Awanda refers, by substitution of the bilabial glide [w] for the palato-alveolar glide [r]. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Lunda, who originated among the Luba, had established a cohesive and powerful empire, and by the time they became involved in the slave trade, they traded not only Lunda peoples, but also Kete and Luba. Cuban-based Congo Basin groups which were non-Koongo-speaking included the Bobangi ~ Bateke ~ Teke ~ Tio ~ Anzico, Mundemba (probably Ndembo, a Lunda sub-tribe), and Mumbala (Mbala) immediately east of Koongo, the Loemi (perhaps Luimbe), a small group of people on the upper Kwanza River south of the Songo and west of the Ovimbundu (McCulloch 1951, 54). There were Motembo (Tembo), fisherfolkfromthe great central rainforest, and Babundo (Babunda an Ovimbundu sub-group). Also Ovimbundu were the Kisanga, if that was what "Nisanga" represented in Cabrera's listing (1986a, 60). Also named in that catalogue is the Kisenga, probably the Kisenge, a Chokwe sub-group. All the same, Nisanga may also have referred to the Kisenge. The Kisamba may have been the Mbundu sub-group, the Kisama. Among the south-western peoples sent to Cuba were the Benjela (or Benguela), the Muluanda (Luanda), the Bondo (Mbondo), Kambaka (Mbaka) and the Bosongo (Songo), the three latter being Mbundu sub-groups. That pygmies were also brought to the Caribbean is attested by Leon (1974, 62) on the evidence of old informants and corroborated by Cabrera's identification of Mbaka as dwarf (1986a, 17-18). Mbaka (Ko) indeed means 'dwarf. Reference to pygmies is also contained in the ethnonym proffered by Cabrera - congo lunde batud, a combination of the large Lunda ethnic group and the BaTwa, pygmy hunters and gatherers who live in scattered communities throughout Central Africa, having been pushed to its eastern margins by subsequent migrations of peoples called Bantu by ethnographers. Perhaps Cabrera's nomenclature suggests that the Twa came from an area adjacent to the Lunda, or that such people were ethnic mixtures. Jamaican Maroons identify certain Bantu ethnicities as having comprised early Maroon society. Among these are the Mabiwi, Mabere and Timbambu (Bilby 1981, 57). The last term needs to be queried in light of the fact that in the same article which mentions this ethnic group, 20

West Central Africa after European Contact

timbambu is cited as referring to lighted open torches (see chapter 8). Is it that convergence has taken place between the term for the flame and an ethnonym such as chi Mbamba, literally 'of Mbamba', Mbamba being one of the old provinces of Koongo? Clearer references are provided by Mabiwi and Mabere, which are phonological variants of the same word, also found in the literature as mubiri, "in the eighteenth century . . . applied both to Vili and to traders from Kakongo and Ngoyo" (Martin 1972, 130 fn. 2). In Guyana, the Koongo-speaking sub-groups recalled were the Mamboma, Zoombo - [mozombo] or simply [zombo], and the Makuta, a group north-east of Mbanza Koongo (Johnston 1908, 1:65). Angolans were called Gola ~ Mongola, 'person of Angola', while Chibundu was equivalent to Trinidad's Chimbundu, 'person of the Ovimbundu', who came from the plateaux in central Angola. Some Africans were also referred to as "Santon" (Small 1996), a designation which turns up in an early-twentieth-century manuscript by a Trinidadian, who refers to "santones or douglas",8 the "santone" being "a mixture of the Portuguese and Blacks" (Manning 1983, 218). This latter indication of physical distinctiveness supports a hypothesis that "santon" labelled an African who, either as first or subsequent generation, had lived for some time on Sao/San Tome, a volcanic island in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Cape Lopez. Sao Tome was one of four islands in that vicinity which had been appropriated by the Portuguese in the 1470s, and settled by Portuguese colonists, along with slaves brought from Koongo to work newly established sugarcane plantations. By the 1510s, Sao Tome merchants began to use the island as a transhipment port for slaves acquired on the mainland, particularly in Koongo and Angola, and then sent to Iberia and the Americas (Harms 1981, 24). This supply route to the West Atlantic was maintained throughout the history of the transatlantic trade, with the island also serving as a landing site for slaves rescued by nineteenth-century European naval patrols (Fegley 1989, 3, 9). In Trinidad, the Musundi and Mumboma were mentioned, both singular forms for people from Nsundi province and (M)Boma town respectively. Other designations were Koongo na Gine, that is, 'Koongo in Guinea (Africa)', apparently a reference to the Bakoongo generally, and "Congo" Luba, a label for the Luba or Baluba, who possessed an empire east of Koongo. Luba was as large 21

Central Africa in the Caribbean

as, but older than, the kingdom of Koongo, while "[t]he last Luba empire, which probably flourished from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, was preceded by other similar empires in the same area" (Birmingham 1965, 4). The Luba inhabited a north-south strip of land between the Lomami and the Lualaba rivers, comprised mainly of wooded savanna highlands (Theuws 1983, A I). There were also "Congo" Luba Wandu, probably indicating an ethnic mixture or agglomeration of Luba and Wandu people. The Luba and Wandu lived to the east of the Lunda, around the Lulua River. Indeed, someone in Trinidad recalled the Lulu River (Ayers 1968), either the small northern tributary of the Nzadi or perhaps an apocopated form of Lulua, a river which passed through the Luba and Wandu regions. The most frequent designation in Trinidad, however, is that of Koongo bodlame or bolame, 'Koongo from the seashore', which seems to have meant people from the Atlantic coastal Koongo regions like Loango, Ngoyo, Kakongo and Sonyo, as well as peoples who lived on the shores of the river Nzadi. Evidently, the river was so massive that it took on the property of a sea. 'Sea' was but one of the designations which served to denote the geographical space constituted by 'river' in a European language, for at its widest part, the Nzadi was called "mukisi (waasa) Nzadi or mukisi mamba (water), down towards the sea mwanza (lake)" (Laman 1968, 4:31). After all, nzadi or nzari meant 'great river' (Ravenstein 1901, 7, fn. 7). Both in connection with the Nzadi and the term kalunga, it is evident that in the Koongo language there was conceptual overlap between 'sea' and 'any large body of water'. Kalunga meant 'ocean' as well as any massive body of water like the Nzadi river. Essentially, in Koongo geo-cosmology it was a watery space which separated the realm of the living from that of the dead. In a literal dimension, the River Congo was not only very deep, but also presented as a vast body of water, even at a distance of ninety miles from the Atlantic (Monteiro 1875, 1:54). Living along the river banks could be hazardous; an informant in Trinidad had been told that "sometimes, when the river was in flood, it washed people away" (Nicholls 1989). Just as in Cuba, where the umbrella designation "Congo" was juxtaposed to a term of ethnic or sub-ethnic identity, such as Congo Mbdngala, or Congo Kabinda, in Trinidad one heard of "Congo" Chimbundu, or simply Chimbundu (or Chibundu), and of "Congo" 22

West Central Africa after European Contact

Mudong, the last term apparently in reference to any of a number of hinterland peoples as discussed above. The Chimbundu were the Ovimbundu from the Benguela Highlands of the territory that came to be called Angola. Ovimbundu is the plural of the singular form ochimbundu 'an Umbundu-speaking person'. Umbundu is the name of their language. The sub-ethnic distinctions that are still encountered in the Caribbean islands are not apparently recalled in Colombia. Perhaps this is because the Central Africans who appear to have dominated the Maroon town of San Basilio - whether numerically or culturally descend from people who had arrived in Colombia through Cartagena much earlier than those remembered "Congo" forebears of the island groups. In other words, the forebears of the San Basilio Maroons came to the West Atlantic centuries earlier than the nineteenth-century slaves and immigrants who came to the Caribbean islands. Yet the memory of the major slave ports has been kept alive in old sayings in the Maroon settlement, or palenque, of San Basilio in Colombia. One old song variously contains self-ascriptions as "Chi mariLuango mi, re marioso mi" ' [I am] of my Loango folk and of my gods' or "Chi manKongo, Chi manLuango; Chi mariLuango de Angola" ' [I am] of the Koongo, of the Loango, of the Loango people of Angola'.9

External Ascriptions From his observations of life in late-eighteenth-century Suriname, Stedman asserted that "The Congo tribe in particular are so fond of the water, that they may, not improperly, be called amphibious animals" (Stedman 1796, 2:368). This may have been due to the riverine nature of the ecology from which many of the Congo Basin people had come, and their skills in such an environment as "expert fishermen" (Ward 1890, 50). Somewhat similarly, in Jamaica it was remarked that "Congos" were among those "who made good field laborers" and, with the Gold Coast people, "were expert fishermen and excelled in making canoes" (Wright 1986, 239). But we can be sure that there were varying skills, cultural tendencies, dispositions, phenotypes and structural frames among the great variety of peoples who were all labelled "Congo" or "Angolan". Opinions of 23

Central Africa in the Caribbean

these peoples varied widely, both in their judgements of each other and in the judgement of outsiders. In Cuba and Trinidad the Koongo of Mbanza Koongo enjoyed a good reputation. "They were very civilized; in their cabildos they had a court ceremonial, a kingdom." It was "a kingdom" because at its head was a king, the Ntotila, with his queen, a court and vassals. "They were not stupid. No. the Benguela were stupid, and the Mondongo, the Musulungo [Sorongo], and the Ampanga. Because of this [their status], many coachmen and domestics in wealthy homes were royal Koongo" (Cabrera 1986a, 14-15; my translation). Speaking of the "Congo" in general, however, a Trinidad informant characterized them as good, proud, sensible people who did not allow themselves to be bullied by their employers. But one of their shortcomings was that when they were drunk they used to abuse each other and sometimes fight (Yearwood 1991). On the other hand, the informant's brother held contrary views. In his view the "Congo" showed less drive than the Yoruba in acquisition of land and material goods. Although himself of Koongo, Hausa and Vincentian ancestry, he epitomized the Yoruba as "gentry, men of property. . . . You couldn't call yourself Yaruba without having land" and inculcating in your children European customs and schooling. Instead, the "damn Congo" was "a low fellow" - his Barbadian father's terms - who loved fetes and food (Collins 1991). Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century, "Congos" still retained fame "for their music and dancing" (Elder 1988, 20). St Eustatius's "Congo" descendants idealize their forebears as tall, strapping, well-built men and attractive, buxom women (Schmidt 1984). Interestingly, a commentator on West Central Africa observed that "big and heavy-grown persons are much esteemed, for their appearance is such as to command respect. . . .The natives are very quick to remark on appearance, and this causes annoyance and fighting" (Laman 1953, 1:41). A more realistic account of the physical appearance of the Central Africans comes from a Cuban Maroon who remembers: "The Congolese were black-skinned, though there were many of mixed blood with yellowish skins and light hair. They were usually small" (Montejo 1968, 38). The Musongo [Sonyo] were "orangey. . . . There were cases of tall Congolese, but they were rare; the true Congolese were small and stocky, and their women were the same" (p. 166). This description accords with that of a ship captain regarding the slaves collected at Loanga, Malemba, Cabenda, and 24

Figure 1.1 Portrait of "Congo" male, Joao Mauricio Rugendas, Viagem Pitoresca atraves do Brazil, c. 1823

Figure 1.2 Portrait of "Benguela" male, Joao Mauricio Rugendas, Viagem Pitoresca atraves doBrasil, c.1823

Figure 1.3 Portrait of "Angola" male, Joao Mauricio Rugendas, Viagem Pitoresca atraves do Brasil, c. 1823

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Congo, on the coast of Angola: "[T]heir skins are very black, few of them are to be found above the middle stature, and the majority are below it; in fact, they may be considered as a diminutive people" (Adams 1966, 159-60). Speaking generally of physique, within the African-born slave population in the British Caribbean "there were significant differences between the particular ethnic/regional groups. . . . The tallest adult males, exceeding 165 cm, came from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Bight of Benin, while the shortest, under 162 cm, were those from Central Africa (Congo-Angola). Adult females followed a similar pattern ..." (Higman 1984, 282). Yet these generalizations were stereotypes which concealed the variety within each ethnic and regional group. Even so, one Presbyterian missionary in Trinidad compared the "Congo" unfavourably with the Yoruba, linking height with competence and morality: for him the "Congoes" were "in stature like boys, and with little or no strength of character . . . seldom rispng] above the cheapest paid labour" (Gamble 1866, 31). But there were other opinions of various sea captains and planters regarding the work capacity of Central Africans. On the one hand, they were attractive to Haitian planters because of their "gentle nature" (Montilus 1993, 161) and "cheerful disposition" (Geggus 1993, 82), which made them suitable for housework (Edwards 1806, 2:283). A similar assessment of their "superior docility" rendered them "good domestic slaves and artificers" (Adams 1966, 163). This accommodating disposition is ascribed by one analyst to the effect of Christianization on Koongo from the fifteenth century (Montilus 1993, 161). They were also found to be adept at Creole language acquisition (Geggus 199la, 37). On the other hand, they were considered prone to marronage, just as by the eighteenth century, Angola and Loango slaves at St Eustatius were not particularly favoured by planters because they "were prone to run away into the forest". They also tended "to become sick because of their unhygienic eating habits" (Postma 1990, 108). Contradictions of perception surface as well in the hierarchies perceived among African ethnicities. The Ovimbundu were, for the Koongo, "a low nation", who drank rum heavily and "were despised because of their laziness and lack of industry" (Elder 1988, 20). This perception contradicts their reputation in Angola where, by the nineteenth century, they had "the tradition of being traders, not only in 26

West Central Africa after European Contact

Angola, but of Central Africa", and had mastered the art of adapting not only to the Portuguese, who found them "tractable", but also to "a variety of peoples and cultures on their trading caravans", so much so that Umbundu became the African trade language from the coast into Katanga in eastern Zaire (Henderson 1979, 51-52). For their part, the Mbundu were perceived by the Trinidad Koongo as speaking "break up", a reference to the distortion the Koongo perceived in the way Mbundu appeared to reproduce Koongo. The fact, though, is that Mbundu was only partially intelligible to a Koongo-speaker and therefore presented as "corrupt" to Koongo ears. This chapter has outlined the impact of a new economic system represented by the Atlantic slave trade upon the coastal and later the hinterland peoples who were seduced by it, or who had it forced willy-nilly upon them. Central Africans became involved in the trade at administrative levels, as commercial traders, as warriors in inter-group conflicts fomented to secure captives, or as victims of kidnap and guile. The region endured four centuries of cataclysmic social, political and economic change, which brought prosperity to certain sectoral interests, but which also brought economic decline and stagnation, from which it became difficult to then chart new lifestyles. West Central Africa was, by the nineteenth century's close, firmly in the grip of overseas economic networks, its peoples colonial subjects, its exported populations exiled to far-flung territories, some as close as Sao Tome and other Atlantic islands, others struggling to carve out new lives in largely hostile environments on islands to the west and on the continent that came to be called the Americas.

27

chapter 2

Experiences of Ennstarement Slave Capture The means by which West Central Africans became enslaved differ in no substantial way from the manner in which other Africans came to suffer the same fate. In the 1850s, Sigismund Koelle, a German missionary in Sierra Leone, interviewed almost two hundred persons who inhabited Freetown after being set at liberty there off the impounded slave ships. Of this sample, the largest number, 34 per cent, had been captured either on the field of battle or in village raids on civilians. Slightly fewer, 30 per cent, had been kidnapped, either by their own ethnic group or by persons from alien groups. Eleven per cent admitted they had been "condemned by judicial process" in their own societies. Seven per cent were "sold by relatives or tribal superiors", and a similar proportion "had been sold to pay debts, in most cases not of their own contracting" (Hair 1965, 196-99). Oral accounts of individual capture garnered in the Caribbean fit into the larger scenario of slave procurement and trade in Central Africa. An eighteenth-century account of affairs in the western Koongo indicated that prisoners of war and persons bought from external ethnic groups were the main persons sold into slavery. To ensure that this was so, the Loango king's economic administrator, the Mafuka, curtailed the sale of slaves at night, even on the sellers' pretext of merely exhibiting them to ships' captains, and banned advance payment on slaves by European buyers (Proyart 1776, 157-58). Initial procurement flowing from acquisition by direct warfare was made by warriors taking captives 28

Experiences of Enslavement

in small- and large-scale wars. Out of that cull, a proportion was handed over to chiefs and war leaders, and the rest retained by the soldiers themselves (Harms 1981., 35). Both war chieftains and troops could dispense with their booty by way of trade. This pattern was followed by Europeans: "During wars of territorial expansion in what came to be their colony of Angola, Portuguese traders accompanied Portuguese armies and bought captives from the soldiers who were entitled to them" (Birmingham 1965, 24). In addition, Portuguese administrators demanded tribute from conquered Mbundu chiefs in the form of eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old slaves known as the pe$a da India., the "West India piece", not necessarily an individual, but a "measure of potential labour" (Alleyne 1988, xii). Yet another source of slaves, in societies where jails did not exist, was legal offenders: those accused of witchcraft, theft, adultery, breaking taboos against kings and their wives, and so.on. Others were sold because they were habitually obstinate or deceitful, and therefore infringed their societies' codes of proper conduct. Some were sold during periods of famine, to lessen pressure on food supplies, or even in barter for food items (Harms 1981, 35). Many people were also sold to pay off their superiors' debts or lawsuit expenses. Among these latter categories were those who were sold by relatives to raise capital, to acquire guns, or to acquit a debt. Within the category of sellers were maternal uncles in West Central Africa's matrilineal societies. Since such uncles owned their nephews and nieces, if the uncles were indebted or had committed a crime but could not pay the fine, they saved themselves from being sold by selling instead a nephew or niece (Chatelain 1894, 8-9; Hambly 1968, 200). The enslaved were made to spend both short and extended periods of time on the way from their point of capture to the coastline, their numbers swelling with new intakes, while depletions occurred because individuals died of fatigue or sickness or age. Even before arrival at the coast, traders, called pombeiros in the River Congo Basin, were sent to buy slaves in the markets of the deep hinterland peoples bordering Koongo and Angola. One of the most important of these slave fairs was that of the Mpumbu sub-group of the Teke, near Malebo or Stanley Pool1 - so much so that the name given the traders derived from the word Mpumbu. The survivors were congregated in slave pens., or barracoons, at the coast. For instance, various slave pens were operated by 29

Central Africa in the Caribbean

the wealthier of Luanda's expatriate merchants, and sited either behind their homes or on the city margins and on the beach. These barracoons - known as quintals (singular quintal), a word also applied to farmyards for keeping animals - could each house between two and four hundred slaves (Miller 1988, 390). The horror this town represented for slave captives is actually mentioned in one of the Trinidad songs. It was a place that changed one's destiny in a negative direction: Nkuumbu ntele

Horror, I have said

Mono ngyele

I went

Ay ay ay

Alas!

Kuuna mu Luanda

Over there in Luanda (Sampson 1972)

Nkuumbu ntele

Similarly distressing conditions held at Benguela, where "the slave pens . . . sometimes contained as many as 150 to 200 slaves, intermixed with pigs and goats. . . . In some instances . . . the walls had openings cut in them, through which guards outside could thrust musket barrels to fire on slaves within who grew unruly" (Miller 1988, 390-91). And at the port of Denis, south of the Gabon River and north of Loango, men in the stockades "were chained in pairs by the ankles", while "the 30

Experiences of Enslavement

women were confined in neck rings and chained in large groups. Children under ten were not chained, but all the infants were killed" (Patterson 1975, 86). Yet oral accounts of capture, from Trinidad, Guyana and Jamaica, recount nothing of the barracoon experience. Rather, the emotional rupture marking the separation of human links is remembered. Several stories recall how enslaved persons were kidnapped while doing routine chores. One child was seized in the company of a servant on the way to market. The kidnappers then sold them to the Portuguese, who changed the child's name. A "Congo" wife in Guyana had already been married and had mothered three children when she was captured on her way to the market. A similar story comes from Cuba, where women going to market were netted in a sheet (Cabrera 1986a, 21). A Guyanese informant's father claimed that an uncle had sold him, taking advantage of the fact that they had often gone hunting together. His daughter recalled her father recounting the details of his capture. After several days' walking, the sixteen-year-old boy and his uncle reached a sea shore. The boy saw a little boat with some men: "mix people . . . dem na black black. Some clear clear. Mix. An' some black [ethnically mixed people . . . they were not very black. Some were very lightskinned. And some were black]" (Morrison 1989, 73). This was the young man's attempt to describe some of the captors as strange ethnic types, no doubt mulatto slave traders who acted as agents for their Portuguese fathers, or who were in business on their own account. One of these men called his uncle aside. Then the boy see de man comin' up. An' de man comin' up. 'E put 'e han' so . . . clap he han' . . . an' dey chain 'e. An' 'e start to holla. Ask am we' he a go ... we' dis man a ker 'e. Well 'e now tun 'e back. Packet. . . de money. 'E tun 'e back. A sell 'e sell 'e. [saw the man approaching. . . . The man put his hand like this . . . grasped his (the boy's) hand . . . and they chained him. And he started to holler. Asking them where he was going . . . where this man was going to carry him. Well, the uncle now turned his back. Pocketed . . . the money. He turned his back. He had in fact sold him.] (Morrison 1989, 15) Such an adult often claimed that the child had been eaten by a leopard (Harms 1981, 35). As for this boy in question, he was taken into a 31

Central Africa in the Caribbean

small boat, where he cried so much that he had to be strapped by his feet to a post in the boat. Having arrived at "a big, big boat" further offshore, he saw "plenty African men chain [ed] in de boat" (Morrison 1989, 15). The boy spent three days on the boat before it pulled anchor, as it waited for other Africans to be brought aboard. "Dem a bring dem and dem a buy dem come. [They were bringing people and the slave traders were buying them as they came.]" It was the first time the boy had ever seen the thing called money (p. 16). On board the seagoing vessels, some of the Africans were so rebellious at their plight that they were chained onto the ship. In some cases, tar was put on the floorboards and the enslaved forcibly put to sit in the tar. To receive their food, the slaves had to line up, holding a calabash bowl for their rations. But before receiving their portion, "yuh ga fuh tun a batty suh. . . . Wen yuh tun a batty yuh guh put yuh plate suh. Yuh get yuh food [you had to turn you bottom to them like this. . . . When you had turned your bottom toward them then you put out your plate like this]" (p. 76). Perhaps this cursory inspection of the slaves' posteriors was a way of checking on the occurrence of dysentery, which was rampant among them. Amoebic dysentery, "an ulcerative inflammation of the colon", was then called the "flux". The infection could spread, producing abcesses on the liver. The disease was caused by the presence of an organism, Entamoeba histolytica, in stale water and rotted food, rather than by foul air and excessive heat as was then thought (Paiewonsky 1987, 48 fn.). In Morrison's account, despite the ample food given to her father: Wen 'e siddown, 'e study home. 'E start to cry. All de food dem a gyam. 'E seh deh does gi' dem good food an' load. [When he sat down, he thought of home. He started to cry. Despite the food they had given him. He said they used to give them a heaping amount of food.] (Morrison 1989, 77) While this particular boy was willing enough to eat, a Cuban source recalled a man sold at Loango who refused to eat and whose mouth was pried open with an apparatus in order for him to be force-fed (Cabrera 1986a, 50). A Jamaican recollection of an enslavement ploy is that music would be played, people would come to listen, and the crowd would be surrounded and seized (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 18). In Trinidad, it was 32

Experiences of Enslavement

Figure 2.1 Mavis Morrison of East Coast Demerara, Guyana, 1994, daughter of a "Congo" named Thomas Jungu

recalled that sometimes the captured were given rum and molasses to drink as sedation. Indeed, the Portuguese procured rum and molasses in their colony of Brazil, and these, together with wine and tobacco got from the same source, were the main commodities they used to pay for slaves in Angola since Portugal itself had such a weak manufacturing sector (Birmingham 1965, 2). Gerebita^ distilled from the foam skimmed off the second boiling of cane juice in the sugar-making process, was the common man's drink in Brazil, and became that country's principal export to Angola during the eighteenth century. "From 1785 to the 1820s gerebita was, in terms of value, more than two-thirds of all Brazilian imports passing through the Luanda customs house" (Miller 1988, 466-67). Some of the Brazilian alcohol was clearly used to stupefy the captured Africans. But even so, some people fought before they were shoved on board. Another eloquent first-hand account of the process of enslavement is given by a nineteenth-century English missionary to British Guiana. Speaking about a visit to the Berbice village of Overwinning, "tucked behind the village of Islington on Providence estate" (Schuler 2001, 136) and inhabited by a group of "Congo", the missionary began by setting the stage: "Standing amongst the plantain trees there is a 33

Central Africa in the Caribbean

black man and his wife; he is over sixty years of age, and has for many years been a deacon of the London Missionary church. It is very interesting to hear him tell the story of his early life." The old man had testified: I 'member fader and mudder too well, do [though] I was a wee picknie [child] when de Portuguese catch me and take me 'way. De place where I libed [lived] in Africa was called Bomah. My fader and mudder had twenty-one piknies. I was the twenty-first. And you must know in Africa if any one in debt to anoder you must pay dat debt. No matter how long, years and years and years, you still got to pay. And if you can't pay, de man come and take one ob de picknies for to pay de debt. My fader and mudder owe debt to an African man. Dey no able fo' pay, so he come and ketch me, and carry me away and sell me to some Portuguese 'man stealers.' Dey put me in chains wid a lot oders [others]; chain long, long, long - it fasten round a' we [our] neck. Fifty or hundred men and boys all fasten wid dat chain. Ef one man lie down all mus' lie down. Ef one sick and no able fo' go, dey loose he, let he lie on de groun', den shoot he. De women be all fasten wid rope. We all march on, long, long way; all throo de night we walk, den we come to de ship. Dey put a' wee in de hold ob [of] de ship, one pon anoder. Dey fasten down de hatch. We lie dere like bags ob rice, no able hardly fo' breave [breathe], so hot, hot, hot. Me cry and cry and cry. (Crookall 1898, 109-10) Penned up in the hold, they used to sing to give themselves courage because they could not see where they were going. When on deck, some people threw themselves into the sea, since they felt that by this means they would return to their country. Some people died on the boat and were thrown overboard. One of the songs recalled in Trinidad that seems to have been used for mutual encouragement during the shipboard journey was: Ko

34

Kwamina, MinKoongo Kwamina, MinKoongo Pb dangala Po kangala

Keep steadfast, foonqos Keep steadfast, Koongos Go aneadl Strut around Go aneadl Walk around

Experiences of Enslavement Cho lolo

Hold fast tha ropes

Zinga, yiiya, yiiya

Survive, win a reputation, shine

Cho lolo

Hold fast the ropes (Philip 1965)

Kwamina

The rhythmic shifts at bars 4 and 6 as against the lead timing at 1 and 8 are mechanisms indicative of different choral segments in a call-andresponse structure. Another song expresses the desperation and grief of enslavement, not only by its lyrics, but also by its dramatically spaced ascending notes suggesting screams, the dejectedness of its descending melodic contours, and the "out-of-tune" note sequences in its middle: TKo Yel e\ el Malonqwe, njebele !3ati ma long we kwizi ku Kongo 0 yaye, ronqa Tanda ikutanda/tanda \ tanda Wo! yaya, nrunga/runge 35

Central Africa in the Caribbean Ko

E! malonga, nzebele

E! companions, I am losing my mind

[Na] bati, malonga,

Chainad comrades

Kvvizi ko Koongo

Don't leave Koongo

0 yaya! longa

Horror! beware!

Tanda ikutanda

I will become thin

Wo yaya! lunga

You mother, danger! (Vincent 1963)

Njebele

The pain of leaving the familiar, the nostalgia for and pride in homeland, despite the treachery which had brought them so low, is tellingly imaged in this lament with its wistful melodic phrases: TKo Nkonkwe nkonkwe ne>\ modi taude Nkonkwe kuna mbanza Kon^o e>\ modi tauda Nkonkwa yaya modi taude Konkwa bakala Kon^o E londa Ko

Nkonko ne\ modi taude

Sails separated [us] from the navel, [our] country

Nkonko kuna mbanza

Navel-string at Mbanza Koongo,

Koongo

[our] homeland,

N@i modi taude

The ship's sails parted us from

Nkonko yaya modi taude

The umbilical cord of [our] mother, the ship's sails took us away from

36

Experiences of Enslavement Nkonko [iva] bakala Koongo The navel of Koongo men . . . E! londa!

0, tell it! (Nicolas Jones 196£)

Nkonkwe

The fear and/or constant alertness of the enslaved is expressed in another song which proceeds with militaristic, slow determination: TKo Vitu ye madu kalunga Watut ewa watu nkayanqa Ko

Vitu ~ Yitu ye matu kalunga Co-slaves of the ship on the sea . Watuti ewo tu keyanga

We are keenly watching those guards (Daniel 1965)

Vitu

37

Central Africa in the Caribbean

A Trinidadian's grandfather, Noombi Gwanda, arrived together with Monok2 Manjo and Ma Moses. He came from "near Angola, near the Potogi [Portuguese], nan Gini [in Africa]": They all come together in one ship and come alive. So they consider themselves brothers. If they drown, everybody drown together. They [are] in the belly of one woman - that's how they consider it - and they dying [are going to die] in their mother ['s] belly if the ship sink. The sea is a mother, they say. (Nicholls 1989) This vivid extended metaphor appears to derive from the semantic extension of'mother' in some Bantu languages. Ngudi (Ko) means not simply 'mother', but also 'womb', and not only the anatomical womb, but concretely 'the innermost space', the bedroom of a house, and any recessed enclosed space. Thus the underdeck where the slaves were crowded contained, for its occupants, these layers of meaning. Even so, the 'house' or nzo, a sub-division of the kanda or clan section inhabiting a village or village cluster, was also known as the vumu, or belly, which acknowledged a common tradition and was synonymous with ngudi in the abstract sense of'root' or 'source' (MacGaffey 1970, 18). But these traditions of common heritage were to a large extent artificially formulated to consolidate political, trade, security and labour alliances. Across Africa, Central Africa being no exception, clan charters or kinship myths had been continuously devised and revised. But "their composition as well as their characteristics fluctuated with changing regional relationships among houses and villages" (Vansina 1983, 89). Therefore, when periodic contingencies forced ethnic groups, states and lineages to reproduce themselves socially and biologically, they paradoxically "maintained their identity and their population" precisely "by the absorption of outsiders" (Cordell 1983, 32). In many cases, these aliens were slaves within the internal slave system. The latter was in many African societies integral to the consolidation of power by chieftains, just as conquest of lands served the same purpose in Europe (Thornton 1992, 102). Indeed, since in matrilineal societies children were the property of their mother's kin, "the only way a descent group could recruit children of its male members was by a man's marriage to a 'slave' woman - a person who had become separated from her own lineage" (Schuler 1980, 151). Her descendants thus became "a lineage of slaves 38

Experiences of Enslavement incorporated in the house of their owners but not observing with them a rule of exogamy" (MacGaffey 1977, 243). Demographic increase by exogamous marriages and by slave acquisition bolstered the social and political status of males, underpinning economic standing by the additional labour power of wives, children and slaves incorporated into the household. All these categories of persons farmed, performed domestic chores, served as soldiers, and in riverside localities fished and paddled trade canoes (Harms 1981, 31). In similar fashion, transatlantic slaves devised new bases of kinship and incorporation to account for and cope with trans-shipment across the ocean, a form of death in life. Paradoxically, then, to reconstruct a life in death, these slaves restored their spiritual being by forging an identity based on a new family network. To counter their own ideology that a human without a clan was a slave "wandering in trackless limbo" (MacGaffey 1970, 92), the people who conceptualized the ship as a mother instituted a new, fictive, and, more accurately reflective of emotional ties, adoptive3 kinship system, whose symbolic common motherhood was physically located in the space they shared aboard ship. Furthermore, the maternal genesis they reconstructed had been conditioned by their natal environment in matrilineal groups of the western Koongo basin, such as the Yombe, the Koongo generally, and among the non-Koongo hinterland Lwena (Vansina 1966, 25). Here, family ties were founded on descent from a common mother. Children therefore belonged to their mother's family, and lived on land owned by the maternal clan (Tourist Bureau 1957, 79). By contrast, patrilineages occurred in the eastern part of the Congo Basin. But even in the Antilles, some of the enslaved suffered further separation when blood kin, now doubly linked in this symbolic ship brotherhood, were delivered to various islands. This led to people making insistent inquires of later migrants from other islands in order to find out where members of their family had been landed. In English-speaking colonies, people who came on the same shipload called each other "shipmate", in Suriname sipi 'ship', and, given its spiritual dimension, "sexual intercourse between shipmates was forbidden as incestuous" (Patterson 1967, 150). The shipmate bond functioned as one of the bases for social relationships within African communities in the Caribbean, both during slavery and indentureship. This produced new sisters and brothers, and this kinship was cemented by naming god39

Central Africa in the Caribbean

parents for one's children from among shipmate kin. Umba, the godmother of one of the Trinidad informants was a shipmate of his father (Nicolas Jones 1968). In Trinidad, Central African shipmates of whatever gender called each other malong. Although unknown in this sense in other parts of the Koongo-speaking zone, the word is used in the northern areas to signify 'comrade, friend'. A broader level of fraternity was pangyame or pandyame < mpangiame (Ko) 'my kinsman'. In the new sociological context it appears to have meant 'speakers of the same language', whereas normally "[k]impangi - genuinefraternity. . . existed between uterine brothers and also between maternal cousins. It created deep affection and strong physical and spiritual solidarity; it ensured the cohesion of villages or sections of villages" (Balandier 1968, 185). Another commentator elaborates: All who have the same luvila [clan name], whether they live in the original home of the kanda [clan] or in remote villages are mpangi ("whole brothers"), they thus spring originally from the same mother. . . . The family is thus a kanda-family, which is born of the same mother, grandmother, great grandmother (nkaaka) and so forth. The terms nzo (house, family) and mooyo (life, womb) refer to a family group deriving from a certain mother (ngudi) and thus representing a branch of the kanda. (Laman 1957, 2:46) The following song's high-pitched registers express the exile's cry for fellowship, as the singer's mother had experienced: E malongwe yaya

Hay! shipmate elder eleter

Wo ye malongwe dumba

Hay! hay! shipmata, Koongo

Kongo

girl

Yinl we mwe

Coma and eeeMelt me (Francis 1971)

Malongweyaya

40

Experiences of Enslavement

Figure 2.2 George Adams of West Coast Demerara, Guyana, 1994. His maternal grandmother's father was a "MaMboma" named Archie Simpson, an estáte "driver" and a great dancer.

Under transatlantic slavery the new ngudi was the slave ship, which birthed its human offspring into a new form of life. But the oíd ties were not forgotten, and remained to haunt the dreams of those exiled in the Americas. One Guyanese grandfather, a "MaMboma" Koongo, had told his grandson of his nightmare in which, as he approached his town, no doubt (M)Boma, he put his fingers to his ears and shouted: Yela yela ladila Muvüa kwizi ko

which perhaps can be interpreted as: Ko

Yeela, yeela, ladíla Muvila kwizi koko

Madneee, slcknees, you are mourning The \ost one, \ am coming over (Adatns 1994)'

And from one of the town's look-out men carne the reply: Nzambi Mpunga twesi

'Goá Almighty be vw'th you'

41

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Indentureship The British Parliament outlawed slave trading in 1807, and by 1838 it had emancipated the slaves in its territories, though Antigua implemented their emancipation in 1834 when the bill was passed initially. After 1834, a so-called apprenticeship scheme was devised as an interim measure that would lead to eventual full severance of the legal obligations of the ex-slaves, now 'apprentices', to their owners/employers, and vice versa. That interim arrangement was brought to a halt in 1838.5 The slaves in large measure deserted the plantations, though they remained near enough to contract seasonal employment from the estate system. But the planters were accustomed to dealing with constant labour supplies. They therefore petitioned London to secure labourers from overseas; and such a supply was indeed available from the slave .ships that still plied between Africa and markets like Cuba, Brazil and the United States, where slavery was still in force. What is more, as of 1808 these vessels were being intercepted by British naval patrols either off the West African coast or at the approaches to slave ports in the West Atlantic. These slave ships were taken to international courts which sat at various locations: Freetown, Luanda, St Helena, Havana, and in Brazil at Rio de Janeiro and Boa Vista. There, the ships would be impounded, sold, their crews punished and the slaves freed. The old "Congo" in CrookalPs narrative is one of the many later labour recruits who had been freed and landed at Freetown. Inserting some anachronistic praise of the British, whom the enslaved could hardly have distinguished among the various Europeans at sea, he speaks of the consoling thoughts of the slaves: But de oders say, "No good crying, picknie [child]! Let we pray dat de English come and caught we, den we be all free men." When we been sailing some time, one week, de English ship come and catch a' wee [all of us]. De cap'n ob de English ship, wid his men, take de Portuguese cap'n and put him in irons, and de oder men he put in long boat; he loose a'wee and let we come up on deck, and he take wee to Serra Lone (Sierra Leone). Dere de Gubna' [Governor] say, "We be all free." (Crookall 1898, 110) Several twentieth-century 42

oral reports by Guyanese identify

Experiences of Enslavement

"Santalina Congo"., that is. Central Africans who had been freed at St Helena island in the southern mid-Atlantic: Wen de meet a certain place name Santa Nina Lina 'e hear deh seh "Freedom". . . . 'E hear dem big wan a ta'k "freedom". "Awi get freedom. Awi . . . na go go like slave no mo. Awi na go ... deh unda masta. [When they reached a certain place named Santa Helena he heard them say "Freedom". He heard the adults say "Freedom". "We have freedom. We are not going to go as slaves any more. We are not going to be under any master."] (Morrison 1989, 16) These freed Africans were then allowed to stay in the locations to which their slave ships had been brought, or were transported to nearby territories which needed labour. Some writers refer to the second category of persons as "recaptives", since they were often not consulted as to their own wishes, further to which they became contract labourers and therefore possessed a dubious degree of freedom. Large numbers of such recaptives came under British control, and it was from this renewable pool that Britain initially provided labourers for the West Indies and British Guiana (Schuler 1980, 7). A more voluntary form of emigration was established out of Sierra Leone, and in the early 1840s the British Colonial Office instructed the Sierra Leone government emigration agent to canvass among liberated Africans settled in villages around Freetown for workers in the West Indies. Three ships were chartered, each with a British naval supervisor, and licensed as the sole emigrant transports to British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica. But when it was realized that there was waning interest among the Sierra Leone residents to emigrate, the policy was diverted towards recruitment in the liberated African schools, and among newly liberated Africans still awaiting permanent settlement and being housed at the "Queen's Yard" (Schuler 1980, 7). Crookall's old deacon was one of the former category: Dey send me to school; dere I learn fo' say A B C . After dat one English man come and say dey want nigger for to go to Demerara, and ef we go dey will gif us work to do in de field, and dey will gif us plenty money. One week and we sal hab a' wee beaver hat full, full. "Wee," we say, "dat is good." Gubnah 43

Central Africa in the Caribbean

say it is true, but he no want us for go. We mus5 go ef we like. So I went to de ship and came to dis colony; and on dis estate me hab libed all de time. (Crookall 1898, 109-11) "A diminishing supply of recaptives led to the cessation of emigrant traffic" between 1854 and 1858, and after 1861 "such irregular numbers of recaptives as reached Sierra Leone and St Helena were transported to the West Indies in ships licensed as the need arose. The last such consignment from Sierra Leone went to St Kitts on the Chebucto in 1863. That year St Helena emigrant traffic all but ceased, with a mere trickle to British Guiana in 1865 and Jamaica in 1867" (Schuler 1980, 8). In the light of this documentary background, and in conjunction with oral evidence, it appears to have been largely the case that the foreparents of my late-twentieth-century informants in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana originally left Africa with the status of slaves. Some informants, particularly those from Jamaica, describe the Africans as slaves on the island of Jamaica itself. However, one person in Trinidad made a distinction between their status on leaving Africa and that on their arrival in Trinidad. He said, "Freedom took them [happened to them] on the way, on the sea," thus indicating that some mechanism allowed them to be classed as free persons even while they were crossing the Middle Passage (Sampson 1972). In fact, this group of people were witnesses to the harsh treatment meted out to ex-slaves on the island, seeing for themselves the sores which people bore from floggings they had been given by white people. Someone from Guyana called this indentureship era - for that is what it was - "bound time, not the real slavery", "bound" meaning "legally contracted", rather than "chained". But there might not have been much distinction to be made between the two conditions. Each was lamentable in its own way. Said another Trinidadian: "My poor grandfather come [came]. They treat [treated] them like dogs" (Nicholls 1989). The Africans were shared up, that is, taken to different estates. In Jamaica, these groupings were known as "lots". Duckenfield Estate was one Jamaican location. One receiving estate in Trinidad was Mandior in Pointe-a-Pierre, near the hot spring; another was Rostant Estate in Moruga. In Guyana, one of these estates was Zeelugt, where there was an area known as "Zeelugt Congo Alley". 44

Experiences of Enslavement

As a measure of economic salvation African immigration failed, for labour shortage was more a symptom than a cause of the sugar economy's decline. Moreover, by the late 1840s planters could not pay workers a living wage, so that after the first few years the indentured labour system became the equivalent of slavery rather than the humanitarian scheme that its British apologists claimed. Considerable tension resulted from planters' perception of Africans as units of labour to be managed and exploited like their slave predecessors, and the Africans' insistence that they were first and foremost an autonomous community. (Schuler 1980, 9) There were so many "Congo" among these labour recruits that one commentator writing in late-nineteenth-century Guyana referred to all Africa-born persons, outside of the Kru, as "Congo", listing as "Congo" even those with Akan day-names from the Gold and Ivory Coasts and the Volta (Kirke 1898, 60, 240, 266).

Soldiers African Warfare Several Trinidadians remarked that fathers or uncles had been soldiers in Africa, where they had fought with guns. "Before firearms came into use the weapons employed were lubota-cudgels, cross-bows and sharp wooden spears" (Laman 1957, 2:161). But percussion guns had begun to be supplied to Central Africa from the sixteenth century (Balandier 1968, 125).6 "[Something in the region of 50,000 guns may have arrived on the Loango Coast each year in the second half of the eighteenth century." They served as payment, and formed part of the upward pricing brought about by competition between English, French and Dutch at the slave ports, from where the firearms were then "widely dispersed through West Central Africa" (Martin 1970, 153). The Portuguese took exception to this payment mechanism, since they were in the business of colonization and were none too eager to have weapons distributed among groups whom they sought to subjugate. Al the same, "some Portuguese traders smuggled guns and powder into Angola in order to sell them. It was argued that the gun trade was necessary in order to enable the nations which captured slaves in the inte45

Central Africa in the Caribbean

rior to obtain them as efficiently as possible" (Birmingham 1965, 45-46). So several of the enslaved men arrived in the Caribbean knowing how to use firearms. In fact, firearms were used not only for wars and hunting, but also as an integral pan of celebrations. Shots were fired off to signal some important event or festivity, such as the death of an elder or chief. But male aggression and conflict could be triggered by a variety of circumstances, including disputes while drinking palm-wine over, for example, differentials in pedigree of birth or possessions. Such wars are very short and sometimes last for only a few hours, especially if someone is badly wounded or killed. The parties then meet for a settlement, which is reached in one way or another through the zinzonzi [spokespersons who act as arbitrators and judges] and their assistants . . . experienced men or chiefs enjoying great and general respect among the people. (Laman 1957, 2:160-61, 108) Two other circumstances could cause a war - an insult to another's mother (Chatelain 1894, 305) and the turning of the rump towards another, sometimes embellished by a self-administered slap. "This insult is called mfinguluya diikina" (MacGaffey 1986, 59), but it is also practised in the former Gold Coast area as well. This gesture is well known in the Caribbean as the supreme insult on the part of women during offensive verbal encounters, and is identified in Jamaica with the female Maroon leader, Nanny, who expressed her disdain of the British forces in this symbolic way prior to launching her guerrilla troops against them.7 Apart from the demands of war, bravery in face of pain was accorded the highest importance among men, so much so that they were socialized into readiness for this eventuality by submitting to the pain of having marks cut on their faces and bodies (Proyart 1776, 168). Laman found that Koongo withstood "not only heavy blows, but also other physical suffering with great composure and patience. If necessary, they [were] able to stand great hardship in connection with work, or much privation in the way of hunger and thirst" (Laman 1953, 1:42). This culture of bravery surfaced in an account from Trinidad that among some Central Africans, men would go into the river, hold a crocodile by its head, and pull it out of the river (Pierre 1971). There were probably 46

Experiences of Enslavement

several methods of catching crocodiles in Central Africa. One method in Angola was to use "a hook of crossed pieces of hard wood, with both ends sharply pointed", on which to stick a bait of suckling pig. "On swallowing the pig, the crocodile [got] the sharp pieces of wood stuck in his throat or stomach, and [could] then be pulled ashore, provided the rope and the men [were] strong enough" (Chatelain 1894, 280). Similarly, some African descendants in the West Atlantic were quite inured to war and conflict. This becomes apparent in the traditions of stick play which are recorded throughout the Caribbean (see chapter 8). Even with respect to actual warfare, there is the testimony of one of the "Congo" co-fighters with Montejo in one of the Cuban independence wars, who continually reminded him: " 'We not frightened war. We accustomed. In Africa we much fighting.' Over there they had warlike tribes who fought against each other, women as well as men, and killed each other in these disputes" (Montejo 1968, 169). Central African male military outfits were not substantially different from everyday wear, involving as they did a cloth or loincloth below a bare torso. One Trinidad informant outlandishly described this as "not wearing clothes at all. They wearing camel clothes; they [their] back naked all the way" (Victor 1971). Indeed in Koongo, this kilt-like outfit, called the ntanga, could consist of animal skins, or of rough cloth woven from the fibres of a type of bamboo or the matombe tree; in Loango it was woven from a type of grass. Chiefs wore "fabrics and skins of better quality". Over their shoulders they threw a net or wore a vestlike garment (Balandier 1968, 162-63). But for war, "warriors would be clad in twigs with black streaks on their brows and temples and mamonilines made with ground charcoal in the name of some nkisi" (Laman 1957, 2:162). Mamoni lines were thickly painted outlinings of the eye, which indicated "the ability to see the hidden sources of illness and evil" (MacGaffey 1993, 53). Speaking of eighteenth-century Loango, a missionary noted that soldiers painted themselves all over in red, in the confidence that this colour would render them invulnerable to firearms. They also wore tall headpieces, some of which were made of bird feathers which were thought to ward off danger (Proyart 1776, 163-64). Clearly, psychological and supernatural factors were of prime consideration in African conflicts. In time of war, men were subjected not only to tests of physical endurance, but also of supernatural readiness. Indeed, an ex-Guadeloupe-based soldier had told his daughter about 47

Central Africa in the Caribbean

this proof of fitness (Modeste 1972). He had claimed that in order to enter the army, recruits were subjected to a test which involved passing through the legs of a woman who stood astride two blocks. This was indeed an elimination process in indigenous fighting procedures. For instance, among the Nsundi, there was no specially trained army, just as in Loango every male citizen fit to bear arms was a soldier in times of need (Proyart 1776, 163). On the other hand, a sixteenth-century source commenting on the Koongo mentions a monarchical guard, battle divisions, an understanding of "military strategy and a certain battle order".8 But fitness was spiritually measured in addition, no doubt, to physical preparedness. The following explains the Nsundi approach to combat-readiness: a test was devised by which the chiefs favourite wife "would take her husband's war-nkisi9 and go and place herself with her legs apart over the village road". Her loincloth tucked between her legs, the men passed between them while the women sang to the nkisi, Mbumba: "Hide the children . . . where they shall go, that they may be flat (against a tree) as lizards. May the guns yonder be as water, but yours burning." Those who stumbled or hit against the woman's legs were considered liable to be wounded or die (Laman 1957, 2:161). One reason that men had to pass between the woman's legs was that the genitals were perceived as one of the principal sites of a human's powers. A woman's genitals as well as her mind were considered the privileged seat of her vital energies and of magical powers which these energies could activate. As such, once a girl became adult, she began to wear a cache-sexe to prevent any loss of this vital force. Thus, to speak publicly of the female sexual parts was at one time punishable by death, especially when it concerned a noblewoman. A woman's magical powers were considered both beneficent and evil, which is why she inspired fear in men. A woman's sorcery was therefore reputed to be highly efficacious. For this reason, men took care to secure female blessing - whether from a wife, aunt, mother or unmarried widow - in order to achieve luck or prosperity (Doutreloux 1967, 62-63). Among the Ovimbundu, a rebirthing rite that followed male circumcision involved the boys passing beneath the legs of both a woman and a man who stood on a river bank (Hambly 1968, 229). For reasons such as these, the package of medicines ensconced in a Koongo nkisi was placed on the fontanelle, the belly or the genitals. 48

Experiences of Enslavement

The information regarding the pre-war routine mentioned by the old Koongo soldier leads one to the conclusion that the African who had related this had been involved in inter-village or inter-ethnic wars before being drafted into either the French or British African corps. In addition, Central Africans commanded knowledge of guerrilla warfare, since open combat was less frequent than ambush strategies. The Koongo, for example, were versed in ambush techniques. During wartime, traps analogous to those set for monkeys were rigged. Cords placed in front of a doorway or across village paths were run to contraptions which set off hales of arrows. Sentinels were posted at night, and young boys installed in trees were engaged in this role during the day. Women, who ran the risk of being captured and enslaved, were either removed to specially secluded areas during wars or they accompanied the warriors, encouraging them verbally and using knives to finish off wounded opponents (Torday 1969, 77-78). In addition, in times of prolonged warfare in the grassland areas, the high shrubbery on either side of paths approaching a village was studded with spikes a meter long; the spikes' fire-hardened points were fixed diagonally into the earth and pointed towards the direction of approach. To step aside from the path was to encounter these cruel points. In forested zones, paths were studded with poisoned spikes concealed under dry leaves. Similar types of spikes are designed in Haiti, where planting piquettes in the earth is among the ways of protecting a field from thieves. "The piquette is a piece of sharpened bamboo or hard wood. Its point is dipped into poison, and it is placed in the ground, sharpened end up" (Courlander 1960, 99).

European Wars But apart from fighting in African wars, it emerges that some African men were also drafted into European armies. One of several oral indications of this came by way of a remark about an army uniform. Trinidad informant Modeste (1971) described her father as tall, and having a uniform like an Indian dhoti'and a turban, which her father would put on occasionally after his demobilization. In French Creole he would say, "Sa se rad kongo", meaning 'These are Congo clothes'. But the description of this uniform reminds one of the Zouave10 outfit favoured by the French army: it was not really an imitation of an 49

Central Africa in the Caribbean

African style of dress but was based on a Middle Eastern oriental concept. In two cases, including this one, it was mentioned that soldiers had been in Guadeloupe before migrating to Trinidad. This would suggest that they were among either English or French troops who had been deployed in the Caribbean.11 Both Britain and France created standing regiments of blacks to make up for deficient European troop numbers, and to circumvent the debilitating effects of disease on European personnel. Although there were also units specifically for deployment in the Caribbean and ranger units - infantry raised from among slaves from time to time and paid only when mobilized (Buckley 1979, 6, 14, 28) - the standing regiments were introduced to serve in any part of the French and British empires. The British government, for instance, decided in 1795 to raise eight West India Regiments from people originally captured as slaves. By 1798 they required four more. The immediate reason for this need was the imperial contests between Britain and France that resulted in the 1793-1815 Napoleonic Wars. But some of the recruits were drafted into the African Corps, later the Royal African Corps, raised for service in West Africa. The British West India Regiments existed for a century and a half, between 1779 and 1928, but half of their principal campaigns were fought between 1779 and 1815, when the Napoleonic Wars came to an end. Their West Atlantic battles took place against French, Spanish and American colonists. They faced the French in 1794 in Martinique and Guadeloupe, in St Lucia in 1795, St Vincent and Dominica in 1805, Martinique in 1809, Guadeloupe and Santo Domingo in 1810 (Swinson 1972, 254). The Seventh West India Regiment was formed out of the disbanded Ninth, Tenth and Twelfth West India Regiments, the "French" West India Regiments, which saw action in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Indeed, the First and Fourth West India Regiments won honours in Guadeloupe in 1810. But these particular regiments were disbanded in 1817 (Buckley 1979, 156-57). So for a soldier to have had a Zouave outfit, he would have had to have been in active service in the late 1850s, which would suggest that he was either in a later West India Regiment than the ones mentioned here or that he had in fact been a French army recruit. For [w]ith regard to the uniform of the West India Regiments, it is to be noted that in 1858 ... there was a complete change in the 50

Experiences of Enslavement uniform worn by West India soldiers; at the express request of Queen Victoria, these troops were issued an adaptation of the uniform worn by the Zouaves of the French army. The uniform, unlike any worn in the British army before or since, is still worn today by the Jamaica Military Band. (Buckley 1979, 180fh. 60)

Figure 2.3 West India Regiment prívate with Brown Bess musket, 1815

Figure 2.4 West India Regiment soldier in Zouave uniform

51

Central Africa in the Caribbean

The uniform is mentioned with reference to "the band of the 1st West Indian Zouaves" in an account by a Sierra Leonean of "the athletic sports at Falcon Bridge Battery, Freetown" on 4 June 1869 (Monteiro 1875, 2:317). A few decades later, another reference is made to "about 300 of the 1st West India Regiment (Negro-soldiers in Zouave-uniform, with English officers) who constitute the garrison in Fort William Frederic" near the mouth of the Demerara river in British Guiana (Netscher 1888, 149). But the fit of the pre-1858 uniform, among other things, had activated one European's sense of humour: in the 1840s Schomburgk, a German traveller to South America, found the sight of Coromantyns, Congos, Mozambicans and Sierra Leoneans ridiculous, and he superciliously detailed "their black fists, black features and curly woolly hair", while attired "in red uniforms with their mis-shapen extremities stuck into white pantaloons". He was also repelled by the various tribal marks "burnt or cut into their forehead, temples, cheek, mouth", and their filed, pointed incisors (Schomburgk 1922,29). On the other hand, another European spoke admiringly of the physical bearing of these men, who were already ex-soldiers by his time of writing: "They were splendidly set up and in spite of their years, were as straight as spear-shafts, which was hardly to be wondered at, since, in the first place, they came of superb stock physically, and in the second place, had led active and healthy lives" (McLellan 1943, 36). Other references to the soldiers are dispassionate. Reporting on his years spent in British Guiana (later Guyana), Henry Kirke recalled that in 1872 Demerara was the headquarters of the 2nd West Indian Regiment, Colonel Wise in command. When the first Ashanti war broke out, the regiment was sent to Cape Coast Castle. . . . When the Ashanti campaign was over, we [Demerara] had alternate detachments from the 1st and 2nd West Indian Regiments. . . . [I]n 1890, the troops, were withdrawn altogether . . . (Kirke 1898, 69-70) Another commentator on British Guiana life shed further light on the global significance of the regiment's men who, he reported, became the "policemen of the old days". Such a person, "[b]orn in Jamaica, West Africa or Barbados, . . . was more often than not an old ex-soldier, who 52

Experiences of Enslavement

had seen service with the West India Regiment in Dahomey, Ashanti, or some other wild African possession of the British Crown" (E.N.W. 1917,47). As Schomburgk himself had intimated, the manpower of two African regiments in the West Indies, operated by England in the midnineteenth century and headed by English officers, was recruited from captured slave ships. The method was that "[w]hen one of these runs into a Colonial port, a recruiting officer goes on board and looks out for the fittest people for military service" (Schomburgk 1922, 29). Contemporary observers, European politicians and later historians are not as kind in their assessment of the enlistment process. Of the fifty-six hundred males among the seventy-eight hundred slaves liberated at the Vice-Admiralty Court in Freetown, Sierra Leone between 1808 and 1815, more than two thousand were chosen or enticed to join the British army (Dyde 1997, 30). Since they put slaves they had rescued from slave ships to labour, the British were condemned for encouraging the trade that they were pledged to eradicate. A West India Regiment based in Sierra Leone saw service in the Anglo-Boer Wars of 1881 and 1899 (Hamilton 2001)12 and recruitment was done in Grenada, among other Caribbean locales (Heywood 2001). This West Indian involvement most likely accounts for reference to the 1881 war in a Koongo song in Trinidad. Yet the strategic impact of events in that South African war was so resounding that it stirred the popular imagination. Certainly, even during the 1960s, its memory was still alive among old people in Trinidad, and it had in fact been registered in that characteristically topical song mode - the calypso. In the stance of a British imperial loyalist, George Adilla, known as The Duke of Marlborough, sang triumphally in 1900: In the reign of Victoria We marched on Pretoria Our valour the world will remember And destroyed the Boers' predomination Now the Transvaal is ours, the population Have raised the imperial flag of Britannia Over South Africa On the other hand, that same year Henry Forbes (The Senior Inventor) celebrated in iconoclastic tones the ghetto gang who had named 53

Central Africa in the Caribbean

themselves "Laventille Boers", and their district "Majuba HUP, and who, nine years after the Majuba Hill battle in South Africa, had routed a raiding band of police whom they considered "British" (Rohlehr 1990, 45-46). So that even if there had been no actual West Indian or West India Regiment involvement in the event, the stunning defeat of the British by the Boers at Majuba Hill had reverberated and lingered around the apparently invincible British Empire. Two versions of a song about the Majuba incident were recovered in Trinidad, the two issuing from differing emotional matrices. The first version is ambivalently sympathetic to the Boers, even while it presents the point of view of a British fighter. The surprise of the defeat is factually presented in the second version. 1.

Mboz e

The I3oers, oh

Mboz mbonga Majuba

The Boere I shot at Majuba

Ta ntele

I grieve

Nlezi na bodi yekiti

Wet fluid wae> spread

Menga ma

This blood (Gomez Jones 196£)

2.

Mboze Wava mundele

The Boers

< Vaba mandele

Defeated the Europeans [English] At Majuba Hill (Nicolas Jones 1968)

Kuna monga Manjuba

Mboze

The fact that .Gomez Jones's last line, with its reference to blood, recalls the last line of another song about someone wounded by an alligator, "Njo Ngando",13 may serve as a clue to the interpretation that. 54

Experiences of Enslavement

following the pattern of oral song composition, the song was not "one of a kind", but may have been recycled from others which narrated some bloody encounter. The demobilized troops of the British West India Regiments, popularly called "old soldiers", were brought to Trinidad, among several other places, and given land in several different locations. As one informant said, "They drop a group here [Manzanilla], they drop a group San Chikit [Sangre Chiquito], a group Sandi Grand [Sangre Grande], lower down [at] Tunapuna, Arima" (Boney 1972). These ex-army men must have been allowed to retain arms, for they had long guns to shoot squirrels and deer in the forest. Gunpowder was kept in a tin bottle with a small head and a cork. They would ram the gunpowder into the gun with a piece of wood and then lock the gun. One grandfather, Noombi Gwaanda, also had a pop-gun made from a tube of bamboo. Inside this he would insert a corn seed wrapped in wet paper, which had the cutting force of a stone when a rod was injected into the tube. The old man said it had been used in Africa (Nicholls 1989). Indeed, guns there were "loaded with heavy stones, bits of lead or metal" for hunting (Laman 1953, 1:87). And a source in Angola testified that "[o]n festive occasions, or at their burials, the guns are loaded with a tamping offuba, or fine mandioca-meal, instead of other wadding, and they then give a terrific report when fired off, and not unfrequently burst" (Monteiro 1875, 1:142). Another implement was the dagger made of indigo wood. In Cuba, it was usually the "Congo" who made this weapon. "Anyone they struck with them went quite stiff. I think they must have had some magic on the point. If a Spaniard saw a Negro with one of those daggers he took to his heels" (Montejo 1968, 168). Perhaps it was their dreaded fighting form and technique which led to the self-ascription mambi> originally a Santo Dominguan and Haitian term for Maroons and lawbreakers, and subsequently a Cuban term designating the ferocious bands of anti-slavery and independista fighters against Spain in the late 1860s and 1870s (Alvarez Navario 1974, 268). The source of the term has been much disputed, but especially in the light of its negative meaning (Deive 1981, 137-38), it seems derived from (Ko) ma- plural noun prefix + mbi 'evil', thus signifying "the evil ones; the dreaded, the dangerous". Ortiz (1974, 337) concurs with an African origin, noting its deprecatory use among "Congo" slaves to denominate Maroons and 55

Central Africa in the Caribbean

rebels, and Cabrera (1984, 32) indicates its meaning as brujo 'wizard/witch; one who works evil'.14 We have in this chapter heard the voices - direct, vicarious and surrogate - of those who personally experienced relocation, through enslavement, forced indentureship and military recruitment, herded with strangers over land and river and ocean, experiences not unlike those who eventually came to the West by way of voluntary emigration. These accounts allow us insights into their bewilderment and sense of betrayal, their mechanisms for confronting mental and emotional anguish, and their strategies for psychological recovery, which involved the rallying of ethnic and family pride, engagement in collective aesthetic expression, the formation of new coteries, as well as their bravery and even reckless gamble with life and limb. We will now pursue various aspects of the lifestyles they fashioned across the sea, Kalunga, and the interrelationships and culture contacts which they were required to develop as survival mechanisms.

56

CMftcr.:3-

CCKW^MmfM

3nawiclKtdf in, C&^MH Ethnic Physical Spaces There is ample evidence that both small and large settlements based on ethnic congruence were formed in the West Atlantic. These settlements were spontaneously formed within slave quarters on plantations, or were constituted by runaway coalitions, or established within Maroon villages. Such communities did exist on plantations because, despite the overall restrictions imposed on the individual and collective will under slavery, Africans still managed to construct their own oases of social interaction. One needs to remember that a slave's life did not consist exclusively of work, even if work was the planters' chief purpose in acquiring the slave. To a significant extent, social intercourse was, in the initial experience of slavery and indenture, mainly available within the ethnic ingroup. This was because of the weight of numbers of particular ethnic groups, since at particular points in time specific peoples were targeted for slave raids, or specific internecine or sub-tribal wars were raging. It is therefore likely that people from the same language community, or from mutually intelligible linguistic communities, were exported together. Across the Atlantic, the preference by planters at particular points in time for certain ethnicities of slaves would have also increased the probability of language clustering. This would hold for a particular estate and, if not, at least for neighbouring estates. In the light of this, it is reasonable to reckon that for the predominant ethnic groups, slaves 57

Central Africa in the Caribbean

from the same or similar linguistic and cultural community did interact and were not, as has been the dogma, isolated from culturally similar associates. Such interaction was normal both among seasoned slaves and between seasoned and newly landed migrants, since those longer separated from their homelands "expected to revive and retrace in the conversation of their new visitors, the remembrance and ideas of past pleasures and scenes of their youth". The newcomers for their part "considered themselves as the adopted children of those by whom they were thus protected, calling them parents and venerating them as such" (Edwards 1806, 342). This scenario is apparent in details from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an English planter in Jamaica who owned a small estate in the south-western parish of Westmoreland and who in 1751 possessed eighty-one slaves. Among his forty-four females, both children and adults, there were five "Congo", and in 1762 he purchased a pubescent "Congo" girl (Hall 1999, 18, 20, 28, 29, 37, 89, 126, 198). Thistlewood revealed much information about his female slaves because he so frequently had intimate relations with them, but he also mentions one of his runaways, Congo Sam, who tried in late 1752 to kill him by machete blows (p. 54). In addition, one section of his 160 acres was known as "Congo ground", and the bridges leading across swampland to the Hill, the site of a "Negro provision ground", perhaps synonymous with "Congo ground", were called "Congo Bridges" (pp. 26, 27, 39). These ethnonyms should not be read as indices of exclusive "Congo" occupation of these places, but rather as indicators of the obtrusive stamp of a Central African presence in this community. Apart from voluntary associations, and contrary to general assumptions, ethnic micro-communities were also consciously planter-engineered. For instance, some planters expressly organized the companionship of African countrymen in the "seasoning" or acclimatization process of newly arrived slaves. One French planter advised regarding his experience at "breaking in" slaves that "it was necessary to attend closely to their needs, entrusting them to slaves of their countries who are also recognized as the best subjects. . . . Their compatriots . . . must, as much as possible, be mixed among them and lodged in their neighborhoods" (Sainte-Marie 1792, 48). Other evidence derives from the 1840s and 1850s, during which time some seventy-six hundred liberated Africans were landed in 58

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

Guyana, six thousand of whom had come through St Helena. While some of these may have been East Africans, data from two shipments, one coming from St Helena in 1842 and the other from Brazil in 1841, indicate that most of the slaves had originated through the port of Benguela. "Indeed, officials decided to settle the St Helena group near to the Brazil group precisely because they were from the same part of Africa. They were located on estates in Berbice county" (Schuler 1995). Given the abundant rationales for ethnic clustering, there is ample evidence of Central African physical agglomerations. In seventeenthcentury Haiti an estate of some two hundred slaves was called La Cour d'Angole 'Angola Court', and many of the slaves' names appear Bantu: Macaya, Bomba, Moussougou (Musungu), Cablinda (Kabinda), Sango (Geggus 1989, 396 fh. 4). There was also an Angola Town in seventeenth-century St Kitts, the island then being divided between French and English control. "Angola Town was located at La Fontaine, just north of Basseterre", the capital. Both Labat and DuTertre report that hundreds of slaves lived in Angola Village at Fountains Estate, originally La Fontaine, residence of D'Esnambuc, the founder of the French colony on the island; Grouse (1977, 74) reports that the Africans in this village numbered approximately four hundred in 1640. In Guadeloupe an uprising that took place in 1656 was launched by two factions, one originally from Angola and another from Cape Verde, off the Windward Coast of West Africa (Mazama 1992, 39).l The Angolan faction based at Capesterre launched their campaign at the appointed time, but the Basseterre group controlled by the Cape Verdians failed to appear (Mumford, 1991, 3:896-97). Almost a century later, in 1736, a revolt was planned by the "Mondong group" (Mazama 1992, 39).2 The last is a reference either to the Ndongo, an Mbundu-speaking people south of Koongo, or more probably peoples from the Central African hinterland, who were given this umbrella designation. In fact, the consensus of studies regarding the ethnic identity of eighteenth-century slaves in Guadeloupe is that "Bantu speakers ("Congos") formed the most or second most important African ethnic group . . . (the other major group being Ibo)" (Mazama 1992, 43).3 Then, in the nineteenth century, between 1857 and 1861, about seven thousand Africans were brought to the island under the "free inden59

Central Africa in the Caribbean

tured" service established after the French abolition of slavery in 1848. Most of them came from the "Congo" area.4 In Jamaica of the 1770s, evidence emerged of a Maroon "Congo" settlement in the island's west, "deep in the woods around Black River in St Elizabeth" (Campbell 1990, 158). By 1795-96, another settlement was discovered to have existed over a fifty-year period of major Maroon-British disturbances. It had once borne the name Congo Town, but was later renamed Highwindward, "the place of greatest safety", and even later given the Jamaican Creole name emphasizing isolation and independence: 'Me No Sen Yu Nuh Come' [I haven't called you, so don't come] (Mullin 1994, 58, 59). Even a perusal of late-eighteenth-century runaways and workhouse inmates listed in the Jamaica Royal Gazette indicates several "new negroes" of "the Angola country", or otherwise called "Mungola", in addition to several of "country Congo"; many such persons are further identified as speaking "very little English". While the linguistic evidence of Koongo presence among the Jamaican Maroons is not as obvious as that of the Twi-speaking people from the Gold Coast,5 it is noteworthy that the name of a plain just below Nanny Town in the Blue Mountain range of the eastern St Thomas parish is Makunu, or Makungo, Level. Makunu (Ko) refers to an abandoned village settlement, literally 'a place belonging to the kunu, or ancestors'.6 Makungo, the version of this place name given by Carey (1997, 392), but cited by Agorsah (2001) as other locations named Makungo Hill and Makungo River, would be a variant of Ma Koongo (plural form for the group). Yet another possible Central African place name may be Budu was-was, a bathing and baptismal site along the Wild Cane River in Moore Town, a north-eastern Maroon settlement.7 Was-was is a reduplicated form of wash, featuring [s] ~ [s] neutralization.8 Budu derives from Mb mbundu 'testicles, anus'. Another lexical artefact is junga < dyonga (Ko) 'lance' (Carter 1986, 100). This Maroon weapon is described as a "light wooden shaft 5 to 5J/2 feet long. At its top is a sharp flattish metal blade. The Maroons converted almost all the steel and other suitable metal they could find into junga heads, which were constantly retrieved and re-used" (McFarlane 1977, 35 fn.). "Although used primarily for hunting wild hog . . . \hzjunga is an object of pride and a symbol of Maroon identity, and may be used in Kromanti rituals." Most Maroon ritual officiants of 60

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

the Kromanti religious dance "keep a junga in their yard, whether or not they are hunters" (Bilby 1981, 72). Central African lexical residue in the language of the Suriname Maroons also gives substantial evidence of Central African populations in their demographic mix. Daeleman (1972) has specifically addressed Koongo elements in Saramakan speech, while such features are also evident in Huttar's consideration of Juka lexicon (1985). Price (1975b, 473 fn. 13) mentions the Juka cult of Mayombe, and the "specialized esoteric 'languages'" among the Saramaka called Luango and Pumbu, "for use in prayer and other ritual settings", which "exhibit a particularly high proportion of African-derived words" (p. 462); while he instances earlier Saramakan greetings such as: "Bote", from mbote (Ko) 'goodness', to which the answer was "Sikenai bote", probably a truncated form of ngi sikama na mbote 'I walk/stand surely in health', and "Lelembu", a reflex of lu- abstract noun prefix + lembe (Ko) 'calm, peace' (1983, 26). Another greeting was "Lelembu Kizambii" 'the peace of God'. On the northern coast of South America during the entire eighteenth century, the Spanish authorities tried to bring communities of Maroons under administrative control; among such settlements were Coro, Curiepe and Macuto, the last a likely Central African name (Acosta Saignes 1978, 197). This is because the Windward coast of Venezuela, called the Barlovento, had been the arrival site towards the end of the seventeenth century of both free and enslaved blacks, called Loangos, from the Dutch-owned islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao (Acosta Saignes 1978, 197; Megenney 1992, 95). In 1742, in a bid to gain full freedom, an insurrection against Spanish colonial power was planned in the Valles del Tuy by a number of Central Africans: Jose Francisco Congo, Domingo Antonio Luango, Justo Luango, Manuel Luango and Simon Luango. Ten years later, Marcelino Ganga, a Kisi from Senegambia, and Manuel Congo helped to found Curiepe, the first town of free blacks in Venezuela (Garcia 1992, 17). By the 1690s, the slave-importing town of Cartagena in Colombia was ringed by palenques. One of them, Matudere, was found to comprise about 250 people, more than one hundred of whom were Africaborn or had Africa-born parents. Of the Africans, the majority, that is, fifty, were Aja-Fon from the Slave Coast, comprising twenty-eight Mina, nineteen Arara and three Popo. Only one was from the Gold 61

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Coast, the person identified as Bran or Brong; while three were Yolof or Wolof, from Upper Guinea. Another three were from the Niger Delta: the two Caravali or Kalahari, and the one Biafara. The second largest contingent was the twenty-five Central Africans, made up often Congo, nine Luango or Loango, one Goyo or Ngoyo, and the five noted as Angolan (Landers 2000, 39). Further north, in Veracruz in Mexico by the beginning of the early seventeenth century, an established palenque was headed by a Bron or Brong of the northern Akan peoples of the Gold Coast. His name was Naga, Nanga, or Yanga. His army was led by an Angolan, possibly Matosa by name (Chavez-Hita 2001, 159 fin. 5). Unable to conquer the Maroons militarily in 1609, the Spanish Crown arranged a truce whereby the palenque would receive the status of a free town, have its own cabildo or local council, with Yanga as the town's governor; but in return the new entity, named San Lorenzo de los Negros, would assist the viceroy in capturing fugitive slaves (Davidson 1973, 94-95, 97). Then internal political differences within a late-eighteenth-century Maroon group resulted in its leader turning over an ex-captain, Makute, to the colonial authorities, who imprisoned him for several years before his eventual execution (Chavez-Hita 2001, 167). Even today, names like Mocambo, Mozambique, La Matamba and El Cerro del Congo ('Koongo Hill') identify places in close proximity to Veracruz (Githiora 1994, 4). This Central African presence is not surprising, given data with respect to the origin of slave shipments to Veracruz in earlier centuries: as an example, between 1596 and 1601, eighteen ships came from Luanda, as against two from Cape Verde, one from Guinea (Windward Coast) and one from Sao Tome, the latter in any case being an entrepot for slaves coming from Central Africa (N'gou-Mve 1993, 21).9 Later, in the early nineteenth century, in eastern Cuba there were several palenques, among them one headed by Juan Angola; two Maroon towns bore names that can safely be assumed to be Central African - Bumba and Maluala (Franco 1973, 44); and El Calunga (Duharte Jimenez 1986, 14). In the post-slavery period, ethnic solidarity was one of the bases of socio-economic unity. Whether as ethnic or multi-ethnic groupings, Africans effected joint purchase of lands, a practice well documented for the formation of villages in post-emancipation Guyana. 62

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

[I]n November 1839 . . . eighty-three labourers from the five nearby estates of Douchfour, Ann's Grove, Hope, Paradise and Enmore subscribed between them the sum of six thousand dollars, made the down payment towards the purchase price of ten thousand dollars and took possession of the abandoned plantation Northbrook, on the East Coast Demerara, which they re-christened with the name of Victoria. (Young 1957, 5) Mindenburg on the West Bank Demerara was bought and named Bagotville. Oral report credits Oku (Yoruba), Koongo and Gola (Angola) people as participating in this financial venture (Brown 1994). Oral report also suggests that "Congo" predominated in Buxton, a town sited on the former Niew Oranje Nassau plantation (Young 1957, 11; Morrison 1989, 23; 1994). This was bought in April 1840 by 128 labourers from the plantations of Annandale, Nonpareil and Lusignan (Cruickshank 1921, 66). Morrison (1989, 23) accorded numerical prominence to the "Congo" at Lusignan. Decades later, by 1881, "44 Kongo people rented or owned land at Geneve estate while working at Le Desir or West Coast Demerara estates. The Kongo lost control of Geneve, however, because they could not pay their drainage rates, and Geneve's local name became "Congo Heart Burn" (Schuler 2001, 136).10 Indeed, "almost as soon as they were freed, many Negroes who in slavery or apprenticeship had been removed to another part of the

Figure 3.1 Princess Hinds Drakes of East Coast Essequibo, Guyana, 1994. Her maternal grandfather was Kaguru, a MuZoombo.

63

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colony took the opportunity to return, as purchasers of land, to their old homes or the immediate neighbourhood of them" (Cruickshank 1921, 68). Joint purchase of land was effected in Trinidad as well (WarnerLewis 199la, 43) but this was either not on the same scale as in Guyana or it has not yet been fully documented. Whether by communal purchase, squatting, or official settlement policy, in nineteenth-century Trinidad there were settlements in the island's south such as Congo Block in Moruga, Congo Kunuk, or Congo Konuk11 at Buen Intento outside of Princes Town, Kambu (Ko) compound near Firebond in Carapichaima, Congo Village in Diego Martin, and in sections of Belmont in the island's north-west (Warner-Lewis 199la, 36-41; 1996, 41-42). There also existed a premises in Port of Spain called Mafumbo Yard (Elder 1966, 194), a name which may originally have been ma- Ko plural prefix + fumbi (Ko) 'secret assassin; ambush; spot on a public road where a murder or armed attack had taken place', to speculate from the fact that the premises was a famous stick fight rendezvous.12 By the mid-twentieth century, "Congo" residents and settlements in Tobago were still recalled: at Culloden Moor and at Congo Town and Congo Hill in the Charlotteville area (Elder 1971, 15). Documentation of the Bahamas post-emancipation African villages has been done, and it is recognized that "Congo" settlements were to be found in Congo Town within "Fox Hill Village popularly known as Sandilands" (Williams 1979, 23), as well as in a section of Bain Town on the island of New Providence (Eneas 1976, 8). In St Vincent, reference is made to Congo Valley (Day 1852, 1:116); and Barbados has a Congo Road in St Philip parish, as well as Congor Bay and Congor Rocks on the shoreline of St John's parish.13 On the island of Marie-Galante in the Eastern Caribbean, there is a place bearing the ethnonym Mayoumbe; on the outskirts of Basse Terre in Guadeloupe there is a town called Matouba, noted for its river and cold spring spa (Lubeth 2000). This environmental detail would suggest that the name of the site is derived from (Ko) ma- plural prefix + tuba 'spring, torrent'. In the westerly St James parish of Jamaica there is a town called Mafuta, spelled Mafoota. It lies towards the eastern boundary of what was the Montpelier plantation and bore that name, even for official purposes, during slavery, its name appearing in military accounts and maps14 connected with the 1831-32 slave uprising in north-western 64

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Jamaica. Mafuta (Ko) could have been a personal name, as well as it refers to payments of two sorts for goods, or to excess fat, but in western Koongo dialects it also refers to palm oil. As a verb, futa in southern Koongo denotes 'to lie fallow, to become overgrown with bush',15 while in Mbundu rifuta, pi. mafuta, means cpit, abyss, whirlwind/ pool'. These southern Koongo and Mbundu meanings are consonant with the boundary status of the Jamaica site, the military description of the area as an "extensive track" of land with thickets, and the indication in the maps that Mafoota overlaps with the site of "Fyffe's shack". This latter suggests that it may have been a slave watchman's outpost.

Ethnic Fraternities Apart from cohabiting in ethnically unified physical locations, slaves assembled in ethnic groups for social and political functions. Evidence taken at a criminal inquiry in Trinidad in 1823 revealed that an Igbo post-funerary ceremony had taken place involving the sprinkling of a fowl's blood over the grave and the playing of a drum, and that this custom had been misread, whether mischievously or in fear, by a slave informer as a signal of war. However, the tribunal was able to establish that there were many Societies or meetings of Slaves for dancing, both in country and Town" [that were] "referred to ... under the Military designation of Regiment, but which word appears, by most respectable competent testimony . . . to be used by French negroes16 . . . on the most ordinary occasions, in familiar conversation synonymously with, or for, the word "party" or "society," to denote a number from ten and upwards, employed in the same labour or pursuit and to be used on the occasion of Dances on Holy days to denote different parties, tribes or nations such as Regiment Congo, Ibo etc. (Johnston 1823) In Haiti, there were and still are reciprocal labour collectives, whereby communities help an individual or family farm a field or build a structure. Mutual aid groupings are known as combite < convite (Sp) 'invitation', but there are also more formal "work societies" which allow members to sell their labour and receive wages, which are then 65

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pooled and shared by other members. "Furthermore, if one of their members falls ill, his comrades come to tend his gardens and to bring him medicines" (Metraux 1960, 33, 38; 1971, 318-39). In some parts of the island such a group is called societe congo (Leonora 1988, 80). In the Spanish colonial world, it was the cabildos or ethnic associations permitted by the Spanish authorities which in large measure allowed for congregations of people speaking the same language. The cabildos, or cofradias, as they were also known, were outgrowths of the medieval workmen's guilds in Spain. African ethnic guilds are known to have existed in Seville in the late fourteenth century, and the institution of the guild was exported when slavery was transferred from the Iberian peninsula to the Spanish colonies in the late fifteenth century (Ortiz 1992, 4-5). Members' dues and rental of the cabildo's premises provided the money to pay fines for the fraternity's infringements of colonial laws, to pay manumission for old and sickly slaves, and to contribute towards the health and funeral expenses of members (pp. 6, 7). "Wherever it existed, the African cabildo served to diffuse beliefs, music, musical instruments, customs and rites of the native groups of those who had recently arrived. It also helped familiarize the slave with the speech of his sellers and masters" (Friedemann 1988, 129). In Santo Dominigo there were cofradias of Koongos and Angolans (Deive 1978, 137). Quoting Juan Pablo Sojo, Bastide asserts that free Negroes in Venezuela "lived in a special quarter at Coro known as Los Ranches, and seem to have been divided along ethnic lines", with the Loangos having their own chief. [I]n the mid-eighteenth century there were no less than forty fraternities spread out among the fifteen churches of Caracas some composed of slaves - which were responsible for the cult of their patron saint and the burial of their members.... They built houses for their members, provided economic support towards obtaining enfranchisement papers, arid gave co-operative assistance in the sphere of agricultural labour. (Bastide 1971, 96) In Cartagena, Colombia, the cabildos de nation served as sanitoria for those who were ill. And in the event of their death, it was in the cabildo that the wake with its attendant drumming and dancing was held. The same funerary function was served by the Koongo cabildo in Las Lajas in Cuba. 66

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

Even before slavery had ended, according to Higman's computations (1984, 128, 133), "Kongo outnumbered other Africans in Berbice towards the end of the slave era", and though this was probably less the case in Demerara, in both counties "Congo" "led the revitalization of African ethnic welfare 'companies' during slavery" (Schuler 1988, 110 fn. 10).17 Thus, in nineteenth-century Guyana, in a manner similar to the practice in the hispanophone cabildos, [a] custom prevailed among the negroes of collecting money for funerals. . . . It had been customary for years for the negroes of every nation in a district to choose head-men or "Kings," under whom were several subaltern officers of the same nation. The duties of the "Kings" were to take care of the sick and purchase rice, sugar, &c., for them, to conduct the burials, and see that the corpse was properly enclosed in a cloth, and that the customary rites and dances were duly observed. (Rodway 1893, 2:295, 297) These were some of the discoveries made by the British authorities in British Guiana during a commission of enquiry held in 1808 to review rumours of intended slave revolts in 1804 and 1807. The 1804 incident had led to the deportation of six blacks, while nine were executed for the 1807 allegations. These reprisals weakened the African social networks, but Rodway reported an internal source of dissension among a section of the "Congo" of that era: An end was put to these "Companies," - as they were called among the Congoes, by a quarrel between them and their "King," who at a certain burial declared he had no money, although the people believed he had enough for the purpose, as it was impossible that their contributions could all have been exhausted. In consequence the "Company" was abolished and on each estate they had since taken care of their own dead. From the confessions of the Congoes it appeared they had a King, Governor, General Drummer and a Doctor or Lawyer. (Rodway 1893, 2:297-98) As we have seen, then, in both Maroon and non-Maroon free villages, and even on slave estates, there lived groups of people we have called "Congos", "Angolans", "slaves", "indentured labourers", or 67

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"Central Africans". Yet, as ethnic groups they were not necessarily isolated from each other. Rather, they are in many instances likely to have occupied neighbouring enclaves, and to have had as many differences among the groups as shared bases of cooperation and mutual aid.

Pen Sketches of Individuals The inhabitants of these hamlets and members of these fraternities were living, breathing individuals who had personal peculiarities of behaviour and appearance, as ordinary or as flamboyant as people we know today. But documents offer only passing sketches of the Central Africans who came across the Middle Passage. Not until the late eighteenth century does there appear to emerge, on the part of Europeans, an interest in Africans as individuals, whether in their dealings with the master class or in their relationships with their own group. Even less interest was directed towards their ethnic affiliation. This scenario is not surprising, given the concern of Europeans with Africans as harnessable manual power, as slaves - and their converse, runaways or as potential converts, or assassins. Eventually, it was the recognition of the slave as individual - whether loyal, or intelligent, but above all, as human - which pricked the European conscience and served to promote the debate over the morality of slavery. By the close of the eighteenth century this new vision had seized enough sympathizers to set in train the campaign for abolition of that institution.

Maroons A few early sketches of Maroons are available to us, either with linguistic evidence of their Central African origin or overtly assigned such provenance in the records. In Santo Domingo, in the sixteenth century, there existed manieles, or cumbes (Maroon communities) in the mountainous Baoruco district, bearing such names as Angola Janga and Pequena Angola (Deive 1988, 114). In fact, one of several famous Maroon leaders who rose against the Spanish government in this period was Lemba, described by his opponents as extremely knowledgeable about warfare (Landers 2002, 234). From the 1540s on he remained at large for some fifteen years at the head of a band of some 140 followers who roamed the Higuey zone. He was eventually captured and put to death, giving his name to one of the town entrances to the capital, 68

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which came to be known as Puerto, de Lemba 'Lemba's Gate'., perhaps because his head or body was exposed to view there (Deive 1978, 141). Lemba is a name of one of the religious cults which has existed over centuries in Koongo, but it is also an alternative name for the Mbula sub-group. It is also a kinship term among the Mbundu, signifying an elder of the lineage (Miller 1976, 46). The fate of Lemba recalls the leyenda de Cafunga, or legend of Kafunga, from the province of Sancti Spiritus in Cuba. The name kafunga carries a Bantu morphology. The legend has two versions: one in respect of a native American who ran away from enslavement and was hounded and bitten by dogs and made to die a horrible lingering death by his captors; the other in respect of a black slave whose climbing gear broke while lopping a palm tree, and who crashed to the ground breaking his skull. From one or the other of these events arose the idiom "to die like Kafunga", implying a painful death (Feijoo 1965, 177-78). In the sequel to the British seizure of Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, an Angolan attempting to negotiate terms of capitulation on behalf of the deposed Spanish governor, Juan Ramirez de Arellano, was strangled by guerilla forces of a Spanish faction opposed to surrender. This Angolan was "an educated man, literate, fluent in several languages, knowledgeable in astronomy, an excellent sugar technician, and a good administrator" (Carey 1997, 91). Later on, in the five-year transition from Spanish to British control in Jamaica, Juan Lubolo, or Lubola, became leader of a band of blacks who controlled mountains overlooking Guanaboa Vale in the central parish of Clarendon. His second name, interpreted by the British as 'de Bolas', is no doubt a reinterpretation of the ethnonym Libolo, an Mbundu sub-group, also meaning 'foreskin' (Miller 1976, 231). Lubolo initially opposed the British, but eventually came over to their side in 1660, having negotiated a pardon. As such, he and his "Pelinco [palenque] of negroes, about 150", were in 1662 granted full civil rights. Lubola was appointed a magistrate, his group was formed into a "Black Militia" of "Lancers and archers", and his men each received thirty acres of land. But his new role, requiring him to use force to subjugate other black groups operating still independent of the British (as had been the case with Yanga in Veracruz, Mexico), led to his death at the hands of another Maroon band in 1663 (Patterson 1973, 254). Another ethnonym applied to a Maroon captain, this time in Suriname, was 69

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Muzinga (Stedman 1796, 1:66), the singular personal referent for one of the Mazinga, the designation of a Koongo people north of the Nsundi and east of the Vungu (Bungu). Yet another Jamaican Maroon raider, Three-Finger[ed] Jack, is credited in 1788 with leading a band of runaways who were chiefly "Congo" (Mullin 1994, 183). Meanwhile, in Haiti, Central Africans were taking part in the revolutionary process there. Among them were Makaya and Makandal. Makaya was a rebel leader in northern Haiti, reported by Toussaint L'Ouverture in 1795 as spending all day at "the dances and assemblies of Africans of his nation" (Thornton 1993, 204). In a 1793 letter Makaya had declared his allegiances thus: "I am the subject of three kings: of the King of Congo, master of all the blacks; of the King of France who represents my father; of the King of Spain who represents my mother" (Thornton 1993, 181). This formulation suggests that Makaya was a creole, a second-generation African descendant whose parents belonged to both sides of the Haiti-Santo Domingo divide of the island of Hispaniola. Whereas Haiti was the economic "jewel in the crown" of France, Santo Domingo had been relegated to a Spanish colonial backwater, as it could not rival the attraction posed by the mineral wealth of the American continent. As the French colony grew, the importation of African slaves reached significant proportions in the western part of the island; the French also raided slaves from Spanish settlers. Many slaves escaped to the Maroon communities in the Spanish-controlled part of the island. The Spanish government encouraged these runaways, as a means of weakening French control of the western territory, and former French slaves were given freedom in Spanish Santo Domingo, in ironic contrast to blacks in the Spanish colony. (Lipski 1994, 5) Makaya's parents were probably part of this flux and reflux, which brought slaves and Maroons under different European authorities at different times. Makaya incorporated these European nationalities into his identity, at the same time as he acknowledged as his sovereign the king of the Koongo, apparently on ancestral grounds. Indeed, the fact that he was known by a Koongo name, Makaya, meaning 'leaves, tobacco', shows that African ethnic loyalty did not end with 70

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the transshipped Africans but, under certain conditions, extended to subsequent generations.18 Makaya's ethnic affiliation parallels that of Kebinda, another lateeighteenth-century Maroon leader in the south-eastern border zone of Haiti and Santo Domingo, his band being hunted by joint Haitian and Santo Domingo militia. Despite his Central African name, a version of the port-name, Cabinda, he is recalled as having been born in the forest and was therefore a Creole. Apart from Kebinda's name, another sign of the Central African connection of his group was the fact that they wore tanga for one of their parleys with the colonial forces. Ntanga was the wrapped skirt worn by Koongo non-nobles and by warriors.19

Figure 3.2 The Field Negro wearing an ntanga "represented with the implements employed in the cultivation of the Sugar Cane. . . . On his arm is a too-too in a coarse netting of lien, termed by the Negroes tie-tie': (Bridgens 1836). 71

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For his part, Makandal was a runaway slave who had a large following on plantations in northern Haiti, to whom he distributed poisons and magic paquets. He was executed in 1758. Identified in European records either non-specifically as African or as a Moslem,20 his name, however, appears to be Koongo. One suggestion is that his name is a version of makunda ~ makwanda 'amulet', Koongo words used in eighteenth-century Haiti to designate what later came to be called paquets Kongo. Furthermore, the tied paquets he sold conform to the manner in which some nkisi are made.21 But his name could also derive from ma-kandalala 'death shrouds', a possible reference to his death-dealing capacity.22 Additionally, one of his assistants was named Mayombe, no doubt indicative of his Yombe origins (Geggus 199la, 32-33), and another was Teyselo, which could be a Koongo rephonologization of the Portuguese name Terceiro, given the custom adopted by the Koongo nobility of using Iberian personal names (Vanhee 1999, 7 fh. 27). Indeed, while there were other African national groups who formed fighting bands during the Haitian Revolution, Central Africans were "common enough among the rebels that Congo became a generic term for the rank and file of the slave insurgents" (Thornton 1993, 185). Bukman too appears to have borne names with Koongo resonances. Officially called Boukman Dutty, it is unclear whether he was African or Creole, but he is reputed to have been, previous to his presence in Haiti, a slave on an estate in western Jamaica. Perhaps this British connection accounts for the -man segment in his first name, the preceding segment deriving from buka (Ko) 'to cure with herbal medicines', a detail which fits with his religious associations as the priest presiding over the ceremony at Bois Caiman which ritually launched the Haitian Revolution.23 Additionally, Bukman was referred to as samba ~ zamba, which could be interpreted either as nzamba 'elephant', the interpretation favoured by Thornton (1993, 185-86), a reference to his "large and powerful stature" or, according to a linked but metaphoric interpretation, meaning 'leader, commander' (Pick 1990, 297 fh. 5). Nsimba ~ Nsamba is also the name given the first-born of a twin (Havenstein 1967, 27; Lete 1992), though Samba is also a Mande (Upper Guinea) male name. Other Koongo guerrilla leaders were Goman and Lamour Derance (Montilus 1993, 161). Both were Maroons. The gallicized orthography of Goman's name stresses the inherent nasalization of its final vowel 72

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

under the phonetic influence of the word-medial nasal consonant. Goma ~ ngoma is a Koongo and Mbundu name meaning 'drum'. Goma operated with his band in the south-western corner of Haiti. He led insurrections during 1792 and 1793, and died in 1820 at the head of an armed community in the mountains of Grande-Anse (Pick 1990, 224,236).

Ex-Slaves and Labourers Among the Central Africans in Trinidad in the mid-nineteenth century was a man in his fifties who claimed close relationship with Angolan royalty. His father had been killed in a war around 1850, and his uncle succeeded to the throne. As a child, the African remembered seeing missionaries at his father's palace. The young prince had fought in a war against a neighbouring people, but one day, in his early twenties, as he drew water at the riverside along with some companions, he claimed Yoruba24 had seized them and sold them to the Portuguese. Their boat, bound for Brazil, had been intercepted by the English, diverted to St Helena, and the cargo eventually brought to Trinidad. At the time of the report, the middle-aged African was about to marry an African woman of his own age, who hailed from the same country as himself and who had come over on the same boat (Cothonay 1893, 290-91).25 Another Trinidad-based male who had arrived in the late nineteenth century as an indentured labourer was one Noombi Gwaanda, who was captured on the shores of the Congo River. He claimed to have been the son of a king, but this might have been a village head or mfumu, who had inherited this office and ruled over a matrilineal clan. "There were as many chiefs in the village as there were makanda [clans]" (Laman 1957, 2:137). Noombi Gwanda had said that a sign of his status was a depression in the middle of his forehead near the hairline. A diamond, it was said, was fitted into this cavity. Perhaps this mark derived from a headband which he once wore, but it might have been a reference to facial scarring. For instance, nsamba were made by the Koongo, including the Eshikoongo sub-group, through the puncturing of a child's skin with sharp reed splinters to inject calcined wood ash. This made for slightly raised bluish scars, or produced flattish satiny patches. Among the Nsundi and Bwende incisions were made on the back, chest and belly in the shape of diamonds or a crocodile (one broad perpendicular line crossed by two short lines). Further scar 73

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ornamentation was made on the breast-bone and the shoulder deltoid muscle, and sometimes a diamond-shaped blob of flesh was raised on the forehead Johnston 1908, 2:563, 564). The Bwende had backs and abdomens "profusely decorated with incisions" in the form of chains and winding cords encircling the body (Ward 1890, 50). Meanwhile, the Loango peoples were described as distinctive on account of "puncturing or marking the skin of their sides, arms, and thighs with square elevated figures, something like dice". They also filed their incisors like shark's teeth (Stedman 1796, 2:254, 255). But the Mbundu also filed their teeth and were circumcised, as were the Loango. The practice of tattooing continued among Africans in St Vincent and Trinidad: Some few like to have their initials marked on their arms, and other figures pricked. . . . This is done by themselves for each other often, and sometimes they get white sailors to do it for them, with a needle and gunpowder, and a little indigo . . . it is generally on the centre of the chest. . . . I have seen one or two such marks on the arm, and on the cheek. They told me that this tattooing was done in Africa, when they were young, that the marks might grow as they grew up. Creole negroes are never tattooed. (Carmichael 1969, 2:298) However, in Cuba, the child born to a high official in the Koongo cabildo was cicatrized (Cabrera 1986a, 24). Noombi Gwanda also kept his head entirely shaved, using either a razor or a sharpened piece of bottle for this purpose. However, partial rather than complete shaving is accredited to Congo Basin peoples, with some men even retaining all their hair, and others elaborating hairstyles with braids and extensions (Johnston 1908, 2:579). On the other hand, it was reported that the men of the Sorongo, the Ambriz and the Eshikoongo - peoples immediately south of the estuary of the Nzadi river - kept their heads shaved, or allowed their hair to grow short, or shaved it in complicated patterns. Stretching the skin of the scalp tightly towards him with one thumb, the barber would scrape away from him with a sharp wedge of glass (Monteiro 1875, 1:268-69). And although no nationality was specified in the following account, Stedman cited details of the toilet preparations of slaves as they arrived off the shores of Suriname, hairdressing details reminiscent of those of which Monteiro and Johnston speak: "All the Slaves are led upon deck 74

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Figure 3.3 Some Ovimbundu tattoo patterns. Adapted from Hambly 1968. . . . their hair shaved in different figures of Stars, half-moons, &c, which they generally do the one to the other (having no Razors) by the help of a broken bottle and without Soap" (Stedman 1796, 1:205). Several other vignettes were provided of Trinidad forebears. One informant's parents were examples of a Central African union across ethnic boundaries. Her father was Pa Goma from the Koongo, while her mother. Ma Goma, was Chimundu. Another respondent's paternal grandmother had been a "Congo angole", Ma Catherine. She had long thick hair, and spoke "broken English", but no French Creole. She had come to Trinidad with a small son. Someone else's paternal grandfather had come as a slave from near the Congo River and spoke "broken 75

Central Africa in the Caribbean

English". Another man's grandfather had died in the 1930s. In his youth the grandfather would go under the water and hold a crocodile by its head and pull it out. Was this a boast in the tradition of hunters' tall tales? Perhaps his daring was based on his invocation of supernatural powers and accounted for his name, Bilongo, which meant 'medicines' in the sense of 'charms, ingredients assigned supernatural force'.26 His other name, in French Creole, also recalled his predilection for subduing crocodiles: it was Caiman amba glo 'crocodile under water'. Another informant's maternal grandmother was named Binda. She was a short, good-looking woman with a full face. She plaited her long hair in four and tied it all in a large headkerchief called a fula (Fr foulard). These headcloths were plaid-like, and of red and white bars, or black and white, clearly the bandanna material that formed part of the textile exports from England, the colonial metropole, and which were based on southern Indian designs. Binda bore no marks on her face and could not read or write. Yet another person's paternal great-grandfather was Papa /BUm/. He was a short, proud "Congo". Perhaps his name represented the ethnonym for the Mbuun who lived between the Kwilu and Kasai Rivers in the Congo Basin, or the name for the Mbum peoples of the Cameroon hinterland. The informant's maternal grandfather was also "Congo". He was called Papa Thomas. Another person's maternal great-grandmother had come as a slave with two girl children. Similarly, while a Jamaican Kumina leader claimed that her grandparents had come to Jamaica "as slevli", that is, as slaves, or during the time of slavery, and were colleagues of similar migrants like Mada Jenkin and Bongo Laing (Kennedy 197la), it is most likely that such persons were indentured labourers. As has already been pointed out in chapter 1, the status of slave and indentured labourer overlapped in several respects, including initial capture, sea voyages, exile and loss of self-employment. Another Jamaican "Congo" descendant traced her line to her grandfather, Thomas Anderson, who was called Busha Tom. While some Africans did become overseers in the Caribbean, it is more probable that the title busha < overseer (Eng) referred not to his status as a plantation overseer in Jamaica but rather recalled some responsible supervisory position he had held in Africa before being captured. In fact, the descendant elaborated by saying that he had been a "leader-massa that bring out people. He was working under 76

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

somebody" (Watson 1971). Could he have been a slave recruiter's agent who was eventually himself seized? In the slave trading regions of Central Africa the king of a territory appointed a mafuka who supervised the trade and employed agents in various locations to garner slave supplies. The seizure of persons themselves active in the trade happened in several cases out of guile, or to make up numbers on the part of the shipboard traders, or as punishment by the worker's employer, or to redeem a debt to the trader - "panyarring", the latter was called.27 Other of Jamaica's "salt-water Bongo" people, such as Old Cook, Old Davis, Old Espeut, or Old Wilson, are widely remembered. . . . Old Cook, who is buried in Arcadia [in St Thomas parish], was also known as "Two-Head Zion" because, it is said, he had two heads - the one on his shoulders, and then, growing out of the back of this, another smaller one (he may have had a tumor). . . . Old Snate . . . worked on Stanton estate, and when his contract expired bought fourteen acres of land. He was famous for his spiritual prowess, and was particularly adept at making the Kumina drums play by themselves, under the influence of spirits. Another ancestor from Africa, Mantu Kokolo, was renowned as a great dancer. (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 14-15) Mother Bartlett is remembered as a Mumbaka (Carter 1985, 4) who forms part of the ancestral pantheon of the Kumina religion, while Manoka Mvula is "the most famous of all the 'salt-water Bongos,' and was apparently a rain-maker". He worked at Hordley and Holland Estates in St Thomas parish (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 15, 18). His failure to fly back to Africa is attributed not only to his consumption of salt, but also to the fact that his clothes were routinely washed in a river. In other words, he broke two taboos. As a rainmaker he was a specialist priest, an nganga matompa, and therefore required to go for long periods without washing his clothes; "it is not uncommon for such a nganga to keep the same clothes on for a full year without allowing them to be washed" (p. 45). A comparable portrait of a "Congo" medicine-man comes in the person of Pa Monkee of Mayo in the central part of Trinidad, who lived in the nineteenth century. A woman who 77

Central Africa in the Caribbean

knew him when she was a young girl attested: "He was an ordinary man, short and thick, and I think he was 'doing bad' because when he had a new pants he would wear it until it was in rags. Even when the pants tore he would patch it and still wear it. The tear [torn] pants was the man's power" (Elder 1995). Pa Monkee was a very famous rainmaker and herbalist, and could make the strokes which a slave was receiving be felt by the planter's wife (Elder 1995). In Tobago, among the old Africans recalled were "Congo Keorke, Congo Leberoot and Congo Peter Jorge. . . . [T]he Congos were known as great dancers of strange music, speaking strange languages and living away in the bush, coming down only on occasions to the village to sell bush-meat, wicker baskets, fish-traps and calabash bowlies"28 (Elder 1988, 19). Their names suggest contact with Dutch and Portuguese or Spanish owners, and raise the possibility of such contact being Tobago-based, or suggest that these men had undergone some aspect of slave experience in Curasao, Suriname or Venezuela. There are a few recollections of first-generation Africans who had books apparently designed to teach them a European language, using their own mother tongue as a reference base. One such instance was that of an old "Congo" called Pa Charlie at Moruga in southern Trinidad, who had had a book with "the African language in it". A Jamaican said that her grandfather had brought from Africa not only his clothes but also a book with the alphabet printed in it. Unfortunately, since this information came in early interviews, before the researcher was aware of the Christianization process in Koongo or, even more pertinently, of the in-transit stay of several nineteenth-century immigrants in Sierra Leone, no follow-up questioning was done as to how the book may have been acquired, or its contents. This may have been a prayer or hymn book, or a spelling and vocabulary manual acquired from teachers and missionaries at schools for liberated children in Sierra Leone. On the lighter side of things, there are some amusing portraits of a few old characters. There is in narrative 27, "Voices in the Night", of Old Time Story from Guyana, a portrait of one of the disbanded West India Regiment soldiers turned watchmen; the joke at his expense plays on [r] ~ [1] phonological convergence in his speech which was no doubt typical of Africans, including Central Africans, among whom the distinction was not significant. But the internal joke among the narrative 78

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

characters is a critique of another non-English feature of speech, which was the reformulation of English syllables with consonant endings into vowel-final syllables, such as look /luk/ > /luku/, in keeping with the morphological structure of many African languages. Thus the doublelayered joke goes that one of the ex-soldiers was employed . . . in the Promenade Gardens and occupied a small house in the grounds. . . . Hereabout, he and his like foregathered to chat. On one of these happy occasions, a rat showed up, and.one of the assembly ejaculated, "Lookoo, a lattoo." Such poor English seemed to have offended the delicate ear of another member of the fraternity, from whom a reprimand took the following form: "Dis dam man, he bin so lang dis countlee an' he still say lattoo. No say, lattoo, say lat." (McLellan 1943, 36-37) Another apocryphal tale among the narratives is about one of the watchmen, who was on sentry duty at Government House one night: "on observing a figure moving slowly in the dark, the outline of which he could not define, he challenged sharply and fired. Instantly, a distressing 'Baah' rang out, when our friend from Africa dryly remarked, 'You speakee dam late' " (McLellan 1943, 36).

Personal Names Among the Koongo names remembered in Jamaica are: Mantu Kokolo < muntu mu kokolo 'the person within the yoke'; Kreso, possibly < nkezo 'what has been cut', or 'he who has been circumcised'; Malaika < malaka 'many'. Malaka, or more usually mambu malaka, is a common Koongo name with the meaning that the newborn child is coming into a world where many problems face him. A 'creole Bongo', popularly called Kominchi < nkwa minti 'one who heals with herbs', had a high reputation as a healer. And there was Manoka Mvula < manoka 'pools of rainwater' + mvula 'rain', who was "leader of the Bobangi (Bayanzi)" and "a powerful rainmaker", who "headed the entire Central African community in St Thomas-in-the-East" (Schuler 1980, 70). Schuler (p. 63) includes the name of a female elder in this community, Mbamba Mbizi Nkadi. 79

Central Africa in the Caribbean

In several localities, for official purposes. Central Africans were called by a European name followed by an ethnonym; thus, from the rebellions in nineteenth-century Cuba, the following persons were identified among the "malefactors": Romualdo congo, Fernando congo and Panitaleon congo (Moliner Castaneda 1986a, 34). In the case of the famous late-nineteenth-century Trinidad lawyer and conveyancer, Emmanuel Lazare, his popular name carried the ethnonym initially: Mazumbo Lazare. "Mazumbo" - usually graphically reproduced as Mzumbo - was the singular ethnonym for Zoombo, a Koongo subgroup. Although orally identified as "Congo" (Sampson 1972), this was an ascription of ethnic descent, as Lazare was born in 1864 to African parents who had migrated from Guadeloupe. The nickname no doubt indicated parental sub-ethnic origin. Like Makaya of Haiti, although born in the Antilles, Lazare appropriated, or condoned the use of, an overtly African designation. This name was a symbol of his identification with black people and the poor. He was a defender of their rights, joined the Pan-African Association founded in 1901 in England by fellow Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams,29 and became a moving spirit behind democratic political reforms at the turn of the twentieth century. He later became a nominated unofficial member of the colonial Legislative Council from 1920 to 1924. He had been the first student to pass the local exams of the Trinidad Law Society, was an ardent agriculturalist, an outstanding athlete, and, if we can hypothesize that his father had served in the French militia in Guadeloupe, he continued this army tradition by holding a commission as lieutenant and adjutant in the Trinidad Field Artillery Volunteers, "(perhaps the first black to do so), and in this capacity represented Trinidad in London at the 1897 Jubilee celebrations" for Queen Victoria, being introduced to the queen and receiving from her the royal message to the Colony (Brereton 1975, 57, 62; Anthony 1978, 79-80; Laurence 1969, 19 fh. 11). Following are a number of personal names collected from Trinidad, Cuba and Guyana. Not all their meanings are readily available, but those that bear interpretation indicate that persons carried personal names and nicknames allusive to natural objects and artefacts, no doubt reflective of some associated quality, names indicating physical attributes, sequential order of birth, or recollective of events at time of birth. 80

Central Africans as Individuals in Community Names

Gender

Meanings

Ankolia

m.

< ngolela (Mb) gift; joy; advantage

Biloongo

m.

(Ko) charmed substances

Binda

f.

Botamutu Kodya m. Bugulu

m.

(Ko) to. put three or more threads together < mbuta muuntu Kodia old man Kodia < bungulu bala (southern Ko) deceit; bungulubungulu (eastern Butaye dial.) noise

Bundo ~ Bundu

m.

< buundu (Ko) name of a fruit

Bwakai

m.

< mmbwaaki (Ko) redness

Bwelandan

m.

< bwelandana (Ko) things which followed one another

Enlongo

f.

< nloongo (Ko) taboo; type of tree; children bewitched

Geenda

f.

Goma Gunga Gwaanda

m.

< ngoma (Ko) drum

m.

< nguunga (Ko) bell

m.

< Ngwannda (Ko) one who concentrates on pursuing

Gwaanja

m.

< kwaanza (Ko) acne; (Vili) syphilis

Gwende

f.

ngwende (Ko) a type of antelope

Jungu Kabongo Kala Kahungu

m.

? < Yunga - Kiyunga (meaning obscure)

m.

kabanga (Ko) you should share your possessions

m.

kala (Ko) charcoal

by an nkisi < ngeenda (Ko) clan name, praise name of clan; ngenda (Mb) journey

young girls

m.

< kihungu (Ko) season when the grass is in flower; hunguhungu (Mb) storm, whirlwind

Kakwindi

m.

< kwindi (My) stump (of tooth, tree); kwindi dya ntu (Ko) big head

Kamuuma

f.

< muuma (Ko) places

Kiinzi

?

< nkiinzi (Ko) celebrative event, purpose

Kimboongo

m.

< kia mboongo (Ko) what is bought

Lumengo

f.

? cognate with bomengo (Lingala) happiness

Malaanda

?

< maambu malanda (Ko) what followed, response

Malandumba

f.

< malanda (Ko) things that follow + ndumba (Ko) girl

Mankembi

f.

< ma- (Ko) matters relating to + Nkembi (Ko) name of wife of nkisi Kimpasi; nkembi (Mb) blessed

Manjo

m.

< ma nzo belonging to the house

Mansao

f.

< mansau (Ko) name of a game; ma- (Ko) matters relating to + nsau (Ko) ferryman; nsau (Ko) elephant; Masala ? < maambu masaala (Ko) what is belated 81

Central Africa in the Caribbean Names

Gender

Mantumba

m.

Meanings < ma- matters relating to + ntumba (Ko) dust, rubbish heap; blame, scolding; matumba (Mb) cleanliness

Mingo

f.

? < mianto - mango (Ko) what belongs to the leopard (royalty, bravery)

Mandi Makanda

m.

< mvoondi makaanda clan killer, that is, one who brings distress to the clan

Mungo

m.

< mu ngo in leopard; mongo (Loango) mountain

Mwila

f.

(Ko) name of a water or stream nkisi

Noombi

m.

< nomba (Ko) to become dark, be black

Nyamboongo

m.

< nya (Ko) of + mboongo (Ko) money

Peemba

f.

< mpeemba (Ko; Mb) white clay

Sambo

m.

< saambu (Ko) prayer

Uja

f.

< vuuzya (Ko) inconstancy; reviver of old disputes

Umba

f.

< wuumba (Ko) to till the soil; to mould pots

Lutete

?

< luteta (Ko) you open the shell or nut

Lubamba

?

lubamba (Ko) a liana, strong cord

The meaning of these names conforms to African practice of signifying personal characteristics, work habits, and events or conditions surrounding the birth of a child. But some appear to be nicknames born of some act of insubordination, or of some proclivity in the character, or prompted by physical appearance. A female name like Umba recalls the vital part played by women in the agricultural life of Central Africa and in its plastic arts. Some names, particularly those from Cuba, are nkisi names, an indicator of the greater adherence in that island to Central African religious practices. All the same, both Empemba and Umba, which turn up in Trinidad, occur in the Cuban data as female names also (Garcia Gonzalez 1973, 234 ). A Trinidad name, Chiliva, may be based on Silvia (Po); similarly, Menualin may derive from Manuel (Po). This category is called santu 'Christian names', and may reflect not only the conversion of Africans to Christianity in the West Atlantic but also the probability that these names had been known or used before enslavement in Christianized sections of Central Africa, as is outlined in chapter 7. These naming practices serve as one of the indicators that indigenous customs were retained in part, even as they changed or were modified with the new circumstances that arose. This chapter has expanded on the individuals and individual experiences of those who crossed the ocean, their appearance, their 82

Central Africans as Individuals in Community

remembered habits and idiosyncrasies. But the chapter has also shown some of the ways in which individuals gained collective strength, whether by joining formal associations, or congregating in ethnic or multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, or through forging links and making pragmatic compromises with European institutions and power structures. These themes will be continued in the following chapter, where there will be less consideration of the personal demeanour and greater attention to the social habits that marked them as people with traditions of conduct, albeit that these now had to be manipulated in situations that were qualitatively and quantitatively different from the environments out of which they had come.

83

Chapter 4

Economic Skills and

Domestic Activity Quiet Relaxation Smoking Laman (1953, 1:54) quotes the Nsundi saying, "Tobacco stills hunger and lightens the burden of life." The Mbundu spoke of "drinking tobacco" rather than "smoking" it (Chatelain 1894, 258), and it was drunk by both men and women. "Smoking is universal. . . . It is a very usual thing to see a native put a great piece of lighted charcoal in his empty pipe-bowl, and puff away, as he says, to warm himself. They generally carry the bits of plaited tobacco behind the ear. Tobacco is always smoked pure" (Monteiro 1875, 2:269). "The Black everywhere uses tobacco. He sows it behind his hut, near the village, and in certain fields . . . The smoking habit is common to both sexes" (Tourist Bureau 1957, 63). "The women as a rule smoke clay pipes out in the fields, the men, on the other hand, smoke munkoka (a calabash pipe with a clay bowl), which after a couple of deep puffs is handed to the next man, a very popular habit when two or more have come together for a gossip. Older chiefs, however, also smoke clay pipes very often" (Laman 1953, 1:54). Gourd water pipes are common among the Ovimbundu and the Bachokwe for smoking tobacco and hemp. However, while hemp (epangue) is not smoked communally, tobacco is. Smoking of hemp or tobacco consists of a few deep inhalations; there is not usually a prolonged placid smoking. When hemp is placed in the bowl of the water pipe it is covered with 84

Economic Skills and Domestic Activity

large grains of sand or a piece of tin. This intervening substance prevents the hot coals from coming into contact with the hemp. The object is to secure slow ignition. (Hambly 1968, 152) In the case of the Rastafari religious sect in Jamaica, a "small object, called grity stone - a small piece of nutmeg, stone, or clay" is placed at the bottom of the kochi bowl "upon which the cannabis rests and through which the smoke is drawn". The instrument of the Rastafari ritual smoking is a type of water-pipe . . . constructed from a variety of containers (including gourds, cow or goat horns, sections of bamboo, or tin cans), to which is attached a clay or wooden bowl in which the cannabis is placed. Not only are these pipes of a design similar to those described in oral traditions as having been used by the post-Emancipation Central African immigrants, but they resemble several sorts of water-pipes - made from gourds or animal horns - documented among a number of Central African peoples. (Bilby 1985, 87) The water pipe of the Ovimbundu consists of the horn of a cow into the side of which a short hollow pipe stem is introduced; at the top of the stem is a clay bowl for the reception of tobacco, or a mixture of tobacco and hemp. The wide end of the horn is plugged with clay, while a hole is made at the tip in order to provide a mouth-piece (Hambly 1968, 165). Both the communal smoking of a water pipe and the deep inhalation are reminiscent of the manner in which the Jamaican Rastafari have ritualized, as the centrepiece of their sacred nyabinghi1 ceremony, the smoking of hemp. Bilby underscores this by a quotation regarding the north-western Koongo: Of all the stimulants, only Indian hemp (Cannabis indicd) is regarded with a quasi-religious respect and its cultivation as well as its consumption are surrounded by genuine rites. . . . The one who sows the hemp must, at the time of sowing, strip himself naked and invoke the spirits of the plant to make it powerful and capable of giving a lucid mind. This ceremony, obligatory, must be repeated at the harvesting of the leaves. . . . 85

Central Africa in the Caribbean Figure 4.1 A Chokwe chiefs water-pipe. Adapted from Delachaux and Thiebaud 1934.

Figure 4.2 A Rastafari bamboo "sip", Jamaica, 2001

At maturity the leaves are put to dry in the sun. In order to consume them, one rolls them in pieces of banana leaves. When one smokes hemp for the first time, it is also necessary to conduct a special ceremony. . . . In fact, the smoker ought, in principle, to seek in hemp lucidity of mind, vigor in work and above all permanent communication with the world of spirits, for, under the effect of the stimulant, man sees unknown worlds, and hears the voices of the ancestors. This is the main reason that the cultivation, preparation and consumption of hemp are always accompanied by ritual ceremonies. (Bilby 1985, 89)2 Clay pipes were common among the Caribbean slave population, and their shards turn up repeatedly in archaeological finds in the 86

Economic Skills and Domestic Activity

Figure 4.3 A pipe-smoking Guadeloupe vendor of herbs, early 1900s

vicinity of slave houses on plantations and in Maroon settlements.3 Of Trinidad it was commented: "the negro women are very fond of smoking cigars" (Day 1852, 1:222). Well into the twentieth century, pipes were used by both men and women. Up to the 1950s it was still common in Trinidad to see female market vendors smoking pipes. Black peasants of both sexes smoke pipes in Santo Domingo, using a clay bowl into which is inserted a hand-fashioned wooden tube (Deive 1978, 134). The popularity of pipe smoking by women in the Caribbean was matched by the situation in Angola, for example, where smoking by women was noted into the 1930s. At that time, boys and girls were not allowed to smoke before the age of thirteen (Hambly 1968, 152). 87

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Productive Activity As far as occupation was concerned, the majority of the peoples of West Central Africa were agriculturalists, hunters and fishermen. But there were others who specialized as smiths and long-distance traders. The agricultural, largely rural life led by first-generation Africans in the Caribbean recalled their homeland villages along hillsides. One Trinidad song told of the domesticity of these reciprocally imaged landscapes: TKo Kyele kokyele mu mbanzele Ta yikibanga Susu gidi kale mu banzale Ko

Kyele ku-kyele mu mbanzala

Dawned it dawned in the courtyard

(N)ta(ngu) i-kibanga

Time travels

Nsusu ?bizidi kala mu

Chickens have already come into the

mbanzala

courtyard (Goma Jones 1966)

Kye/e

For a living. Central Africans in Trinidad did gardening - that is, peasant cultivation - and worked on cocoa estates. Their own lands, which they leased or bought, were largely cocoa properties as well,' interplanted with banana, fruit trees and zaboca - avocado pears. They sold their cocoa beans to the nearby estates. As in Africa, wives stayed at home, looked after children, but also cultivated kitchen gardens. Men carted the surplus of these gardens to market in barrows, or with the help of the mules and donkeys they owned. Women also gathered cocoa pods that had been picked off the estate trees by the men. Men picked cocoa and dried it. The involvement of nineteenth-century 88

Economic Skills and Domestic Activity

Africans in the cocoa industry was underlined when a Trinidad Manzanilla resident (Boney 1972) asserted that "Old soldiers plant[ed] the cultivation you see now" in that area. The reference to "old soldiers" was to the ex-soldiers of the West India Regiment, who had been granted settlement lands in various parts of Trinidad and the Caribbean after the Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815. Men also tended animals, since they used donkeys, mules and horses as forms of transport. Work on all these fronts enabled them eventually to buy land. But these estates were eventually lost "because of too much wine and women", and their inability to repay credit from Chinese shops (Boney 1972). There, the items they bought were counted twice, since the Chinese had written methods of computation, while the Africans kept inexact mental accounts or notched reminders. In addition, the old Africans invested their legacy exclusively in one child. They did not concern themselves with the education of their daughters, but rather educated a favourite son to whom they gave charge of their estate: if that son squandered the inheritance, then all was lost. The economic activities of the Trinidad "Congo" reflected a customary division of labour slightly modified by exigencies in a colonial polity. Before the colonial regime in Central Africa, however, it was observed that women devoted themselves "entirely to agriculture and to various domestic arts" (Laman 1953, 1:48), so much so that women in the early twentieth century considered it unmanly for males to engage in vegetable growing. An eighteenth-century source noted that women in Soyo province "have the duty of preparing the food and working the land. . . . At the first rains they go with their little hoes and loosen the top soil and plant their beans or other legumes on top of it. ... The fields are not fertilized here; the rain alone suffices." They weeded twice a year and harvested in January and May (Balandier 1968, 95-96). On the other hand, men planted "only bananas, fruittrees, tobacco and sugar-cane" (Laman 1953, 1:115). Other male agricultural activity included making fences, starting bush fires in the dry season as part of the cyclical slash-and-burn farming method, "clearing forest areas, cultivating pisang, building huts, hunting and fishing, tapping palm-wine, smithing and trade with neighbours and friends. Trading trips might also, however, take them as far as the coast, or to other tribes up in the north" (Laman 1953, 1:48, 116). 89

Central Africa in the Caribbean

Figure 4.4 One type of Koongo house in the Koongo-Angola region, c.1910. "The house walls were of palm fronds and the roofs of palm or reed thatch. The villages were formed of groups of houses arranged in a square around a central open space" (Denyer 1978). As Laman mentions, house-building was a male occupation. A memory of Neville Marcano, the calypsonian Growling Tiger, was of a "Congo" who lived in Congo Village, Diego Martin, in the early decades of the twentieth century. The old man was remembered as wearing short pants, a long jacket and walking barefoot. He was called Tonton /toto/. Marcano considered Tonton intelligent because he built for himself a little house all of bamboo. To Marcano's surprise, the house was waterproof. Tonton split the bamboo longitudinally and used it for his roof as well as the walls. Tonton's little house recalls the lightweight architectural styles of Central African huts. The Igalwa and Mpongwe of the northern sector of the Central African region built their homes of split bamboo. [T]he sections of the walls are made on the ground and then erected. The builder drives in a row of strong wooden poles, and then ties the sections on to them very neatly with "tie-tie".4 . . . Sometimes, however, instead of the sections being made on the ground of closely set split bamboos, the poles of unsplit bamboo are driven in, and the split bamboos are lashed on to 90

Economic Skills and Domestic Actívity

Figure 4.5, above kft Rope-making in La Bonga, Colombia, a male activity, 1990s (Schwegler 1996) Figure 4.6, above ríght Plaiting a sleeping-mat in La Bonga, Colombia, a male activity, 1990s (Schwegler 1996) them, alternately inside and outside, and between these are fíxedpalm-leafmats. (Kingsley 1965, 113, 220) Balandier (1968, 141) remarks that "Kongo habitation was more reminiscent of the arts of weaving and basket-making . . . than of the art of building". He enumerated the range of fibre-woven artefacts they manufactured: cloth from fíg tree bast, plaited split cañe, bamboo, palm midribs, dry reeds, grass, fibre, or string made fish traps, baskets, vesseis of every description, hats, shields and even sandals. [S]ome of the string basket-work is so fine . . . the mesh is so cióse, that the receptacle thus woven will hold water, especially when it has received an interior coat of resin. Some of these baskets or vases were formerly smeared with red clay or kaolín on the outside, and thus could stand modérate heat in the embers of a fire and so warm the liquid held within. (Johnston 1908, 2:807) Straw-weaving was in fact a male domain in Central África, a tradition maintained in the black village of La Bonga, neighbouring the Maroon 91

Central Africa in the Caribbean

town of San Basilio in Colombia, where mat-making for sleeping purposes and cord-plaiting to make ropes and haversacks used to be important economic activities (Schwegler 1996, 1:229-30). With regard to house structures, Balandier refers to an eighteenthcentury description of commoners' houses which were made of tightly interlaced palm branches covered with straw (1968, 141). Babangi [Bobangi] or western Bayanzi houses were made from the long midribs of the raphia palm with a thatched roof of reeds or oil palm fronds. The threshold was a log of wood or palm trunk (Johnston 1908, 2:747). By extension, in Trinidad, the trunk of palm trees was cut into floorboards, making for an undulating floor (Sampson 1972). Palm thatch was used for roofing. The fragility of Central African houses was partly due to the fact that villages were often moved. It was easy to move huts short distances since they were dismountable, but if the new village site was too remote, huts were completely rebuilt (Laman 1957, 2:135). Migration was undertaken out of practical considerations such as a search for better hunting grounds, soil and fishing waters, or for occupancy of "a pleasant hill or an attractive palm grove". Overpopulation also gave rise to migration. Clans moved from each other's vicinity when disputes arose because of overcrowding. But there were also supernaturally related reasons, among a people who were prone to interpret events in spiritually explicable ways: "ominous events" including a spate of deaths, the passing of a great chief, haunting spirits, frequent lightning strikes or storms, the fear of heavy pedestrian traffic near a village by strangers who could "take" the children's souls by magic (Laman 1957, 2:134-35). Similar movement of villages took place among the Ovimbundu, and for comparable reasons (Childs 1969, 37).

Food Culture A Trinidad female informant averred that the "Congo" liked to eat corn-based foods, but that they preferred cassava (Nicholls 1989). This comment reflects the change in diet in West Central Africa occasioned by the popularity quickly gained by cassava after its introduction from Brazil by the Portuguese, perhaps at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Balandier 1968, 94-95). Corn itself had been "imported from 92

Economic Skills and Domestic Activity

America to Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century and later introduced to Central Africa by the Portuguese" (p. 93). The starchy base of the West Central African diet before these innovations had been a millet called luko (Eleusine coracand) and sorghum or guinea corn (Andropogon sorghum) (Balandier 1968, 92-93; Johnston 1908, 2:605). Interestingly, that eleusine may have been known in Trinidad. At least its Koongo name occurs in one of the African terms cited by Mr Babb, an informant to Melville and Frances Herskovits at Toco in 1939 fundja luku (Herskovits and Herskovits 1939, Box 16, File 5). A term very similar to this occurred in one of the accounts of Koongo foods in Cuba. Kundialuko was the name given to a dish made by stewing pieces of cassava and ochro along with boiled bones and gristle. This soup also contained dumplings of wheat flour. The whole was boiled until thick (Garcia Herrera 1972, 151). Corn made kuku, called fufu, as well as porridge. These were made from dried corn grated or milled into a flour. To make the kuku> they added the cream of grated coconut to the water into which the meal was to be boiled and steamed. Into the kuku mass was stirred soft stewed peas, especially pigeon peas (gungu), as well as salted meat chunks/Portions of this congealed mass were eaten in the evening, and in the morning they ate big slices again (Sampson 1972). Similarly in Central Africa, sorghum and, no doubt later, maize were used to produce comparable foods. "As [sorghum] flour does not rise, it cannot be used for bread, so the negroes make a kind of porridge of it, to which other things are added, such as beans, peas, palm oil, ground-nuts, animal fat, okroes . . . or small pieces of meat" (Johnston 1908, 2:606). A comparable practice obtains among the Ovimbundu, where, to improve the quality of the meal, since corn by itself is thought a poor food, cornmeal is stirred in boiling water to which beans are added (Hambly 1968, 146). The same practice is carried on in Cuba. Cassava made "all quality food. You could boil it and eat, you could make starch from it, can make funji from it which is kuku,5 come back make naagidi, make sele, kwanga" (Nicholls 1989). Sele is made from "bitter cassava", that is, poisonous cassava containing prussic acid (Manihot utilissima), which is boiled and put in a tureen or a clay pot. Water is thrown over it and then thrown off in the morning. This is done for nine days, at which time the cassava can be eaten. Sele is eaten particularly when food is scarce, the point no doubt being that it 93

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was derived from a food source which was risk-laden and, as such, second preference to its "sweet" or non-poisonous counterpart (Manihot palmatd). In Trinidad cassava kuku was called funji, and this, or its variant mfundi, was the name applied in Koongo (Obenga 1992, 80-81). Similarly, the term is funji in the Virgin Islands and Antigua, funche and funchi in Curacao, and funche in Puerto Rico. A Guyanese used the term "funde kuku" (Adams 1994). Fungi is what one of the planter Thistlewood's mistresses, Marina, a "Congo", made with the corn he gave her uto treat the Negroes, and especially her shipmates withal at her housewarming" (Hall 1999, 18). Funji, "the staff of life of the A-mbundu" or Ovimbundu, and of the Mbundu, was made from cassava flour (Chatelain 1894, 257; Miller 1976, 204 fh. 70). According to a Trinidad source, cassava kuku was made by the following method: Sweet cassava was grated. The damp mass was then wrung, either by putting weights on a bag into which the mass was placed or by wringing it in a couleve.6 Kuku was then made from the semi-dried flour by stirring it in water which was allowed to come to the boil and steam the carbohydrate. This food formula was recorded during the early eighteenth century by the Catholic priest, Laurent de Lucques: by using the flour of luko and of sorghum, the Koongo made "a porridge called infundi, which is prepared in an earthen pot with boiling water. This porridge takes the place of bread" (Balandier 1968, 157). A similar food among the Ovimbundu is called iputa viutombo £ mush of manioc' (Hambly 1968, 147). A bread was made from sweet cassava flour. Cassava was cut up and put in the sun. When the pieces were dry, they were pounded and the resulting flour was called konkote, or farine. Konkote, a term used still in Guyana as gungoti, and used also by the Herskovits's Trinidad informant, Babb, derives from Ga konkonte 'manioc flour', and is cognate with Twi kokonte which extends to cassava or plantain cut into pieces and dried (Cassidy and Le Page 1967, 264). When the farine was dusted in portions into a hoop placed on a heated stone, this produced a type of flat bread called cassave by old Trinidadians and called bami in Jamaica, where it remains a popular food item eaten especially, but not exclusively, with fried fish. Sweet cassava also made kwanga, which is "Guinea bread, African bread" (Nicholls 1989). In the Congo Basin, "dried [cassava] roots, 94

Economic Skills and Domestic Activity

Figure 4.7 Mortar and pestle for pounding starches to a paste. Museum Kura Hulanda, Curasao.

ground to powder, are used to make a paste, particularly the one called chikwangue (a thick dough, boiled and rolled in a banana leaf) which really constitutes the Black man's bread" (Tourist Bureau 1957, 60). It was in fact a food introduced towards the end of the eighteenth century (Obenga 1992, 82). Kwanga had a dark colour; To make it, you tied a bag with cassava to a tree on a riverbank. This was to have its poison washed out. In Guyana it would be tied at the side of a drain or dyke. After nine days the cassava was removed from the bag. The cassava skin would come off, leaving the cassava blue. A similar process of detoxification was undertaken among the Mbundu with respect to olungunga 'bitter cassava' (Hambly 1968, 147). To make kwanga, the cassava was pounded in the mortar, and the stringy matter removed. The cassava pap was then wrapped in portions in banana leaves which had been singed over a fire, and the portions tied. These parcels were boiled in a kerosene tin. The product was kwanga which, it was said in Trinidad, could last two to three years if put out on a cocoa tray to dry. It was packed in a barrel for August and September, months which were the "hungry time" in those days, because that was the height of the rainy season. At that time, when it rained, one had to 95

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swim across rivers with one's clothes tied on top of one's head to reach home. Otherwise you slept in the hut at your farmland. A song about hunger was one remembered in Trinidad: TKo [3angale Fwa k warn a fwa I3angale Ndya kwame dya Ko

Mbaangala

The dry reason

Mfwa kwame mfwa

Die I will certainly die

Mbaangala

(In) the dry season

Ndya kwame ndya

(So) let me eat (Nicolas Jones 1963; Sampson 1972)

&anga\e

In West Central Africa, from mid-May, a cold, dry season - sivu led into mbangala, a dryness with "little or no dew" lasting from July to the middle of October (Weeks 1914, 308), which took the form of a prolonged drought, devastating agriculture and inflicting famine. This led to outbreaks of disease, to population dislocations, to raiding of crops and animals in fertile spaces, to armed clashes, and even to cannibalism (Miller 1988, 21). Kwanga was a cassava bread which could last for months and was therefore an important staple for surviving lean times. In Trinidad it was stored in a barrel and was taken out and eaten in slices. According to both Trinidad and Guyana sources, it was eaten either with a sauce or with meat; the Guyana source also said salt and pepper were added to kwanga, which was wrapped in plantain leaves and eaten with peanut stew (Drakes 1994; Nicholls 1989). Balandier (1968, 158) summarized that "the whole of African culinary art lay in the making of sauces to enhance dishes which tended to be plain". 96

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These sauces are generically called mwamba and are made from palm oil, called ndende (Ko and Mb) and ondendi (Urn), dende being known marginally in Jamaica, but also being used in Guadeloupe (Mazama 1992, 48). The strained pulp of palm nuts is boiled, which "causes oil to form and when water is added this forms an emulsion". Thereafter, meat or fish is added and cooked in the sauce (Balandier 1968, 159). In Trinidad, cassava sauce was called nangidi. It was made from boiled cassava water, heated by placing it in a bottle near the fire, and flavoured with a pinch of salt. A vegetable stew could also be made from the leaves of the cassava plant. You broke a big cassava branch, sat down with a basin, and pulled out all the soft leaves, leaving the leaf ribs. The leaves were folded, put into a mortar and pounded. The sauce and the vegetable stew were made in the evening after work. Again there is confirmation that "the manioc leaf, or rather, the leafy tuft of the new shoots, is cooked and eaten, like our spinach, highly flavored and seasoned with palm oil" (Tourist Bureau 1957, 60). The Ovimbundu cooked leaves of the olungunga, bitter cassava, but did not eat this when warm (Hambly 1968, 147). Kwanga was eaten with meat such as lappe, tatu, agouti, goat, fish and pork. "Pig is a big man in their vocabulary", claimed a Trinidadian in jocular fashion, meaning that it was very important in their diet. Pig also made pudding and souse. The meats were usually bukane [barbequed] by hanging pieces on a stand over the fire. The fire was covered with bush so that it would smoke. The meat, whether lean, pigtail, hogshead, chicken, fowl or duck, was stewed in a pot with the cream from grated coconuts together with garlic and oil. "And when you take out that, you eat until you can't eat" (Nicholls 1989). Apart from bukane meat, there was corned meat, which was kept in a jar. In Africa, meat was similarly roasted. Sticks were sharpened and then stuck in the earth near the fire. Small fish, rats, grubs (nsombe) etc. are spitted in this way, several to a stick. Bigger fish, as well as pork and other forms of meat, are spitten on stronger sticks. . . . Meat may also be laid in round sanza-baskets which are then suspended above the fire to dry. The fire is kept up until the meat is thoroughly dry. The older people used to parboil the meat before roasting it. (Laman 1953, 1:64) 97

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Figure 4.8 The oil palm caterpillar (Stedman 1972) House rats were not eaten, but land or field rats were a delicacy (Chatelain 1894, 281).7 Dog meat was also eaten by the Koongo, Pende and Ovimbundu (Hambly 1968, 155, 292). An eighteenth-century writer mentions the consumption by slaves in Nevis of dog meat, grasshoppers and cane rats roasted in banana leaves (Smith 1745, 217, 225-33 in Olwig 1993, 39). Among the Ovimbundu, locusts were gathered, fried or boiled in water, dried and preserved with salt in earthenware pots (Hambly 1968, 140). Additionally, quoting Hans Sloane, who documented life in the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, Carey states that among the non-European foods eaten by the native Americans and Africans were the raccoon and agouti, or coney rabbit, sugarcane rats, certain snakes and the cotton tree worm, "which was considered a delicacy" (Carey 1997, 143). The "excellent butter . . . made by melting and clarifying the fat of the palm-tree worms" in eighteenth-century Suriname was commended by Stedman (1796, 2:22-23, 115) for whom the butter tasted of "all the spices of India", and yet another foreigner, this time in nineteenth-century Trinidad, reported favourably that "the gru-gru [type of palm] worm, a grub . . . is considered by the French here, and by some of the English, as an exquisite bonne bouche [sic]. Indeed it is often brought as such to the market in Port-of-Spain, where it is eagerly purchased" (Day 1852, 1:332). The custom continued in twentieth-century Tobago, where the "Tumbu Rorum8 which bores its way and lives in the trunk of coconut trees is still eaten by some older people who insist that it is a delicacy". This food type is mentioned in the previous Laman quotation about the 98

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nsombe or cabbage palm larva; it occurred also in the northern sector of Central Africa where the "big maggot-like pupae of the rhinoceros beetle and the Rhyncophorus palmatorum were consumed" (Kingsley 1965, 208). Among the Ovimbundu "the insides of the caterpillar are squeezed into boiling water to make soup" (Hambly 1968, 140). The same source noted that the flesh of the python, or omoma, was eaten (p. 138). While evidence for the consumption of python meat has not so far been uncovered for the Caribbean, a related observation is a propos: In British Guiana (Guyana), some soldiers had killed an alligator, and "[hjaving left him near the hospital whilst we [the European soldiers] walked into the fort, the negroes took an opportunity of stealing him away; and, on returning, we found our alligator chopped in pieces, and already stewing into soup - the slaves anticipating the mess, as a delicious feast" (Pinkard 1942, 91).9 Starches consumed by Central Africans in the Caribbean (other than corn and cassava) included rice and root crops such as tannia (Xanthosoma sagithifolium) and the related dasheen. The latter was called malanga in Trinidad, the stress falling on the last syllable (Modeste 1972). This word, borrowed from the Koongo designation for the same food item, was also retained on Colombia's Atlantic coast to refer to Xanthosoma edule, whose root (Colocassia, lard) was eaten as well as its leaves (Castillo Mathieu 1995, 81). It is applied to either dasheen or eddoe (taro) in Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as Haiti and Guadeloupe (Baker 1993, 144). Yam was not prominently mentioned in the Caribbean diet of Central Africans, but mention was made of a "Congo" growing a long white yam called juba, or crazy yam (Nicholls 1989). The beans of choice appeared to be Angola peas, called pigeon peas in the Eastern Caribbean, but in Jamaica gungu peas, a term no doubt derived from ngungu (Ko), a type of pea (Cajanus cajan Druce) (Sautter 1955, 78). Speaking of late-eighteenth-century Suriname, Stedman reported that "the negroes are extremely fond o f . . . pigeon or Angola peas" (Stedman 1796, 2:97), just as in nineteenth-century Angola, Monteiro (1875, 1:296) observed the use ofcajanus indicus. In the Dominican Republic these peas are called guandul (Deive 1981, 133), in keeping with the variants guandul and guandu used in the hispanophone Caribbean generally, including the Atlantic coast of Colombia and its hinterland (Castillo Mathieu 1995, 80). An interesting departure is that Bilby and Bunseki (1983, 70) found that among 99

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Kumina practitioners in Jamaica gwandul referred to 'red/kidney peas'. This might indicate a laryngeal word-initial consonant in a Koongo cognate, but in hispanicized spelling gu- represents [w]. This makes clearer the word's derivation from wandu, noticed by Cuvelier as the main legume in eighteenth-century Koongo, and identified by Balandier (1968, 93) as Cajanus cajan Druce, "a shrub which lives three years and is cultivated for its seeds, which are consumed when half-grown". From accounts of both Central African and Yoruba descendants in Trinidad, it is clear that the main meal for Africans was taken in the evenings, which accords with observations such as this seventeenthcentury account by Laurent de Lucques concerning the Soyo, a subgroup of the Koongo: "They eat only one meal, the evening one. During the day they make do with a few peanuts or a handful of manioc, and smoke tobacco" (in Balandier 1968, 161). Snack foods were roasted maize and palm nuts (Laman 1953, 1:52). But there was yet another significant food item - the peanut. Although not reported in the Trinidad data, the word pinda from mpinda (Ko) surfaces in Jamaican "pinda cake" and is mentioned as the term for the peanut sugar cake in the Danish West Indies (Carstens 1987, 158). The peanut is recalled by Cuban Central African descendants as an item in the diet of the ancestors. In central Cuba, the "Congo" who lived in Las Lajas were said to be very fond of meals made of peanut. They grew this crop in their little holdings, and with the nut they made sauces. Groundnut sauce was recalled in Guyana as a thickener for chicken and bean stews (Drakes 1994). In addition, the Cuban "Congo" beat the raw nuts in the mortar till they formed a thick mass which they divided into balls they called andivo. They ate these balls for breakfast with dried beef. They also ate roasted peanuts as a snack during the day. "They were always chewing either groundnuts or tobacco" (Garcia Herrera 1972, 150-51). Valdes Acosta (1986, 108) lists the word for the peanut paste balls as endiba which, like andivo, was derived from ndiba (Ko) 'peanut'. On the other side of the Atlantic it was noted that the groundnut was an important part of the food of the natives, and more so in the country from Ambriz to the River Congo than south at Loanda and Benguella. . . . It is ... roasted . . . when fully ripe. . . . 100

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[T]he natives then generally eat it with bananas and either the raw mandioca root, or some preparation of it. ... The nuts are also ground on a stone to a paste,, with which to thicken their stews and messes. This paste, mixed with ground Chili pepper, is also made into long rolls, enveloped in leaves of the Phrynium ramosissimum, and is eaten principally in the morning to stay the stomach in travelling till they reach the proper camping-places for their breakfast or first meal and rest, generally about noon. It is called "quitaba". (Monteiro 1875, 1:131-32) This peanut paste is called in Nsundi kindungwa, or mwamba (Laman 1953, 1:57, 58). In Laman's ethnographic work on the Nsundi, frequent mention is made of yuuma, which he glosses in his dictionary as a stewed combination of banana and peanuts cooked in palm oil. Yuuma yambizi combines meat or fish with ordinary yuuma. "In places where bananas and peanuts do not grow so well, yuuma is made of palm-oil, beans, potatoes, manioc, the leaves of the bean and other plants." There are variations of this dish in various regions of Koongo (Laman 1953, 1:57, 58). The meal is reminiscent of Trinidad "oil-down" and Jamaican "run-down", a compote of pieces of starchy food such as yam and banana, stewed together with salted mackerel in Jamaica and salted pig's tail in Trinidad. All this is boiled to a thick consistency in coconut milk. Sampson (1968) describes his grandmother as cooking a sancoche [thick soup] of tannia and peas. Another Caribbean culinary adaptation of the West African concept of stewing together a variety of food items is kalalu. While the etymology of the term is uncertain,10 meals of this type are familiar in several parts of West Africa. In Louisiana kalalu is known as gumbo, kingombo being the Mbundu word for 'ochro', and the term used in Haiti. Kingamboe is also among the words listed in the Dutch Creole language of the Virgin Islands (Larsen in Paiewonsky 1987, 104). Among the "Congo" of Central Cuba it was one of the preferred meals of the old Africans. It comprised a white bush, the herb guenguere^ ochro and pieces of meat (Garcia Herrera 1972, 151). In Trinidad salt crystals were not used to flavour food. Rather, water in which ashes had been soaked was put into the food being cooked. The ashes had been put into a container to settle and were then filtered 101

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out of the water with a strainer made from the fibre of coconut tree bark (Nicholls 1989). Similarly, in the areas of Koongo where marine salt was scarce, salt was derived from "the potash of the burnt reeds and marsh plants" in riverine locations (Johnston 1908, 2:748). Elsewhere "housewives used cinders obtained by burning either the male inflorescences of the oil-producing palm or the pith of the palm tree; these cinders were either used as they were, sometimes mixed with ground peppers, or subjected to 'washing' over an earthenware colander" (Balandier 1968, 159). "The fibres gathered from a palm tree . . . serve as a strainer" as well, one may note (Johnston 1908, 2:607). Kolanut or obi (the Yoruba term) was chewed when drinking alcohol to prevent the onset of drunkenness. "Nkasu (or nkaazu) [as it was called in Koongo] was sought after by virtue of its tonic and even aphrodisiac effects, its role as a pacifier, and its therapeutic uses. . . . It was usually chewed slowly, but was sometimes consumed grated or powdered for medical purposes" (Balandier 1968, 160). Kola was also important in Angola, and in Luanda it was the custom to eat kola nuts and ginger root together, especially in the early morning (Chatelain 1894, 257).u Accounts of slave behaviour in the Caribbean often speak of the addiction among some slaves to eating dirt. Efforts were made to check this tendency as it sometimes led to death. The cause of this inclination has generally been laid either at the door of nutritional deficiencies or of hookworm infestation. This might well have been the case, given the imbalanced diet to which slaves were exposed, both during the Middle Passage and on estates. But there is evidence that this habit had been earlier cultivated in Central Africa, for example, among the Nsundi, where chalk-earth and the "clay with which certain termites build their hills or tunnels on the trunks of trees are much favoured". The earth melts in the mouth and is swallowed. Chalk is mixed with medicine from an nkisi and given to children to fatten them. In addition, young people, pregnant women and the elderly often eat earth to still hunger or lessen the taste of fat. Excess intake can however produce swollen eyes, cheeks and limbs, and constipation (Laman 1953, 1:52). The "red earth of ants' nests" as a favourite food of pregnant women has been noted among the Eshikoongo (Weeks 1914, 109), the Mayombe and Kasai, and is called in the latter region budina (Overbergh and Jonghe 1907, 121, 213). 102

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Some Caribbean-based doctors and planters felt that African slaves ate earth as a means of killing themselves so that they could return in spirit to their homes; as such, they took harsh measures to punish those who did it and to deter those who were so inclined. But "[t]his argument lost its weight after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, when it became clear that geophagy was practiced by Creoles as well as Africans" (Higman 1984, 295). By 1835 a surgeon at the Annotto Bay Marine Hospital in Jamaica was in a position to conclude that the moderate use of this [clayey] earth is considered by the negroes neither dangerous nor disgraceful; and those who eat it, take it as much to gratify an acquired taste, similar to that of chewing tobacco or opium, as to satisfy any morbid desire. Prepared in the manner described [baked in cakes], it is used by many as a social habit, under the name of aboo. (Higman 1984, 295)12 The practice was noted as well in Grenada and Dominica. "Recent studies of geophagy among the Tiv of Nigeria and the Ewe of Ghana suggest significant parallels with West Indian practice. . . . There is considerable evidence, then, that geophagy among the slaves of the British Caribbean had a strong cultural focus" (pp. 296-97). And while this custom seems also related to hookworm infestation, "a growing body of literature suggests a far stronger association with malnutrition, particularly deficiencies in calcium and iron", particularly as such deficiencies affect children and pregnant women (pp. 297-98). Several descriptions of aboo refer to its chocolate brown appearance (pp. 295, 296), suggesting perhaps its ferrous content. White earth, also eaten in both transatlantic locations, was variously called pezo, mpembe or mpemba among the Kasai (Overbergh and Jonghe 1907, 213). Early accounts of slave life sometimes allude to the slaves' consumption of spoilt meat, usually interpreted as desperation. Some contemporary observers, however, recognized it as a matter of taste. Speaking about one of his encounters with the Jamaican Maroons, Bryan Edwards had this to say: "I remember, at a great festival in one of their towns, which I attended, that their highest luxury, in point of food, was some rotten beef, which had been originally salted in Ireland, and which was probably presented to them, by some person who knew their taste, because it was putrid" (Edwards 1806, 327). Indeed, it appears 103

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that some groups of Central Africans had a taste for rotting food. Mouldy kwanga or cassava bread was eaten, "meat that has nsunga (i.e. a smell like that of oil birds) is very popular", and fish that had gone bad was "placed in leaves with salt and pepper and roasted" (Laman 1953, 1:59). One Trinidad "Congo" descendant (Victor 1971) claimed that cannibalism was practised in Africa: "It have African [there are Africans] in Africa, if you go there they eat you raw." Couched as a generalization, it may well have derived from negative colonial stereotypes. But while human flesh was not a routine food in Central Africa, it was sometimes associated with warfare, when prisoners captured were eaten, both to humiliate them and to overcome the inconvenience of carrying them about with an army (Torday 1925, 80-83). In the case of some Mbundu sub-groups, the chief ritually consumed an organ of his predecessor as part of his installation. Furthermore, it is instructive to note that among peoples whose world view is limited by their exclusive sense of primordial ethnicity, there exists a tendency to regard the Other as non-human, or if human, as inferior, savage or barbaric, unclean, or unchosen. The perception by the Ovimbundu, for instance, that the peoples who inhabited lands to their east were ngangela was their way of saying that they were not human, thus the proverb: "As a grass hut is not a house, so an ocigangela is not a person" (McCulloch 1952, 3). "Africans commonly attributed cannibalistic practices to all their enemies, including Europeans," writes Miller (1976, 249). In addition, the word "eat" covered a wide semantic range, including the inducement of the death of another through witchcraft (Harms 1981, 240 fn. 15). Thus the suspicion of cannibalism by other Africans and by Europeans was not always justified, but the practice may have been indulged at a stage in their history, or may have been restricted to conditions of famine or war. There were, nevertheless, taboos connected with food. Writing of nineteenth-century Guyana - British Guiana at the time - Moore comments: Many Creoles believed in taboos relating to food. . . . This was the belief that certain meats were unwholesome; that the human blood was affected by the kinds of meats consumed; that the blood of each family differed from that of another; that 104

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each family had a predisposition to certain diseases which might be developed or suppressed by the use of or abstinence from such meats; and that meats good for one family might be blood poison to another. (Moore 1995, 101) Smith (1956, 158-59) had also noted this belief in rural Guyana. This taboo was known as kinna ~ kenna, cognate with kiina (Ko) 'interdiction'. Bastide (1971, 100) cites this custom as in existence among the "Bush Negroes of the Guianas", among whom one of the terms for the practice is kina, known as tschina in Loango. The idea and the term kina, or even more specifically tata kina, "a food taboo . . . inherited in the paternal line", do in fact occur among the Matawai, one of the Suriname Maroon groups (Beet and Sterman 1981, 239, 284). Although unnamed, this taboo is reported from several sources among the Mayombe (Overbergh and Jonghe 1907, 115). This belief was widespread along the West Central African coast. Among the Gabon, certain rites are performed for children during infancy or , youth, in which a prohibition is laid upon the child as regards the eating of some particular article of food, or his doing of certain acts. . . . The thing prohibited becomes removed from the child's common use, and is made sacred to the spirit. Any use of it by the child or man would therefore be a sin, which would bring down the spirit's wrath in the form of sickness or other evil, which can be atoned for only by expensive ceremonies or gifts to the magic doctor who intercedes for the offender. (Kingsley 1965, 456) Among the Gabon people of whom Kingsley reported this belief, the word for this taboo was orunda. Among the Koongo, there were various levels of food taboo: the "totem taboo (mokumbu) of [the] family"; a "temporary taboo (mungilu) of anger"; an ngili, "because of a serious illness and the desire to avert a relapse"; as well as "the inherited taboo (also ngili) to avoid a complaint from which the father suffered" (Weeks 1913, 299). In another work, descriptive of another of the Koongo peoples, the terminology is different: the inherited taboo (mpangu) . . . is always permanent. . . while . . . the personal taboo (nlongo) . . . is often temporary. In some districts the word konko (prohibition, command, law) is used 105

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more freely than mpangu. . . . The inherited taboo passes from father to son . . . and so long as the daughters form a part of their father's household, or remain unmarried, they must observe it, but when they marry they generally drop their father's taboo, and follow that of their husband's, i.e. the one he has inherited from his father. (Weeks 1914, 245) Aspects of this system operate as well among the Kumina-related people of Jamaica: "certain food tabus are followed which are related to the father's family" (Moore 1953, 27). Associated with this concept are a system of hereditary connections. Below are various informants' explanations of this system which closely resemble the Akan notions of heredity:13 You got your body from your mother. Beezie (bizi) is the word for body. We call blood deebu (dibu). Mother and all mother's family are known as deebu. My deebu are my mother and her sisters and brothers, her mother and all her children. We get our spirits from our fathers. Spirit is called kanuba (kanuba). Kanuba comes from father, his father and father's father. (Moore 1953,27) Kanuba may perhaps derive from kiniumba (Ko) 'spirit, ghost'. The source of dibu is unclear, though one might hazard a connection either with dimbu 'symbol of power', suggestive of a spiritual connection, or ndambu 'part, half. Fire appears to have been a constant in Central African daily life. In one corner of their houses there was "always a collection of dry wood used for keeping up the fire" (Johnston 1908, 2:747). The Loango and Koongo used firewood that exuded a fragrant odour. Flames from this wood illuminated the front courtyard of their huts, which was where they ate their evening meals when there was no rain, where neighbours met to converse after supper, and where dances were held (Proyart 1776, 118-19). This firewood burnt so slowly that it was only necessary to push the logs together a couple of times in the course of the night. It [was] considered a disgrace to be obliged to borrow fire in the mornings. It must be kept going the whole time for cooking and for the sake of the warmth, and at night to protect the house from evil. . . . In watch-rooms and 106

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in camps the open fires are kept up on account of the wild beasts. In the fields where the women are at work the fire is always lit with a brand that they have taken with them from the fire at home. (Laman 1953, 1:84) The same was done when proceeding on a journey or migrating. When fire had to be produced by artificial means this was generally achieved "by friction between pieces of wood. The tinder most commonly in use is the pith of the raphia-palm fronds" Johnston 1908, 2:628, 629). In Trinidad, men and children collected wood for cooking, and a big pile was generally kept in stock. There is no indication, however, that a constant fire was maintained inside their houses. Fire was produced by rubbing together flint stones contained in a special calabash which had been cut in two and stuffed with small pieces of rotten wood or cotton to catch the fire. In chapter 7 we will revisit the subject of fire, to examine its supernatural, rather than its domestic and secular, significance among the peoples of Central Africa, and the contexts in which the more subliminal meanings of fire were revived. But here we have examined, with a view to identifying possible West Central African influences and connections, diasporic agricultural and culinary culture, food taboos, and smoking, along with architectural techniques and straw-weaving. We now turn to an outline of social interactions and the rituals marking significant stages in the life of the individual and therefore of the community.

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Chapter 5

Interpresonal Relationships: Courtesies and Rites of Passage Moral Values and Social Etiquette The profile of a good person, from the perspective of the kin group, is to show pity and generosity to members of the kanda. Good persons are praised, given a good burial and posthumous renown. Such behaviour towards strangers is not considered necessary unless it is prudent (Laman 1962, 3:257). Good behaviour is an outgrowth of the high standards of conduct expected of community members and the disciplinary measures used to ensure their implementation. Among the Ovimbundu, for instance, children "are beaten if they tell lies, answer old people rudely, steal food. . . . Children do not speak when their elders are in conversation, unless addressed. A child, like an adult, receives a gift with both hands." The use of one hand is considered a depreciation of the gift (Hambly 1968, 213). While Hambly considered that the Ovimbundu lacked a notion of sin against divine authority - a line of reasoning contradicted by African concepts of ancestral and supernatural sanctions for certain acts - he reasoned that there were social offences which were considered criminal and therefore punishable. His assessment, given his taxonomy, was that adultery was a crime on a par with theft; but adultery was not a sin (pp. 264-65). Applying this transcendent moral code, he critiqued the contingent moral conduct which seemed to him to be more in evidence among the Ovimbundu than among his own American community. 108

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A similar observation, by a missionary, was that the Koongo "have a very real notion of what is good and evil, right, wrong, false, shameful. . .. But in judging these matters they consider first of all their own kanda and nzo. Outsiders are regarded as strangers and enemies; against them they may behave and act as seems best for their own kanda" (Laman 1962, 3:257). As such, whereas lying and theft in one's own family are denounced and even severely punished, and cheating of relatives is taken to court, it is thought commendable to lie to strangers and steal from them, provided that one stands to gain by it and is not discovered. But theft in the market-place is punished by live burial, and adultery used to be punished severely (Laman 1953, 1:48). All said, the moral training of children was utilitarian in that it promoted individual and societal harmony, being geared towards their own welfare and the prosperity, honour and power of the kanda, as well as the way they are to behave towards their chief, their father and old persons. Fear of the mother is not so great, for she owns the child. As children grow up under the influence of various nkisi and must observe all sorts of prohibitions, however, they must from their earliest years learn respect, reverence and obedience, as well as self-denial, continence and other good qualities. (Laman 1957, 2:21) These values were noted in Angola and were expressed by proper behaviour towards parents and the elderly. Of parent-child relationships, an observer wrote that parents were always consulted before the younger person undertook a journey; the younger always bid them good-bye, and leave them some little present. . . . On returning to their towns they immediately see their fathers and mothers and the old people, and squat down and "beat hands" to them, and give an account of their doings. A little food is then eaten together. . . . Neither the men nor women will smoke whilst speaking to their old people, but always take their pipes out of their mouths, or, if their hands are engaged, hold the pipe-stem across their teeth. (Monteiro 1875, 2:268-69) Several of these politeness conventions were mentioned by a Trinidad female informant, who recalled the behaviour of her maternal 109

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great-grandfather from Koongo and his son, her grandfather: they would clap their hands in front of their face to greet older persons or persons of higher social status, and would cease smoking in the presence of such individuals (Yearwood 1991). The welcome courtesies which formed the basis of their conduct are further explained by the following: They used to say malembe (peace) or mpolo (healthy) and clap their hands, snap their fingers (bindookila) or rub their hands and beat their breasts. They may also take each other's hands and stretch them out three or four times towards each other, or cross them towards each other and greet with clapping. This is repeated two or three times. . . . Another friendly greeting takes the form of both parties falling on their knees and clapping their hands. . . . A great chief is greeted by falling on one's knees (yobila tobe), rubbing one's hands on the ground, stroking one's ear-lobes or temples and clapping one's hands. (Laman 1953,1:47) Even as the basis of these concepts of conduct lay in a sense of loyalty to the kanda, social crucibles such as those in the West Atlantic demanded a widening of the concept of the in-group, including as it now did persons from ethnic out-groups and persons who belonged within a cosmopolitan religious brotherhood. The carry-over of the long-lasting quality of affective bonds, and the demonstration of respect, are to be read into the testimony of a nineteenth-century British missionary in British Guiana: [W]hen a poor Congo Catholic, once a slave, old and infirm, will come some distance to welcome back a priest after many years of absence, and will shake his hand with evident emotion, and then, within the same half minute, will, as a special favour, beg "to shake de hand again," it shows much genuine feeling and warmth of heart. (Scoles 1885, 2-3) To settle aggravations, the resort to internal arbitration mechanisms similarly characterized the "Congo" in Trinidad and Guyana. One Trinidad informant testified that the residents of Mayo, mainly "Congo", used to live in love. They never had courthouse [referred matters to the civil authorities]. When they had any dispute, they 110

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would call a meeting - all the old people would gather together and they would sit and sift out their business and blame the one who is the wrong person and everything would finish there. They didn't use [used not] to go to court. (Sampson 1968) It was one reason for the informant's admiration. There is so far little evidence of the practice of pronouncing a curse, not in the Caribbean sense of verbal abuse, but in the more traditional sense of uttering words intended to conjure negative effects. Such traditions are significant in the verbal cultures of Africa. Among the Koongo, a common type of curse is: "Cry for mother," which means, "May your mother die and give you cause for mourning." I have seen small boys maddened by the repetition of such a curse, and in their rage they have rushed at boys twice their size in an attempt to fight them for uttering such things about their mother. (Weeks 1914, 157) In African-American cultures of the West Atlantic, negative remarks about another person's mother is an index that a dispute has reached a climactic level.1 But the more serious ritual cursing of another has been retained among the Suriname Maroons, at least among the Matawai group. There, to curse is siba (Beet 1981, 241). Among the Eshikoongo, [to] curse (siba) a child or near relative who is very bad, obstinate, or self-willed, the curser cuts off a piece of his own cloth, wraps some of his hair in it, and burning the little bundle, he says, "You shall never have children, or you shall never become rich." To undo such a curse, a ritual is observed between the curser and the cursed. (Weeks 1914, 155-56) A form of action perceived by the recipient to be a curse is the placing of one's foot on another's, whether accidentally or incidentally. "To hit or kick against another's foot in passing, if intentional, is equal to a curse, and will cause a bad quarrel; but if it is done accidentally the man asks for pardon, and will. . . lightly touch the foot again, to undo, or nullify the curse" (Weeks 1914, 157). In Trinidad, it was not unusual, in crowded situations, to feel the intentional return of a foot which had accidentally crushed one's foot; the meaning of this unspoken exchange was that the curse or bad luck which the first trampling ill

Central Africa in the Caribbean

had transferred to the victim was being returned. Similarly, it has been traditional in Trinidad to consider stepping over another person's outstretched feet an insult. Among the Koongo, "[a] person moving out of a sitting crowd . . . shuffles his feet along the ground so as to avoid stepping over anyone, and will tell those squatting around to draw their feet up out of the way so as not to touch them" (Weeks 1913, 300). Social intercourse was nurtured by mutual visiting as a constant restatement of reciprocity. In Princes Town, Tabaquite, Brasso, Mayo and other places in Trinidad, Africans paid mutual visits. In the words of one lady, "You lived your life as if you're home [in Africa]. Everything they were doing in Africa they do here. . . . When people got sick, Africans didn't mind how long they had to walk to get to see the sick person" (Yearwood 1991). These rules of courtesy were more than social habit and comradeship in exile. They also served as an index that one's mind towards the other was clear, that one bore no ill will. One very important visit was made by children and grandchildren on New Year's Day. They would go to be blessed by their progenitors. The little children would kneel before them in an action of obeisance that was an adaptation of one of the African customs by which inferior/superior relations were expressed. Balandier (1968, 177) described women as "kneeling or with bent knees", clapping their hands in greeting and then carrying the hands one at a time to either temple and finally pressing them to the centre of the forehead. It appears that the Trinidad-born children did not proceed further than the action of kneeling, but they then said, "We wish you a happy New Year." The children's mother would also kneel at the feet of her mother and father. Grandfather would put his hand on the children and speak in broken English. His message to them would go along the following lines: "Traise God when you get anything. Ask God if you want anything. Don't quarrel with people.' Grandfather would sit in a hammock or on a little wooden chair. He would put out his foot and lean his head on his hand. Grandfather was a good-looking old man" (Yearwood 1991).2 The message imparted to the children, both in these accounts given by "Congo" descendants, and those given by Yoruba descendants, indicates a strong commitment to Christian doctrine and outlook on the part of their elders, but it is also grounded in precepts for harmonious living and inter-relationships coming out of African concepts of community. 112

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ChUdbirth It was expected that neighbours would visit the newly born infant and its mother (Yearwood 1991). However, among the descendants at the Central African enclave of Piaye in the south of St Lucia, it is the practice for persons to cry at the birth of a child because of an overwhelming sense that its life would be full of obstacles. Another tradition underlines feelings of insecurity when faced with environmental and human hazards. One Trinidad recollection of Central African childbirth procedures is that the new born baby was subjected to a test: it would be thrown into a river, and would either float safely or be seized by a crocodile. It was unclear from the account what this trial was intended to prove: whether it was meant to validate the paternity of the child and therefore its mother's fidelity to her husband, or whether it tested the robustness of the child for life in this world. If the child were a weakling, its succumbing to danger would be signified in its disappearance. On the other hand, the death of a child soon after its birth was always attributed to adultery on the part of one of its parents, and they were required to submit to a ceremony of purification (Torday 1969, 158). Other rituals surrounded childbirth. Among the Nganda the new mother calls the nganga to direct her and guard her from danger. The nganga bounces the child above his nkisi and then takes the mother by the little finger, her mpidi basket on her head and along with the child, and they go to the crossroads, singing £", nsongi nzilal "The guide, who shows the way." Afterward they drink palm wine and the nganga asks for his fee. (Lunungu, Cahier 159 in MacGaffey 1993, 37) During the Nsundi naming ceremony the child is placed upon a cloth in the manner of the consecration of a chief, and for protection chalk and yellow ochre are smeared on its arm where the arm-ring is to be, on its joints, forehead and back (Laman 1957, 2:13). While the child is still on the cloth it is given its name. The mother's work basket (mpidi) is then blessed and medicine put into it, and the mother with her child is led outside the house to a nearby stream. "On the bank they invoke Bunzi, Manzanza and Nakongo", who are minkisi, powerful spirits, 113

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and say phrases like: "'However they may come, bandoki [witches], bisimbi [spirits of the dead] and bakisi [spirits with the power of deities], may your eyes be clear-sighted. . . . May you make the crossing with health, may you cross over with gladness'. . . . This is thrice repeated, and they cross over." After the child has been named, "each nganga must sew a little futu-bag of cotton and put into it a medicine that he has carved. From eight to twenty such bags may be tied to the child's body, to prevent its being bewitched" (Laman 1957, 2:10-13). Other forms of ritual protection included supplying children with small blue-white glass beads threaded on a cotton cord. "Such bracelets were worn first on wrists and ankles and then round the upper arm and neck." A small band would also be put round the hips. The mother would then rub fragrant ndimba or nkula red pomade into these cords and all over the child's body. Then "on a cord encircling the neck a little tutu-calabash, a rattle or other ornament, and an amulet to prevent sickness might be suspended" (Laman 1953, 1:72). It is still common in the West Indies to see babies wearing around one wrist a little chain of black or blue and white beads. Indeed, protective devices are worn in Koongo even before the birthing experience, in this case by pregnant women; the charm consists of "three black seeds (zieki)3 round the loins to ensure the correct formation of the [child's] limbs. . . . On the same girdle with the zieki is a small sea shell (nangd) which is worn to prevent miscarriage" (Claridge 1969, 95). In Guyana the baby was given "an injection" on its arms, intended to give the child protection from danger and to make it fearless (Morrison 1994). This is probably a reference to the nsamba or tattoo, but also to the insertion of gunpowder in it, to act as an antidote to physical attack (Proyart 1776, 169). One sees in the Koongo birth-related rituals versions of various Caribbean practices. In Cuba the child of Central Africans was taken by seven priests, nganguleros, who swore on his head - pledged kisi malongo - so that he would not die or be injured in any way. The priests, the parents and the godparents entered up to the waist in sea or river or well water, and placed the child in the water. A sacrifice of a cock and an opossum was made. An alternative was to use at the ceremony seven jars of water, seven tobaccos, seven brave men, gin, seven branches from seven different trees. The child was given the name of an ancestor. The procession left the bush, the godfather singing and the 114

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others shaking a maracas to the words: "Kuna ntendale kuama Nganga la musi musi" (Cabrera 1986a, 24-25). Among the Kumina people in Jamaica, when a baby is about seven months old, a ceremony is held, called a "birthnight table [altar]". A sheet is spread on the ground, the baby placed on it, and drums are played. The baby is then lifted and passed over lighted candle. A white pigeon is killed and its blood allowed to flow into a basin of water mixed with rum. The child is bathed in this, so that it grows up well, and so that no evil "messenger" or spirit should come to the child and take charge of it. The baby is then placed before the drum. With all this done, "A spirit travel with him till him [he] old" (Kennedy 1971b). A Trinidad ritual was to roll the baby from one person to another over a bed or table. The adults would say "maki bungo, maki bungo" < makubungu (Ko) 'get strong', to accompany this action (Nicholls 1989). The phrase invoked protection for the child, and contained a wish that the child would be prosperous. Then a cut would be made on the child's body - though the account did not specify the place - and quicksilver put in the incision as a protection. After this, the child was walked right around the house, then brought in and given to the mother. "If he is to dead [die] he will dead," said the informant matterof-factly, indicating that the health and strength of the infant were proven by its ability to withstand these trials.

Weddings Apart from shipmate bonding, families were created by marriage. Some African men married African wives, but some married women outside their "nation". In Jamaica, "Ndongo were supposed to marry only Ambaka, Nsundi to marry only Kongo.4 Bobangi. . . could marry members of any other subgroup but were considered best matched with Kongo . . . but in the long run such marriages, especially . . . to Creoles and Maroons . . . threatened Central African solidarity" (Schuler 1980, 71). Notions of ethnic and blood solidarity were perhaps among the reasons why a female Koongo descendant testified that, in Trinidad, some African parents chose partners for their children (Nicholls 1989). Hambly had noted that there was no infant betrothal among the 115

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Ovimbundu (1968, 180), and although there is no evidence that this practice was standard in Central Africa, the Trinidad practice may have arisen in response to conditions of exile, in which Africans of particular nations wished to promote relationships with specific nations to which they were partial. These reasons were similar to those that impelled Koongo, Bwende, Nsundi and Eshikoongo chiefs to "betroth their children very young . . . with the object of advancing their children and creating friendly relations with the neighbouring tribes" Johnston 1908, 2:678). Among the Ovimbundu marriage was preceded by a two-year contract between a man and the girl's family, an arrangement having been sealed by a gift from the future groom to the girl's parents. Further gifts immediately preceded the girl's transferral to her husband's home (Hambly 1968, 189-90), Another type of engagement was in reality a trial marriage, during which a young girl and boy spent their evenings together and slept together after the presentation of gifts by the young man to the girl's parents. However, no sexual relations were expected to take place (Hambly 1968, 181; Childs 1969, 112-13). In fact, in neither situation was it expected that pregnancy would result. So much so that the husband burnt a hole through the girl's loincloth if she were not a virgin on marriage, and sent her to her mother. This signified his disappointment at having received damaged goods, so the payment of a pig made up the loss (Hambly 1968, 181). In a rather similar manner, among the Nsundi there were three types of marriage. There was "a loose marriage without any sanction", when no attention was paid to the relations obtaining between parties such as divorcees, widows and widowers, and mature couples. There was also trial marriage, which was entered upon after the two parties had become acquainted with each other. This could develop to a legal stage, when there was a settlement between the families of the two sides. No premarital intercourse was tolerated before the marriage settlement leading to legal marriage, longo. The latter was akin to the marriage referred to by a Trinidad female Koongo descendant: "Every mother keep they child near, so when you married you's a virtuous girl. Then the bridegroom will come and pay your mother for you." Payment was a gift of money, according to the capacity of the groom to pay (Nicholls 1989). In Angola, "the money and other things given by the suitor to the girl's parents are not the 116

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'price' of the girl, as is often said, but the 'pledge' and symbol of the contract thereby executed". If the wife were to prove unfaithful or unfruitful her parents would have to return the gifts (Chatelain 1894, 9). Since this was the only Trinidad reference to the "bride price", it is not known how the system actually operated. On the other hand, in Guyana the term "buying the bride" is still used in rural areas. This takes place when drummers come to the future bride's home the night before the wedding. They present her with a purse containing money. She may or may not accept the amount inside. This money is apparently not presented as coming from the bridegroom or his family. What however is considered the item of exchange between the bride's and bridegroom's families, as a token of their impending connection, is a bottle of rum. This exchange takes place around midnight on the eve of the wedding, and is considered the principal form of "buying", being even more central than the donation of money to the bride-to-be. These episodes are accompanied by music, revelry and a hunt for the bride, who is concealed and has to be found within the house precincts. Indeed, it appears that during the nineteenth century the bride-to-be was confined to the bedroom of her parents' house, not being allowed to be seen or to venture outside at all. At that time, because it was regarded as sacred, "the ceremony known as 'buying the bride' could be attended only by the members of the two families, and no strangers should be present" (Smith 1956, 171-72). The bridegroom-to-be is bought as well. He is hidden and covered in a sheet as a group of the bride's family advances, singing, to his home. His whereabouts are discovered, and he is brought out openfaced to sit in the middle of the company. His mother and a representative of the girl's family stand beside him, as the girl's family sing their intention to buy the boy and the mother's reluctance to part with him. The girl's representative then buys him with money or any other suitable token. The man is then hoisted aloft in a chair by the biggest women present and taken to the ganda, or performance ring, a clearing made at the home of a relative or godparent of either of the couple. Meanwhile, the would-be wife has also been placed in a decorated chair which, immediately after the buying, has been lifted on high and lowered, and then she is borne, like her prospective husband, to the ganda, where the festivities continue (Sinclair 1989, 223-24).

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Figure 5.1 Vaneza Sinclair of West Bank Berbice, Guyana, 1994. A Kramanti descendant and kwekwe connoisseur.

A performance event called kwekwe,5 or kweke, or keke, takes place after this, but the kwekwe in fact occupies the nights for about a week prior to the wedding itself. Kwekwe dancing takes place inside a house, since the percussion which accompanies the dance is actually made by the stamping of the feet of the male and female dancers who move in an anti-clockwise direction, singing songs with sexual inriuendos and bawdy actions. But the ganda is "opened" by the sprinkling of "high wine", that is, overproof rum, in order to call in the dead relatives. The ring of dancers enters to shouts of "e (k)olande", a common Koongo phrase in songs meaning 'come on, follow'. Among the kwekwe songs is the following, which refers to the male and female reproductive organs and indicates the universal instinct for sex: Pussy, pussy gangara Pussy na got no high company You run over yander You knock am bambala Pussy no got no high company All over fireside You knock am bambala Pussy no got no high company Pussy and cocky a one family Pussy na got no high company6 (Sinclair 1994)

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Pueey

Another marriage song similarly includes words of likely Central African provenance: Ye mongo delange Ye mongo delanqe < ? E Mongo i-dilanga (3yal a go 'way

E! Mongo \e crying (&ecaue>e) the girl \e> going away (Bagot 1979)

Another Guyana song gave good wishes to the couple: (3uyKo

Kongama sula mama ~ Mongkala mama ya e>u\a Yatika

Ko

Kangama ye zoola Yadika

Hold together with love riave children and help them grow up (Sinclair 1994)

Another prenuptial tradition in Guyana involved drumming festivities and songs for the bride-to-be a few days prior to the wedding. There was also drumming the day after a wedding. These may be reworkings of aspects of the drawn-out wedding proceedings in certain 119

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parts of Koongo and, no doubt, other parts of Africa as well. Before the wedding, women from the bride's village go to feast at the compound of the future husband and his parents. The women carry pots and pans to cook the pig provided by the bride's parents. It is the convention . . . for the girl to dance in order to show her happiness at being the occasion of such a feast. . . . The day after the wedding feast the bride removes the red dye. . . . About midday men bind her with bush-rope and carry her in that condition to her husband's house. She is accompanied by her bridesmaids, who dance and sing . . . (Johnston 1908, 2:680) She is left tied up in the new home and is speedily released by the eager husband. But in a day or two she may steal home "out of coquetry, outraged modesty, or for some real grievance with her new life. She is speedily recaptured, and perhaps receives a mock beating, or a real one, till at last she settles down into married life" (p. 680). Among Guyanese descendants of the "Congo", and perhaps other ethnic groups, on the day after the wedding, if the bride had been found to be "virtuous", a ceremony was held known as Paapa dance. Evidence of the girl's virginity had been established by the presence of an elderly woman near the bridal chamber. It was the woman's responsibility to retrieve the bed sheet in the morning. That was displayed at the open window, a big red flower was tied to the door of the room, and the news was spread that the Paapa dance would take place later: "Big ting de a battam, gyal a good gyal", in other words, festivities would take place in the ganda, the open space underneath the elevated house, since the bride had been a virtuous woman. For the occasion, a white sheet would be spread in the ganda, and the newlyweds put to sit on decorated chairs. The colour symbolism used for the bride is reciprocally mirrored in Koongo and Guyana: in Koongo the bride's body is coloured bright red with tukula, which is camwood paste, while her face is painted white. In Guyana the bride is dressed in white with a red salo, or cotton cloth, around her waist. The bride advances to her place led on a string by her godmother. Speeches would follow, with the chairman and others coughing to interrupt the flow of speakers' flowery oratory. But the aim of the cough was really to indicate that a point had been reached at which the 120

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speaker should throw onto the sheet his financial contribution to the celebration. The length of the cough bore some relationship to the amount of money the speaker was expected to proffer (Sinclair 1994). Some of the money went to the couple., some to their parents. A rhyme intoned on this occasion was Kwaami zegele, perhaps kwaami nzengele (Ko) 'I have cut mine'; and a song declared Muma kabara kasamba, which could be interpreted as Muuma kabana ka saamba 'This part needs sharing' (Sinclair 1994). Kuuma

At this "bridal ganda" in Guyana, the couple open the floor, and then a sequence of male partners seize opportunities to dance with the bride. For this privilege they throw money onto a sheet in front the drummers; they also pin note money onto the dress of the bride. It is the drummers who signal the need for a change of dance partners by interrupting the rhythm they are playing. Another male partner now steps into place, bowing before the bride and "dancing her out". Money is also collected for drinks. In the end, the money is given to the drummers and the drinks sales go to the parents, while the bride and the bridegroom - who is similarly "danced" by females and regaled with money - keep their collections for themselves (Adams 1994). Sometimes the bride, and sometimes also the groom, slept the wedding night at her parents, though not together. This somewhat resembles the practice among the Ovimbundu, whereby the bride sleeps the first three nights after the wedding at her parents' home, while the groom sleeps at his (Hambly 1968, 180). They sleep together on the fourth night. 121

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In Trinidad of the 1910s and 1920s, wedding invitations were served in the following way: one of the girl's parents, or a representative, went around with a bottle of rum and a glass and would say to an invitee that the daughter was about to be married. The glass would be handed to the invitee who would ask the parent to throw out some liquor. The invitee would then drink, as a sign of acceptance of the invitation. Not to drink would be to refuse the invitation. On the wedding days themselves, guests would bring a bouquet of flowers, a bunch of plantain, a pig, or a goat. The flowers were a European touch, but foodstuffs, especially pigs, were common gifts for weddings, coronations and any other festivity in Central Africa. Chickens and pigs constituted what Janzen calls "social currency", pigs being the larger of the two units and as such being "reserved for major rituals in which their exchange constituted a sign of reconciliation or obligation met between clans. The pig was considered (and still is) the appropriate unit of recompense for human blood shed in a quarrel" (Janzen 1982, 31). In Trinidad, weddings took place from a Thursday through to Saturday. They began with a farewell dance held at the bride's mother's home, at which there was drumming and the sharing of malaavu 'rum'. The guests were fed with cane-juice, or molasses mixed in lemonade, malaavu, cocoa drink, or lime punch with rum. Rum, as successor to malaavu 'palm wine', was much in evidence on social occasions, for in Africa palm wine flowed "freely at all kinds of festivals, on the occasion of law-suits, visits and in the evening after the common meal" (Laman 1953, 1:54). The marriage itself took place on the Saturday afternoon in church. As the guests went in they threw powder, and guns were fired. The parents of the bride and groom threw powder, rice and flour as the young people entered the home where the reception was held. During the course of the function, the bride and groom stole away. There was another dance on the second Sunday after the wedding, when bride and groom came back to register thanks to their parents and the guests. Drums were beaten, rum was imbibed, and the couple went to church to be blessed by the priest. Most of the people were Roman Catholics, though the grandmother of this particular informant on wedding customs had been Anglican. Naturally, this spate of celebrations called for much food. Rice was cooked in a huge iron pot holding sixteen gallons of water. A trench was dug in the ground to 122

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accommodate the wood-fire to cook such a pot. In Central Cuba, food for festive occasions was cooked in cauldrons fixed over four large stones. The pots were stirred with large wooden palettes, and great palm branches were used as pot covers. Cups and spoons were shaped out of gourds, though people generally ate with their hands (Mendoza Lorenzo 1986, 61). Interestingly, a description of a country wedding in Jamaica in the 1970s bears a strong resemblance to the Koongo type weddings described for Trinidad: We all rode horses or mule . . . including the bride, and that wedding lasted one week. . . . I think the bride and the groom lived in town. . . . But everybody went back to country and . . . when you entered the wedding yard, there was all this coconut [branches] tie over the gate, and bougainvillea and all like that, and they make up bamboo booth all over, and every night the country orchestra would come and play, and cow and goat [would be eaten]. And next Sunday we went back to cturn tanks'. It's 'return thanks'. The whole party went back to the church, just the same way again. . . . We went to church and the parson spoke to the bride and the groom again. This particular one was in Clarendon [parish], Frankfield [district]. (Perkins 1989) An Nsundi account mentions the matondo ca sign of gratitude', which is given a year after wedding negotiations and festivities begin. On this occasion the wife's clan arrives with pigs and other presents in recompense for the meat, fish and other gifts the husband has given his wife and her clan (Laman 1957, 2:33).

Funerals The significance of death as a rite of passage was underscored by the seriousness and lavishness with which ceremonials for this occasion are treated both in Africa and the Caribbean. In the Maroon town of San Basilio in Colombia, the inexorable phenomenon of death always produces a profound commotion. Such great importance attaches to this transition that no other rite of passage of greater significance exists in the 123

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life cycle of these Maroons. The concern for securing a noteworthy, 'well done' funeral is particularly notable in this epoch of cultural change . . . (Schwegler 1990, 2; my translation) The increased significance of appropriate ritual is doubtless connected to the view that "the newly dead do not go quietly on their way but remain behind to annoy and harass the living. They must be buried with suitable ritual and properly placated throughout the year; otherwise their activities and influences will be unpredictable" (Courlander 1960, 30). For San Basilio funerals, the singing of the call-and-response lumbalu is an "integral part of a 'well performed' " event. Other terms for the lumbalii are canto de muerto 'dirge', and lloro 'lament' (Zapata Olivella 1962, 209). Schwegler derives lumbalii from lu- (Ko) the prefix marking a collective noun + mbalu (Ko) 'reflection, thought, remembrance, memory'. It appears that the drum which accompanies the songs was previously also known by the name lumbalii. The lumbalu . . . is a musical death rite the purpose of which is to demonstrate condolence and love for the deceased and, in the case of the passing of a young person, compassion for his/her mother. Around the corpse are assembled professional mourners, drummers and singers to intone - amidst the crowd, soulful wails (and many times bottles of liquor) - the religious chant of the lumbalu. The lumbalu ceremony is generally a rowdy affair. . . . (Schwegler 1990, 2; my translation) This wake-keeping usually takes place at the home of the dead person or at a mourner's house, and only on rare occasions goes past the pre-burial period into a nine-night velorio (Zapata Olivella 1962, 210). While formerly more young women may have taken part, today only old women sing, while men of all ages clap and play drums to the beat of the songs. The family and friends stand nearest, surrounding the corpse; others form an outer ring, yet others chat, drink, laugh and dance. While all this is going on the women repeatedly wail "ay, mona mi" 'Ay, my child!' The songs themselves are punctuated by Koongoderived exclamations such as: mame 'alas', i lele < e lila 'oh cry', tantwe < tanta 'feel great sorrow', ma muje < ma 'see, look' + muhia 'calamity'. But amidst these laments are wishes to the departed 124

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spirit to yombo gwenda < yombo kwenda 'silently go',, and reambe yombo < dyama yombo 'sleep peacefully'.7 Trinidad Koongo dirges carried plaintive melodies and bore words such as: TKo Yanga mana mya ~ myala Pandyaama a panya-panya Pumonga ~ pumongwa Saki ma fudi, mafudi pandyaama Yanga lula, yanga tata Ko

Yenge, mana mwela Pangame i paring a Po! mmonga Sa kifwa ka fwidi Yenge, lula; yenge, tata

• Paaca! tha braath dias My countryman \e> labouring (in daaththroas) It is finishad! Sorrow! Tha dying has indaad diad Condolences, elder; condolences, father (Nicolas Jones 196£)

Yenge

125

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At the kutumba wake in St Lucia, "men sing in a groaning manner, the women in a piercing high tone, often raising their hands over their heads in supplication, miming grief (Simmons 1963, 47). This description of the attitude of the hands is unclear, but Laman (1953, 1:44), speaking no doubt about the Nsundi, refers to a posture of "very great grief, the clasping of hands bearing down over the crown of the head, which is done in the same manner in Jamaica, with the elbows either held tensely and as closely as possible in front of the face, or fanned out to both sides of the head. A Guyanese lady, meanwhile, remembers her mother - a Koongo descendant - singing mourning songs and crying at wakes. No grand cooking was done for wakes. Instead, ginger tea was brewed and drunk. This was also an occasion when people sang songs "in country" [African languages] from their "nancy stories".8 In other words, whatever their themes, the mere fact of their African authenticity qualified certain songs to be sung at the death of a member of the "Congo" community. In Trinidad, "waking" in some rural communities featured the bongo dance, in which two males "jump into the circle and move energetically, mirroring each other in competitive spirit. . . , The dance demands agility, flexibility, stamina and strength" (Ahye 1978, 93-94). From her observations in Jamaica in the early decades of this century, Beckwith (1969a, 85) reported that a wake occasion in the Santa Cruz mountains of the western parish of St Elizabeth was called the bakinny "or 'Back in i' [the grave], as I believe". This word, however, is a derivation of bakunu (Ko) 'the spirits of the dead, ancestors'. The word baquini occurs as well in Santo Domingo, denoting a wake for a child, or in some cases for an adult; the wake is marked with festive activity (Deive 1978, 124-28). The term appears in several other parts of the Hispanic Americas (p. 126). As for the Jamaican occasion, "they build a bonfire, about which the men and boys play games while the women and girls stand by watching the sport. . . . They 'dance Calimbe' in an antic caper upon a pair of sticks held horizontally by two other players" (Beckwith 1969a, 85).9 In Trinidad, during the wake and on the morning of the burial, stick percussion was again employed. Two shorter pieces of stick were beaten against the longer kumbi stick, which was held steady to receive the knocking. This accompanied a procession, which moved from the tent where the wake had been kept to the "dead house" [the home 126

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where the corpse lay], most likely on the same premises. The procession filed in to say farewell to the corpse. The dead person was buried in the cemetery after a church service. "But we keep African prayers the night before", referring to the combined dance and Christian prayer activity which had characterized the wake (Francis 1971). On that occasion, food was eaten out of calabashes. Among Kumina adherents in Jamaica, drumming is performed at the graveside, after a church service. If drums are not played, it is believed that the duppy [ghost] will "ride somebody bareback", that is, haunt somebody enough to cause them mental turbulence. A drum is played at the top end of the grave and another at the foot, to confine the duppy to its new home. The Kumina people also observe a "tombing dance" some years after the burial, at which time the grave is cemented over. For this occasion, "you build the Kumina dance the Friday night and tomb the African [on] Saturday morning. . . . But some of them are so stubborn they still come out and dream you [appear to you in dreams]. That makes for a lot of worries [troubles]", so the tombing ceremony has to be repeated. The group dances around the grave, and "you take your head [use your head] and dig up ... root up all those flowers in the grave when the mayaal take you [when you are overcome by a possessing spirit]". The gravel is then shovelled off to get the ground level, and a tomb - a concrete slab - is set over it. Rum, sugar and water, wine, and a goat killed on the grave are offered, while the tombing is being done. These sacrifices bid the dead "howdy" (Kennedy 1971b). The hybrid nature of such Afro-Christian burial rites offended the Christian clergy in Jamaica, and contestations on cultural and religious grounds did arise. The nineteenth-century Moravian Church in western Jamaica, for example, sternly opposed the use of drums and other African practices by their converts; and Stewart (1992, 119-20) presents evidence of the amalgamations and conflicts which arose over burial ceremonies and concepts of the afterlife during the nineteenthcentury missionary enterprise in Jamaica. Similarly, as early as the seventeenth century, in the South American Caribbean port of Cartagena, the Jesuit missionaries to the African enslaved population, led by Peter Claver, objected violently to the use of drums for wakes and to the preparation of food to be buried with the corpse (Friedemann and Arocha 1986, 174-75). 127

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In Jamaica the Koongo method of preparing the corpse is remembered. This was to wrap the corpse in a length of cloth called a kandal < kandalala ca long length of cloth for a shroud'. Another name was makutu ku. The wrapping was done "in such a way that it would plug up all the orifices, thus preventing spiritually harmful gases from escaping and injuring the living relatives who were responsible for the proper care of the body before burial". In addition, the kandal allowed the dead to go into the afterworld in a proper fashion since, to quote an informant, "You are not to go before him naked . . . Jehovah God, Nzambi" (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 37-38). This is a Euro-Christian rationalization regarding a Central African custom. For in Koongo, very important people were swathed in so many folds of native cloth that the corpse became a ball (Laman 1957, 2:90). Oral testimony indicates that there was a time in the palenque San Basilio in Colombia, when the body was buried "dressed in very much cloth" (Schwegler 1992, 75). In some unspecified parts of Koongo, the funeral of an important male involved burying the basket coffin in the marshy bank of a river - along with wives and slaves - and then allowing the water to flood the site, which had been dammed for the purpose of creating a grave (Torday 1969, 192-93). The use of a basket coffin, either in Africa or in the Colombian Maroon settlements, seems to be the reference of the lumbalii dirge which sings: ilombo ya a kai matete < yombo ya ha caido matete 'gently the basket(s) has dropped down' (Schwegler 1996, 2:612-17, my interpretation). And although indirect, one may wish to make a connection between the concept of a watery grave conveyed by this type of burial, and the boat-shaped coffin adopted among some of the Suriname Maroons (Counter and Evans 1981, 313) and imaged in one of the "Palenque de San Basilio's" funeral dirges: ee ba \a kanoa em remo i ya nee \e embango' em rremo i em kanalete ... o, kanoa tan pa rrio Kauk', e

the oarleee canoe qoee away it ha5 already embarked without oar and without paddle . . . the canoe reete in the river Cauca10

It had also been the custom in the palenque to enclose the corpse in straw mats for burial. This was later replaced by a canoe-like coffin, and more recently by a box-type one (Friedemann 1994, 16 fn. 11). In most parts of the Congo Basin, according to one nineteenth-century 128

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commentator, the bodies of young children who were other than the first-born or twins were wrapped in a rush mat and buried in a corner of the mother's hut. The first-born was put into a pitcher or jar, while twins were enfolded in banana leaves (Johnston 1908, 2:644). Among the Luba, ordinary persons were also wrapped in a mat, though persons of prominence had their bodies forcibly bent to fit into a large wicker basket with a lid. Other groups, such as the Yansi, wrapped such a body in tree bark or folds of native cloth (Johnston 1908, 2:645-46). Straw mats also feature in.the San Basilio palenque burial as containers for the everyday and professional objects used by the deceased; these mat wrappers were formerly put into the grave, again following Central African custom. But during the twentieth century, probably to bring palenque usage closer to Euro-Colombian practice, these bundles, either of straw or plastic, came to be thrown into a gully adjoining the cemetery immediately following a person's death (Schwegler 1992, 53-55). The placing into the grave of items frequently used by the deceased was common in Jamaica during the slavery period, and at least two of several descriptions of African funerals by European observers contain references to items which seem Central African. One occurs in a mid-eighteenth-century account and describes the sacrifice of a pig in honour of the deceased: "The nearest Relation kills it, the Intrails are buried, the four Quarters are divided, and a kind of soup is made, which is brought in a Calabash or Gourd, and, after waving it Three times, it is set down; then the Body is put in the Ground."11 Elaborating on the items put into the grave, a late-seventeenth-century commentator includes mention of objects with special Central African resonance: cassava bread, roasted fowl, "Tobacco and Pipes with fire to light his pipe withal . . . in order to sustain him in his Journey beyond".12 This latter custom stemmed from a conception of an afterlife, ku mpemba ca land of gladness and comfort', where earthly sickness and suffering are no more. In the post-emancipation period these world views persisted, but they were modified by Christianity and its somewhat more abstract conception of a heaven, even though the concrete images of wings, trumpets, family and friends reuniting more often than not lent substance to the idea of an everlasting happiness. Oral evidence records that there had been a time in palenque San Basilio when graves were dug with a lateral cavity adjoining the vertical 129

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hole, thus making for an L-shaped chamber, a practice recorded for the coastal Bantu of the Cameroons (Schwegler 1992, 61). In the early part of the twentieth century the Accompong Maroons in Jamaica sometimes extended the rectangular burial cavity backwards under the ground. The explanation given for this was the fact that the diggers had hit a rock, but the observer noted that the cavity was already large enough for the average coffin. She was struck by the resemblance between this practice and that of the "tunnel grave of the Dutch Guiana Bush Negroes", another community of Maroons. She commented: In Dutch Guiana their blood brothers are still aware of the fact that by digging a tunnel, egress of the body from the grave is made practically impossible. Then the spirit is thwarted and a playful one can't bring the flesh back if he chooses to return amongst the living. (Dunham 1971, 88, 91) Other Central African characteristics of the San Basilio palenque burial practice include the construction of a small straw or galvanized zinc roof over the grave (now little done), the placing atop the grave of some items used by the deceased, the washing of hands by the grave-diggers, and the planting of a tree on the grave (Schwegler 1992, 74, 77). As regards the washing of hands, this symbolizes the separation of the living from the spirit of the dead, and whereas it is performed with rum in Colombia, it is done with river water in Koongo, plantain sap in coastal Cameroon,13 and "water containing red clay and adwere leaves" among the Akan, with everyone dipping hands into it and sprinkling himself before entering the home from which the dead person had been taken (Busia 1962, 31). A parallel custom is preserved among the Saramaka of Suriname where, after the burial, "all would turn and run as fast as they could to the river's edge, where the unwashed dirt that had accumulated during the digging of the grave, and the more serious spiritual contamination to which they had been exposed in handling the body, would be washed away in the safety of the flowing water" (Herskovits and Herskovits 1934, 21). The placing of a tree on the grave has been interpreted as "a sign of the spirit on its way to the land of the ancestors", since the tree represents "the idea of immortality and perdurance" (Thompson and Cornet 1981, 186-87), but an additional intention, as signified by a Colombian palenque resident, is to allow the dead to rest (Schwegler 130

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1992, 77). This intention focuses on the tree's roots, which "plant" the body and spirit firmly in its domain. This is because the Koongo believe that a dead person consists of three parts: the part which is eaten by bandoki 'witches'; the part that is transformed to nkuyu 'ghost'; and the shed skin that remains in the grave, pupu. The deceased, as spirit, remain in their graves for six to ten months, during which time "they change their skins and acquire a fair appearance like albinos". The mobility of the spirit is demonstrated when the grave collapses or an opening is observed. When deceased persons have become bandoki: they wander about in the palm groves, the woods and the villages to torment people at night-time and steal hens from the hen-house. . . . The good may also visit the villages to see how their survivors are looking after their children and possessions, and to assure themselves that these duties are being performed in accordance with what is right and proper . . . (Laman 1962 3:14, 15) An ethnographer writing of Jamaica in the early decades of the twentieth century reported a custom that still survives, though to a lesser degree than then obtained: When a dead man's ghost has come back to "ride" the living and it is desirable to "plant him" so that he cannot again return, certain expedients are used to "keep the ghost down," the most common of which is to plant "pidgeon peas"14 on the grave, for as the roots grow downward this will prevent the ghost from taking the opposite direction. At the west end of the island they boil the peas because, as the peas cannot shoot out of the ground, so the ghost must remain in the ground: the peas "keep him down". (Beckwith 1969a, 76) The practice of "planting the grave" may involve placing some grains of corn or peas on the grave. The desire is to anchor the spirit, should it desire to wander and cause disturbance to the living. In the southern sector of Central Africa trees are a metaphor for persons. A Koongo proverb says: "God set us in order as living trees" (Wing 1959, 298). The interpretation of this is that a "tree, like a man, has vitality, so that its leaves grow continuously, like hair, and if cut down will spring up again from the earth" (MacGaffey 1986, 129). Thus, the San Basilio 131

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widow mourns at the passing of her husband that she has lost the trunk of her family (Schwegler 1992, 77). This correspondence between human beings and trees is underscored in the ritual and practice among the Mbundu, for whom the mulemba tree symbolizes "the integrity of the kin group", and its roots "the attachment of each descent group or ngundu to the ground in which the tree grows" (Miller 1976, 64). In related manner, among.the Lunda, Lwena and Chokwe, east of the Koongo and Mbundu, the muyombo tree is planted in the centre of the village and is associated with the deceased headman. "It thus represents the protector of the village and the seat of the ancestors of the village group" (McCulloch 1951, 75). The gravesite tree is therefore "a sign of the spirit on its way to the land of the ancestors".15 In addition "individuals or families usually have outside their houses akishi sticks, sometimes cut from the village muyombO) sometimes from some other tree" (McCulloch 1951, 76). Akishi (mukishi sg.) means 'ancestral spirits'. Thus, at death every individual leaves a mukishi. Writing of a ceremony at Anse-aVeau in the south of Haiti, Millet describes an annual ceremony marking the dedication of the bua de la fami 'family tree'. "In this tree is concentrated the powers of a houngan or of his family" (Millet 1989, 72; my translation). These powers fade over time, as the family draws on its reserves of energy; this is why the tree is renewed each year during the December rite to the loa called Gran Bwa 'great tree'. The tree itself is forked, which allows Gran Bwa and other deities to play and gambol in its branches when they possess the houngan and other members of the family. The tree is erected on family property, not within the vodun hounfort or shrine. After a hole has been dug, a cross is outlined within it by the use of imported flour, and this is circumscribed by a circle.16 This geometric sign is then reinforced by tracings with ashes, then cornflour and finally, as a neutralizing agent in the event of sorcery against the family, with sesame seeds. Each member of the family present makes three libations of water into the hole. As the tree is implanted, the family sings a song of rejoicing, and to steady the trunk in the ground, the earth is trampled by everyone. The tree is then "baptized" by libations of rum thrown from its branches by the presiding officiant (Millet 1989, 72-73). The Maroons of the Accompong settlement in western Jamaica provide yet another instance of the sacralization of family bonds by way of 132

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the external icon of the tree. Among them they honour a kinda tree., which is one of the sites of the Accompong family reunion that takes place annually on January 6. This memorial, along with "the grave of Kojo, Accompong and other past Maroon leaders . . . half a kilometre down a rugged slope north-east from Kindah", are regarded as "sacred grounds". The tree is understood to mean "We are a family". Sacrificial offerings of boars and rams and food made there on the anniversary., amidst the singing of songs, establish the tree as a tutelary spirit of the community. The precincts of the kinda tree are sprinkled with rum in libation, an action that is repeated when the select group goes to the grave sites. In the early morning before the crowds gather, food is prepared under the shade of the tree. The food provisions used ought not to be white;17 yellow yam and plantains are roasted and boiled by male Maroons and a few elderly Maroon women. Whatever the meat, it is the male of the species that is utilized; it is cooked without salt, since part of the meat is taken as offering to the graves of past great Maroon leaders, and offerings to spirits must not include salt. But the food is flavoured by being stirred over the fire with large pimento (Pimento, officinalis) sticks. While only male Maroons go to the grave sites, the kinda tree is the locus of the communal feasting, dancing and drumming that mark the day's activity. "The site is located just outside Accompong Town to the north-east. . . . It is said to have been the base for consultations for Maroon leaders during their wars against the British forces. . . . That place was the site of Old Accompong Town" (Wright 1994, 65-66). The interpretation of the tree as a familial bond is in keeping with the Ovimbundu lineage representation of such trees. But it appears that the kinda also served a function with regard to political decisionmaking. In this connection the ritual significance of trees in the consecration of administrative heads or paramount chiefs (ntinu) among the Nsundi and Yombe is instructive: [T]he sacred nsanda rubber-tree is a kiyaazi (royal sign of dignity). No one may break off a leaf. . . nor may it be wounded with a knife. . . . When a nsanda-tree is planted a medicine is first placed in the bottom of the hole. This is the kindakazi (nkinda-magic) of the chieftainship. . . . The nkinda protective power exists in the animals from which the paramount chief 133

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has received the kinkonko-soul, and in the nsanda-rubber tree which is on the occasion of the coronation ceremony planted in the enclosed court and is a dynastic sign of dignity. . . .. The tree was planted at the coronation or burial site. (Laman 1957, 2:145, 150) The place of the coronation or burial where the tree was planted is honoured, and "may not be trespassed upon by the children of the mvila [lineage name], though the chiefs children and grandchildren may go there". Such a burial tree, among the Yombe, is likely to be away from inhabited areas since their "paramount chiefs are buried in a sequestered spot in the forest" (p. 150). The fact that, among the Accompong Maroons, only recognized members of the community may accompany the procession to the site of the graves on the anniversary day - though outsiders may take part in the kinda tree celebrations - seems an echo of this selectivity. But the burial ground is not a forested area, rather a broad grassed plain, which is the location of the grave of Kojo ~ Cudjo, an eighteenth-century military leader, as well as of other leaders. Kojo's grave is marked only by stones. But adjacent to the grassy level is the thick forest and undergrowth that constitute the location of the older settlement. In keeping with Central African practice, the site of old settlements is also the site of the burial grounds of its headmen. The Accompong Maroons recognize the gravesite and the forest surround as being the location of what is called Old Town, obviously an earlier village. In a parallel way, a level site just below that of the known Nanny Town in the eastern Blue Mountains is called Makunu Level, Makunu 'the site of the ancestors' being the name given to earlier settlements, so that Makunu Level serves the same relationship to Nanny Town as the Old Town to Accompong Town in the west. In Jamaica and Trinidad, it has been the practice of older generations to plant a tree on the site where a newly born child's 'navel string' or umbilical cord is buried, and children are told when they are old enough to understand which particular tree belongs to them. Of this practice in Accompong and in other parts of Jamaica, it is noted: The navel cord and afterbirth are planted under a tree, usually coconut or breadfruit, and that tree belongs to the infant for the; rest of his life. No matter where he might be in later life, he 134

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would not think of parting with this tree, and it and its produce descend to his children. Sometimes the tree is provided by the parents, sometimes by godparents or other relatives or friends. (Dunham 1971, 114) The placing of conch shells on graves in the West Atlantic has also been credited to Koongo-Angolan influence. The custom in Guadeloupe and in the southern United States has been noted (Thompson 1984, 135), and is likewise remembered in Santiago in eastern Cuba (Larduet 1995). Interestingly, "there are several unusual graves in the Port Royal Parish Cemetery. Old and over grown, their wooden headstones often decayed, their most striking feature is that the grave mounds are covered with conch shells - in contrast with the brick tombs in the immediate vicinity" (Pigou 1985, 139). These shells mark the resting places of simple black folk. The shell, as metonymic of the ocean, externalizes a cosmic geography that links the sea and death, kalunga being the Koongo, Mbundu and Umbundu term for both concepts. The conch is "both spiriform and enduring", added to which there is word play on zinga, meaning 'to live, to perdure, to move in a spiral path', in one of the names for the nether world, kutwazingila 'where we shall live'. "Thus people in the olden days hid their soul in these shells with the prayer: cAs strong as your house you shall keep my life for me. When you leave for the sea, take me along that I may live forever with you'" (MacGaffey 1986, 77). A further explanation of the conch symbolism, which complements its analogical reference to kalunga, is that the waters of the sea, like the glint of the conch, reflect the light of the moon and stars, which are the home of Nzambi (Larduet 1995). During the San Basilio wake, a glass of water is placed on an altar together with candles, paper flowers and statues or lithographs of Catholic saints. The water is to receive the soul of the dead, which remains in its earthly home until the last night of the wake (Friedemann 1994, 11). The loa or deities in Haitian belief are conceived of as living in Africa, called Guinee, or beneath the water in the "island below the sea". One view is that they "share this residing place with the spirits of certain categories of the dead" (Courlander 1960, 19). A few years after a death, the vodun community holds a ceremony to retirer d'en has de reau> a ritual to reclaim the soul of the deceased from "the waters of the 135

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abyss" (Deren 1970, 27). The link between soul and water is repeated in the Jamaican mayaal ritual that seeks to recover the "stolen shadow" of a sick person. This is usually discovered at a sacred tree, and after oblations are made to the spirits that surround the tree to release the shadow, "a white basin of water is held up, and as soon as the released soul falls into it, a cover is clapped over, and some one runs home with the captured soul and restores it to its owner by binding about his head a cloth dipped in the water" (Beckwith 1969a, 144-45). In Trinidad, the only reference to a destination after death was the recall that a "Congo" grandmother had spoken, on her deathbed, of kalunga (Jane-Ann Joseph 1968). For the Koongo this complex word refers to death, eternity, the ocean or river depths, the location of the dead. Among the Chokwe and Lwena, kalunga can mean 'rain', is associated with rain, thunder, lightning, the ocean and the underworld, death and the grave, fate or destiny, the creator and destroyer (McCulloch 1951, 72). Although it is Suku whom the Ovimbundu regard as creator and supreme being, it is significant that Suku as well is associated with rain (Hambly 1968, 123). Meanwhile, kalunga for the Ovimbundu has literal meanings such as 'sea, king, god, death', but this depends upon the tonal variation of the word, which is also the response given by a king to a commoner in answer to a greeting (pp. 214, 239). But the abode of the dead is, in the final analysis, ubiquitous, in that Johnston (1908, 2:643) also mentions a Koongo belief that the dead went to "a country of dark forest". In Koorigo, this is called mfinda, a concept of strategic importance in the cosmology of Cuban practitioners of the Mayombe or polo religions. For them, the cemetery is campo finda 'the territory of the dead', and is therefore the site of several of their rituals that involve securing earth from specific graves (Larduet 1995). The elaborate rituals for death, marriage and birth are underpinned by certain world views, which are apparent in this chapter but which will be studied in greater depth and detail in the following two chapters, which deal with religious ideas and practices. Here, we have seen how the communal impetus underlies rituals of greeting, which have at their root mutual recognition, and respect for age and social status. By the converse, social bonding is severed by ritual cursing. Death rituals serve ambiguously to distance the dead from the living, while according the dead somewhat similar levels of respect to that which the living person 136

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would have received in the temporal world. Meanwhile, social cementing and incorporation are secured by protracted birth and marriage ceremonies. The tree's multivalent symbolisms as new life, the renewal of kinship solidarity, and the steadying institution of chieftaincy are all relevant to an appreciation of some little-understood Caribbean customs which have endured over time. Similarly, the sacred signification of water and light beams, as emblems of the life of the soul, have elucidated various practices across the Caribbean region.

137

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Religion and World View Religion is that aspect of human activity which involves adoration of entities, beings, energy sources conceptualized as superhuman, even divine; it also involves supplication made to such presences in order to secure some satisfaction in the human plane. Both aspects of religion involve ritual or ceremony, born of a perception that certain formulae need to be followed to ensure propriety in the attitude of the lesser being towards the superior being and, in the case of supplication, to ensure the successful outcome of the plea. In the adorational aspect of religion there tends to be a supposition that the presence being worshipped is more powerful than the human making the adoration, the attitude of the latter being therefore one of subservience and obeisance. On the other hand, there exists a more coercive posture in supplicatory activity, which has traditionally been considered magic: in this case the human supplicant believes himself or herself able to acquire superhuman powers, which in turn enable him or her to procure or manipulate visible change in circumstances or substances. As such, the levels of power ascribed to a mediator or manipulator, and to the superhuman presences, are closer than obtains in the power relations between the adoring supplicant and the superhuman presence. Jahn comments on this dichotomy, attributing the adorational to Christianity and the coercive to African religion. 138

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The Christian . . . believer adopts a passive attitude towards God. He waits for God's grace, for God must call him. . . . In African religion . . . which is man-centred, man has an active attitude towards the gods. Through the sympathetic magic of invocation he compels the divine power to unite with him in ecstasy. . . . In ecstasy, he takes [the gods] into himself, is ridden by them, personifies them, identifies himself with them. (Jahn 1968, 158) But the dichotomies in fact co-exist in both religions. Orthodox Christianity emphasizes the adorational, but occasionally incorporates, with varying degrees of caution, faith healers, miracle workers and exorcists. In parallel fashion, some aspects of traditional African religious thought and behaviour conform more closely to the adorational axis than do others. Central African religion has tended to highlight the coercive, an emphasis which has attracted to it Western terminology such as "fetishism", "magic", "sorcery" and, in the Caribbean, "obeah". The inherent nature of the coercive mediator's power tends to be exhibited in respect of overt situations or substances. In the case of African religion, these substances tend to be related to their purpose by the deliberate metaphor of sound-meaning analogy in the words used in conjuration, and also by the metonymic relationship of the substance to the person for, or against, whom the supplication is being made. The metonymic and verbal metaphoric relationships sought in African supplicatory religious ritual1 are consonant with the world view of non-literate cultures, in that words are conceived as conveying power, and the relationship between sound and reference is closer than obtains in societies where long use of literacy forges distance and greater abstraction between the two. On the other hand, a differentiation has been observed by Africans, their transatlantic descendants and Westerners, regarding the purpose of this coercive, manipulative religious practice, in that it is used to procure healing on the one hand, and harm on the other (McCulloch 1952, 39). In Central Africa, religion is considered "good" when it relates either to personal healing or to the welfare of the collective, inclusive of public "rituals linked to the sociopolitical structure of the society".2 Privacy of function and the procurement of individual goals 139

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invites accusations of sorcery, as is typical of societies where community is primary, and secrecy is associated with evil. At the same time, traditional African religion acknowledges an ethical middle ground, so that the morality of an action may be relative or contingent; this is so for humans as well as for spiritual forces. Indeed, while it is possible that in several traditional religious philosophies the creative force is perceived as beneficent, moral relativity and evil are conceived of as within the capacity of both lesser spiritual forces and the mind of man (Gyekye 1998, 468). Similarly, "bandoki [witches], minkisi [lesser spiritual forces] and the spirits of the dead" are identified by Laman (1962, 3:54), writing of the Nsundi Koongo, as blameworthy with respect to misfortune, including illness and death. The interplay and complementarity of oppositional forces is fundamental to traditional African perspectives on existence;3 linked to this is a consciousness of "the processual nature of being" (Menkiti 1979, 158), so that oppositions do not necessarily hold between divergent essences, but interact along a continuum of approximations which eventually intersect. But in essentialist terms, the ritual interpretation of several African etiological narratives establishes "the controlling principle of twinness", and "of binary opposition" as between "thought/sign, sign/word, small/expanding, male/female, sacrifice/resurrection, order/disorder" (Ray 1976, 28-29). This mirror imaging that is, simultaneously, the refraction of opposites, is codified in Koongo by the figure called the diyowa or tendwa, which concretizes the cosmos into four quadrants, thus constituting a cross. "One line represents the boundary; the other is ambivalently both the path leading across the boundary, as to the cemetery; and the vertical path of power linking 'the above' with 'the below'" (MacGaffey in Thompson 1984, 108). This relationship, in turn, is polyvalent, since it refers to God and man, God and the dead, and the living and the dead. The division also differentiates "the domestic realm", the human community as signified by the hearth and mbanza 'courtyard, town', from that of the wilds, the watery depths, spirit spaces and trade routes (Janzen 1982, 285, 291). The points and the spaces diagrammatically define not only the geographical four corners of the world, but also the temporal "four moments of the sun dawn, noon, sunset, and the mirrored noon of the dead we call midnight" (Thompson 1984, xvi). The circle at the circumference of the 140

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four points of the cross represents the continual motion of the sun and therefore indestructibility, reincarnation (Thompson 1984, 106, 108-9). Belief in reincarnation arises because Bantu world view holds force or energy as the essence of being, and that this spiritual dynamism is in continuous interplay in the universe (Tempels 1969, 52, 58-59). Thus "one force that is greater than another can paralyze it, diminish it, or even cause its operation totally to cease, but for all that the force does not cease to exist" (p. 57). So that "the zero diminution of energy, which becomes completely static through lack of faculty to employ its vital influence on behalf of the living . . . is held to be the worst of disasters for the dead themselves". The latency offeree therefore predisposes a world view of the revitalization of force, whether in the primal cause, or in humans, animals, plants and minerals, living and departed. As such, the "spirits of the dead . . . seek to enter into contact with the living and to continue living function upon earth" (p. 65).

Indigenous Central African Religions: Mediating Agencies Priests Nganga (Ko) denotes "a physician or medical man, pharmacist, prophet, seer, visionary, fortune-teller, priest, and ndoki. He uses his kindoki to provide help rather than harm. It is not inaccurate to call him the good ndoki, or counterwitch, of bandoki" (Bockie 1993, 67). An ndoki accesses kindoki, "the art of exercising unusual powers" (p. 41). According to Buakasa, kindoki "signifies power or force. . . . It is . . . an ambivalent, ambiguous power, which arouses fear; of a dangerous and good power, capable of harming but also protecting" (in Bockie p. 43).-The concepts captured by the term nganga are reproduced among the Lwena and Luchazi in chimbanda, which itself is cognate with Umbundu okimbanda (McCulloch 1951, 81, 83) and Khoi-Khoi (Bushman) kimbanda (Estermann 1976, 10).4 The making of a Koongo nganga begins when an "nkisi would overtake with a powerful ecstasy at a watercourse or elsewhere a person for whom it conceived a liking". The entranced person might stay away for about nine days, after which she or he would return home with an nkisi 141

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in hand. This then became the core of the total nkisi which was composed "with or without song, dance or beating of the drum". If the core object had fallen from the sky, for example, the tail feather of a parrot, or a piece of mica which was thought to have come with the lightning, "then a sky-nkisi is composed. If the object is from water or land, it will, accordingly, be a water-nkisi or a land-nkisi". On the other hand, an nganga may be invested when an nkisi manifests itself "through the sickness with which it afflicts him. The sick person then summons a nganga to be cured". If the sickness is serious, "the nganga often instructs the patient to compose, under his supervision, the nkisi in question and dedicate himself to it, so that he may recover from the illness and also be able to help others. As soon as he has composed the nkisi he is its nganga" (Laman 1962, 3:69-70). Another scenario for the creation of an nganga is that an ancestral nkisi-spirit may reveal itself to a relative in a dream, or through some animal or disease; or a deceased nganga may engineer "to make the nkisis of the kanda [clan] famous or to give a certain nkisi to the village". Again, there is the pattern of an ecstatic individual finding an object and rushing to the village with it, but the individual stands in kin relationship to the deceased nganga (Laman 1962, 3:68). Among the Ovimbundu, the training of the ocimbanda lacks formal rites and initiation, neither is the position hereditary, "but the boy or girl who wishes to become an ocimbanda must have 'spirit in the head'", that is, a neurotic temperament (Hambly 1968, 273). These induction processes have much in common with those in Africa-related religions in the Caribbean. Within the Kumina religion of Jamaica, religious calling is signalled by withdrawal of the neophyte from daily life and sequestration in a trance condition. A Kumina priestess recalled her vocation experience in early teenage: how she had planted seven lilies which all bloomed one Sunday morning. That morning she encountered a silk cotton tree. She fell at its massive root enclosure and remained there in a trance for twenty-one days, during which time she neither ate nor spoke. But she had visions and was spoken to by ancestral voices, which taught her African (in fact, Koongo) words and phrases. She was also inspired to sing songs in the Koongo language. After twenty-one days she was found by relatives, who then put on a dance and "dinner" to mark her ascent in "the African world". On this occasion she became possessed by an ancestral 142

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spirit (Kennedy in Warner-Lewis 1977; Brathwaite 1978). Another Kumina practitioner fasted on the ground during four days and four nights when she first got in the spirit. She was then a schoolgirl. When she came to herself, the whole place was green and she "draw up" [envisioned] many things. She saw "all the ole arrivants them [African immigrants] - They don't have on clothes like we. They have them uniform - tall hat of straw, and clothes, and strinkets, strinkets [trinkets] around it" (Watson 1971). Nganga has served as etymon for the Dominican Republic's gaga Voodoo priest' (Baker 1993, 143), which is also the term for the vodun religion there. Meanwhile, stripped of the Koongo abstract noun prefix ki-, nganga has come in Cuba to stand for "a spirit, a supernatural force", and also for Death. The word is also applied concretely to the receptacle for that force: this may be a clay pot, a three-legged iron cauldron, or a bundle made of sacking or palm netting and containing an assortment of natural objects. This the Koongo call nkisi, which accounts for Cuban nganga nkisi, referencing the object in which the force resides. But nganga nkisi can also mean the priest who operates the receptacle. There are many other terms for this role, among them Padre [Father] Nganga or Padre Nkisi, Ngangula and Ngangulero, Nfita [Nature Spirit], Tata Kunanyanga, Ta Anabutu [Father of the Bush], Tata kui [Father of Mysteries], Kimanfinda [of the Cemeteries], Kumangongo [of the discovery of witches] (Cabrera 1986a, 126).

Ancestor Commemoration A common denominator of black African religion is its ancestor focus. Life is conceived as a process of spiritual maturation, with death an important stage in a journey of accumulating wisdom through experience, and enhancing spirit force through knowledge. The state of existence after death is that of "living dead", in the terminology of John Mbiti, and from this state the spirit eventually moves into the timeless undifferentiated eternity of what in Swahili is called the Zamani.5 "Ancestor veneration may be seen as a projection onto a mystic plane of strong, clan-centered identity", and the dominance of this aspect of religious belief "co-occurs with marked insular self-identity in areas loosely linked to large centralized governments and among acephalous peoples" (Warner-Lewis 1991b, 64). The awe and venera143

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tion in which ancestors are held in Central African religion rests on the belief that the "deceased excels the living in strength and power, because he is altogether otherwise. He has the spirit of the wind, a shape in the likeness of Nzambi and his strength; for this reason many refer to the corpse as nzambi" (Laman 1962, 3:24). On account of this, "in all the circumstances of life people must carefully meet the demands imposed upon them by their ancestors . . . and protect themselves with all caution against the evil powers surrounding them, both dead and living" (p. 257). Of relevance here is the belief of the Suriname Maroons in the kunu "avenging spirits of people or gods who were wronged during their lifetime, and who pledge themselves to tormenting eternally the matrilineal descendants and the close matrilineal kinsmen of the offender" (Price 1975a, 46).6 Both in urban and jungle areas of Suriname "kunu . . . is the vengeance meted out by gods and ancestors for violation of traditional codes of moral behavior" (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936, 69).7 "Ancestors . . . are thought of as like the elders they recently were: very conscious of their due and likely to punish disrespect. This punitive tendency is considered justifiable, and descendants hope that if they behave themselves their ancestors will exercise their capacity for violence on their behalf, against enemies" (MacGaffey 1986, 170).8 It is further instructive that kunu, kulu and kuyu are dialectal variants of the same word, with varying semantic distribution. Among some groups, Mukulu or Nkulu 'the eldest, the ancestor' is the name for the first man, while the same terms "originally designated God" for other Bantu peoples. "In the Congo, the term may also mean greatness"; yet nkulu "may also signify a deceased, the plural bakulu meaning the old people, the ancestors" (Laman 1962, 3:60).9 MacGaffey (1986, 70, 73, 136) indicates, for instance, that n'kulu means 'ancestor' and n'kuyu 'ghost' in some parts of Koongo, ghosts being evolved from witches, while in Manyanga n'kuyu refers to 'ancestor' and nyumba is reserved for 'ghost'. Kuyu is the referential term for 'ancestral spirits' among members of the Kumina religion in Jamaica, though it is unclear whether a special term is reserved for witches in the world of the dead. The belief in the retributive force and function of the ancestors appears not to be terminologically formulated in other parts of the Caribbean as it is in Suriname, though the sense of ancestral vengeance for neglect of them is a common and active belief. To deflect such 144

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vengeance, interaction with the ancestors is re-enacted within both the Kumina religion of south-eastern Jamaica and the Convince religion of the island's eastern parishes. Convince, also called Bongo, is now a little known and sporadically practised religion, carried out by individual "Bongo men", with a handful of adepts. Bongo men become possessed by ghosts of earlier Bongo men, rather than by biological antecedents. In keeping with belief in the greater potency of the eldest in the journey of life/death, "[t]he most powerful Bongo ghosts come from Africa, but the ghosts of ancient Jamaican slaves and the Maroons (descendants of runaway slaves) who perpetuated the cult until recent times are also of importance. The ghosts of Jamaicans whose deaths have occurred more recently are less powerful than the others" (Simpson 1978, 100). In Jamaican parlance, a ghost is referred to as a "spirit" or "duppy", the latter word from Twi dopi 'spirit of the dead'. The ghosts welcomed into Convince ceremonies are of persons who practised magical rituals in their lifetime. These, like the others, are expected to teach the living Bongo man "spiritual secrets, protect him, bring him good fortune, and assist him in performing magic (Obeah)". This suggests that Bongo is an ancestral and priestly society functioning across time. To fulfil the social and religious obligations of this fraternity, the Bongo man holds an annual event involving animal sacrifice, memorial services on the anniversary of the death of past members, and ceremonies to pacify ghosts or to thank them for help (pp. 100-101). In Convince, then, as in Kumina and Cuban Palo Monte, one notes a reconstitution of family relationships akin to those established on the basis of shipmate solidarity.10 In these cases, however, the basis is participation in a religious fraternity. The term 'family' is actually employed in palero parlance to signify the Palo Monte confraternity in Cuba. Palero comprises four expressions of the same religious nexus. They are Palo Monte or Mayombe, the form by which it exists in Matanzas province, Briyumba Congo in Havana, and Kimbisa and Kimfwiti, characteristic of the province of Pinar del Rio in the far west of the island (Larduet 1988). Within this confraternity as a whole and within each unit there exist hierarchical relations among members. At the base is the palanquero - a devotee who participates in ceremonies by singing responses. A mansanero's work is to secure items needed by the taata (Ko) 'father'11 of the family - objects taken from rivers, the sea, the forest, the cemetery. The yayi (< yaya (Ko) 'mother') is a female 145

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whose responsibility it is to attend to childbirth deliveries and herbal medical care within the palero family. The bakunfula is a confidant of the taata, perhaps in an apprentice relationship, who assists the taata, helps him sing, and is acquainted with his mfumbi or guardian ancestral spirit, through whose intervention with Nzambi the taata is able to pursue his spiritual work. The head of the family is the taata, who may be a taata nkisi, a priest, even one who has initiated others into the palero priesthood* but when the third generation of priests are initiated by a second-generation priest, the first-generation priest is now elevated to the status of taata nganga. In other words, a taata nganga is a priest who has initiated others who are now in their turn initiating a new generation of priests. Among the rites of initiation is the marking of incisions on the candidate's head, legs, shoulder blades, chest, even on the tongue (Larduet 1995). In Kumina the term "family" is not used to refer to the membership, who instead are called the "Bongo nation", and include ethnic subgroups such as the Muyanji (Yansi), Munchundi (Nsundi), Mumbaka (Mbaka) and Mondongo, the latter either referring to the Ndongo of Angola or serving as an omnibus term for Teke and/or a variety of hinterland Congo Basin peoples.12 As such, "Kumina groups are organized along lines of 'family' and 'nation' ancestry". Within the various congregations there is a hierarchical structure headed by "a known Science Specialist,13 who in addition to his or her priestly role doubles as an organizational head and Master of Ceremonies" (Ryman 1984, 90, 91). The family concept, however, is overt in terms of the transfer of power at this level of the ceremonial hierarchy, as it "seems to be predicated on an ideal succession by a direct family descendant" (p. 101). The only information available on Bongo or Convince suggests that it is more concerned with procuring individual benefit than Kumina is, and that it is a more private form of religious celebration than is Kumina (Hogg 1960, 3, 4). Apart from Bongo's dance religious occasions, however, it appears that intervening activity on the part of priests and priestesses is occupied by religious manipulation, whether healing or harmful. Kumina has been treated as an ancestor cult and, as such, there has been less data on the use of negative religion within Kumina, though data offered below indicates that it is practised. On the whole, however, there seems to be some overlap between Convince's reliance on ancestral spirit possession and that enacted within Kumina, but 146

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Kumina is more community-oriented than Convince. The tangential relationship between the two religions, however, is evident in their common matrix in the east of Jamaica, and the co-occurrence of the words such as mayaal, signifying an intense state of spiritual possession, malaavu 'rum', and bongo in both sects. 'Bongo' is a positive self-ascription among Kumina practitioners.14 Apart from the difference between Kumina and Convince with regard to religious manipulation, Kumina musical accompaniment is based on drums, whereas that for Convince involves hand-clapping and stick percussion. Convince also utilizes Christian hymns rendered a capelld, whereas Kumina has its own repertoire of Koongo-based and Jamaican Creole songs. In turn, Convince appears to share a similar musical content and song accompaniment as the mayaal services held in the nineteenth century. In Kumina, it is the immigrant ancestors who return to enjoy themselves in the bodies of the living, and who give advice to the community's descendants. "The express purpose of any serious Kumina ceremony, whether it be a memorial, an entombment dance, a birth celebration, or a private working [ritual], is to establish contact with the ancestral dead through the possession of living dancers by their spirits" (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 6). "You have to play the drum [so] that all the old Africans dead to [will] come. Den you gaan to mayaal. That [is] a bongo mayaal spirit. Dem old Africans, dem a ride you pon you head. . . . The duppy - some are Africans and some born in Jamaica, but they grow up in the African ways" (Kennedy 1971b). When mayaal "bites" a person, possession takes the kinetic form "of a series of long steps followed by vibrating side-wise body movements and by wheeling turns and sudden stops with pelvic forward tilt". Also characteristic are "back bending, rolling over in a succession of somersaults and climbing high coconut trees" (Baxter 1970, 138-39). That these kinetic forms characterize mayaal religion, but occur as well in Kumina, attests to the interrelationship of a number of religions in Jamaican religious history.15 To remove the spirit lest it harm its host, the leader has to blow rum onto the devotee. The Kumina "queen" or congregation leader who explained this, identified her patron spirit as Mother Murray, who also had been a head queen of Kumina. But as some of the spirits are very fierce the Kumina leader has to "rough them up, because some of them come in a manner that they would give you lick [beat or punish you] and kill you" (Kennedy 1971b). A rod may be 147

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used to help control such spirits. Correspondingly, in Koongo it was observed that "The bankuyu . . . may be put under a curse and abused if they persistently torment somebody by dreams and apparitions and leave him no rest" (Laman 1962, 3:190). During the Kumina, the ancestral spirits are fed. The food for the spirits is taken out of the general cooking first. Then, before anybody eats, the offering is placed on the ground before the drum, and the spirits are invited in words to come and eat. " 'Well, gwankas, ko dya bolo. Dya madya.' You call the spirit and say, 'Please come and have your meal and when you done you weenda back to you zwandi.' Zwaandi means 'grave'. And you put down dem sugar and water, and dem rum and who drink wine you put it side of it and leave it." Then the spirits take some of the food, and the leader of the ceremony takes some and places it to the east, west, north and south of the enclosure. "That food, after you done with it, nobody can eat it else they vomit dead [vomit till they die]." The food is buried. Salt is not put in the spirit food. "Salt and kuyu food not 'gree" (Kennedy 1971b). The significance of ancestors is further evidenced by the importance accorded to dreams. It is a medium through which instructions are given to the living. "A dream resembles a diviner who relates future events" (Laman 1962, 3:7). Thus a pregnant Jamaican dreamt that her mother appeared in a dream instructing that the child she was about to birth should be called Elizabeth. But the dreamer chose to give the child another name. The woman's subsequent illness was attributed to that disobedience. In addition, there needed to be two Kumina ceremonies to save the life of the young child, during which she was thrown this way and that, and the family had to sit down on the earth and eat. The placation represented by the religious ceremony is seen as having saved the life of the young child. Despite the mother's folly, the child as she matured became possessed by the spirits of her grandfather and grandmother during Kumina ceremonies. And she maintains the practice of Kumina because "it's our rule. We born come and see it [it was a tradition even before we were born]." Furthermore, failure to observe this rule would result in illness (Watson 1971). In Trinidad, the main Koongo communal religious ritual at the turn of the twentieth century was saraka, though one informant (Francis 1971) referred to it by the Koongo word kumbi.16 Saraka derives from an Arabic word for almsgiving, a fact which suggests some degree of 148

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syncretic interaction between the Koongo community and groups such as the Hausa and Yoruba, who also practised saraka in Trinidad. In Africa itself, the relationship between culturally Arabicized Mediterranean and Sahelian Africans, Hausa and Yoruba, was more substantial than it was between Arabs and Central African peoples. It was indeed only about 1865 that Arabs from Zanzibar reached the Lualaba-Congo and Lomami rivers (Johnston 1908 1:84). As such, it is more likely that the Caribbean rather than Africa was the site of Central African-Islamic cultural interchange. In Trinidad, saraka, or prayers as it was otherwise called, was held annually. Great quantities of food had to be prepared for saraka occasions, as many friends were invited, and children were the first group of invitees to be fed. Very often new cooking utensils were bought for the saraka., and others were borrowed from friends. So much food had to be prepared that food was cooked even during the saraka itself. For the feasting part of the celebration, people sat on the ground on sugar bags, which had been washed and spread all around the prayer room. No blood sacrifice was offered during this ceremony. Drinks served included rum, coffee and non-alcoholic beverages. Meals included yamatuta17 and sweet cassava pounded together intofufu. Kalalu - the gumbo-like Trinidad dish - was made from malanga, a type of dasheen, with boiled chataigne (breadnut) seeds inside. Plates .and spoons were made from the calabash gourd, and the food was served on banana or banana-type leaves. An account from Guyana of the food at an "African dinner", obviously another term for saraka, indicated the serving of corn kuku, gungotils or cassava kuku with okra, and copious consumption of ginger beer. This food also served as a food offering to the ancestors. It was deposited at a spot in the yard of the house where the feast was kept, and ginger beer rather than rum was used for libation. It could very well be that ginger beer served as a substitute for palm wine, the main local wine in West Africa and West Central Africa. Their similarity in physical resemblance and their comparative fizziness to the taste link these two beverages. They both have a slightly milky appearance, so much so that one European compared palm wine to coconut water (Monteiro 1875, 1:98), and while the water of the green coconut is clear, that of the dried fruit has indeed a milky, thin consistency. Then, although fresh when first tapped from the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), within 149

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hours palm wine begins to ferment and develop a fizzy tang. Fermentation of ginger beer is induced by standing crushed ginger roots in boiling water with sugar and sometimes with a little yeast, but it is drunk before becoming intoxicating like palm wine. The Trinidad saraka also had a musical aspect. During its drumming and singing session, Koongo songs would be sung. Some songs were partially in French Creole. Some Koongo examples went as follows: TKo Ye ding ding ding Koobi yangemaa Ye malongwe Kwenda kwenda lyeki yangema Ko

Ndendi ndendi

I hava followad

Kobi, yangema

Firmnass, alavatad ona

Kwenda, kwenda

Go, walk

?yangema

Elevated ona (Soney 1972)

ftoW

150

Religious Cosmology and Praxis The next song was sung on parting: TKo Malolo tomi a Malonga zamya zamya kwanda

Ko

Ma-lele Toma e Malong e Zamya-zamya kwenda

Things hava quietened down 6a wall Countrymen o Quietly, softly, go (Boney 1972)

Malele

The women wore their heads tied in Creole style, with coloured headkerchiefs tied from front to back, and front again. When possessed (unclear by whom, but most likely by ancestral spirits) they shook their bodies and did bele19 steps. They moved their waists and shoulders, though their feet hardly moved, making only tiny steps. They would make a sudden curtsey while dancing. Whereas no word is remembered in Trinidad for this motion, in Jamaican Kumina it is called salo < saala (Ko) cto rest'. A Kumina queen explained, "When you dancing the bongo, the African language tune, you salo, salo, you drop, kotsi [curtsey], bow to the drum and to the audience. You dey pon Kumina now, you ripe ina bongoz [you are there in Kumina now, you are truly dancing the Kumina bongo style]" (Kennedy 1971b). The Trinidad description of the small steps accompanied by the movement of shoulders and waist accords well with the dance style of the Kumina, which is a mincing shuffle forward on the ball of the feet, with the torso at a backward diagonal from the hips, which together with the shoulders agitate gracefully. This choreography is replicated in the dance for the dugu ancestral commemoration by the Black Caribs, or Garifuna ~ Garinugu of Belize, even involving the sudden forward torso thrust that 151

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marks the reversal of direction of the dancer's movement (Greene 2001; Kerns 1983, 157-64). Indeed, this resemblance leads one to speculate on the possible relationship between the Garifuna word dugu and the ndungu drum mentioned by Laman (1968, 4:70) in an entertainment context, and moreso with the southern Koongo duku, a little drum beaten in lamentation for the dead, and perhaps not unconnected to the noun ndungulu 'death-throes, suffering'. The outline of the saraka in Trinidad may be compared with ancestral commemorative events in both Cuba and Guadeloupe. In the hills of Capesterre Belle-Eau in Guadeloupe, a family descended from nineteenth-century contract labourers and bearing the Koongo name Massembo/Massimbo have continued the tradition of honouring their ancestors.20 The festivities are held annually on the night of 1 November, the Catholic Feast of All Saints, La Toussaint) with activities centring around the singing of Koongo songs and the performance of Koongo dances and drumming. A similar event, called la comida 'the meal', was held among the "Congo" and their descendants in the quarter known as La Guinea within the town of Las Lajas in Central Cuba. Up to the 1970s, the dinner took place in the Casino or cabildo called Sociedad Africana Casino San Antonio. This structure was built in the mid-nineteenth century as the religious and community centre in which the "Congo" held their dances, conducted funerals and performed public religious rituals. The dinner formed part of the religious activities with which Catholic saint days were marked, but the researcher of this group does not specify whether the dinner was connected to events marking ancestral memorials. It was, however, an occasion on which much meat was served: pork, goat mutton and chicken. In addition, there were sweets, drinks, chocolate, crackers and coffee. Children were served first. A plate of cooked meat was placed in front the statue of the Catholic saint, Anthony, which occupied the altar in the Casino. Another offering was made to the pot or cazuela which contained the fundamento, that is, the ingredient/s which constituted the "seat" or locus of the prenda that was kept in the home of the mayombero, priest. This offering consisted of the blood of the goat which had been sacrificed for the occasion, and its sexual organs (Garcia Herrera 1972, 165). Prenda appears to designate what the Koongo call nkisi. Another name for a cazuela or metal casserole which contains a number of ritual objects is a kindembo, an abstract term for an authority over a type of 152

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sacred power (Hechevarria 1995; Larduet 1995). The term is derived from ndembo or coronation chalk, which is one of the insignia of the office of chieftaincy; however, the Cuban kindembo is not particularly linked to the chalk or clay mpemba which the palero uses extensively in his rituals.

Nature Spirits In addition to invocation of the group's ancestors within Jamaican Kumina and Cuban palero., there is within these religions a concept of a First Cause, though adorational rituals to this spirit are not part of religious activity. In Jamaica, the First Cause is called Zaambi Ampongo ~ Ampuungo, or King Zaambi, or King Ampuungo, a partial Anglicization of Kinzambi Ampungo (Ko) 'most powerful spirit'. Zambi is one of the spirits of the Boni Maroons of French Guyane (Bastide 1971, 59). In Jamaica, Zaambi Ampuungo is linked to thunder, just as in Koongo, where Nzambi is "credited with universal power in the sky and on earth", manifesting in rain, thunder, lightning and death, as well as "in the growing plants, flowers, trees and fruits, in the birth of man, his growth, his getting a beard and grey hairs" (Laman 1962, 3:55). Mpungu signifies "large, supernatural or wonderful" (p. 60). For Cuban paleros, "Sambia prepared the menga - the blood - that runs through the veins and moves the body, gives it life, and breathes into the nkutu - the ears - intelligence to comprehend" (Cabrera 1986a, 124; my translation). In Cuba, on the evidence of a palero informant, Nzambi inhabits the sun, and sometimes the moon (Larduet 1988). Cabrera's informants equated Sambi with "the great God who lives in the sky, who is greater than . . . the other Sambia who is on earth" (Cabrera 1986b, 77; my translation). . . . above all is Sambia. For this reason it is always said "Sambia above, Sambia below", Sambia nsuloy Sambia ntoto. Thus there are two Sambia and it is the same Tubisian Sambi Sambia Munansulu: great God who is there in the sky and Mpungo Sambia bisa muna ntoto: Sambia who came to make the world and made everything. (Cabrera 1986a, 129; my translation) 153

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The earth is conceived of as the wife of the sun, Tangu. During the day, the sun would burn their children, so Ngunda, the moon, made a pact with the earth to save her children. The moon gave earth dew at night, while sun was asleep, and refreshed the earth. In that way the plants did not dry up (Cabrera 1986b, 119). The moon itself, called gunda < ngonde (Ko), "is the primary star for the mayombero" (Cabrera 1986b, 121; my translation), no doubt because of its mirroring association with the earth, paradoxically the element best exemplifying fertility/possibility, yet at the same time the location of things that die. That mirroring relationship is exemplified also in the understanding that Nzambi/Nsambi lives sometimes in the earth and at times in the new moon (Larduet 1988). ' In Cuba, Sambia heads a spiritual hierarchy. Immediately below are the kimpungulu, or pantheon of mpungu or nature forces (Hechevarria 1995), who are represented as minkisi and manipulated to perform benefits for the supplicant. Some of these forces are equated with Catholic saints, Biblical figures and Yoruba deities: Pandilanga with Jesus; Kabanga, Mpungo Lomboan Fula with St Francis; Bakuende Bamba di Ngola, patron of the Koongo, with "King Melchor who originated in Koongo"; Pungun Futila, or Tata Funde, with St Lazarus; Nkitan Kitan, Mukiamamuilo, or Nsasi, with Shango and St Barbara; Yola, or Mama Kengue, with Obatala and Our Lady of Mercies; Pungu Mama Wanga, or Yaya Kengue, with Oya and Our Lady of la Candelaria; Sindaula Ndundu Yambaka Butan Seke with Osain or St Silvester; Mpungu Mama Wanga, Choya Wengue with Oshun or the Virgin of Charity; Pungo Dibudi with Ogun, or St Peter; Lufo Kuyu, or Watariamba, with Ogun and Oshosi together, or St Peter and St Norbert; Zarabanda with Ogun Asibiriki or St Michael the Archangel; Nkuyu with E(Legba), the soul in Purgatory; Majumbo Moungu Mpungu or Ntala, and Nsamba with the twins, St Cosmo and St Damian. Also among the mpungu are nature spirits: Cuatro Vientos [Four Winds] denominates the four parts of the world, while there is a mountain force called Nkita Kinseke, or Minseke. Water spirits, called nkita, yimbi or simbi nkita, carry names such as Mboma, Mama Kalunga, Pungo Kasimba, Mama Umba, Mbumba Mamba, Nkita Kiamasa, or Nkita Kuna Masa, or Kisimbi Masa, Nkita Kuna Mamba, Baluande. An nkisi to the element of water, such as Nkisi Masa, is composed of aquatic 154

Religious Cosmology and Praxis

plants, sand, mud, pebbles, shells and a snake (Cabrera 1986a, 128-29). Hilton categorizes nature spirits as belonging to the mbumba dimension of Koongo cosmogony. This dimension appears . . . to have been expressed in a cluster of beliefs and rituals involving a giant snake, water, trees, fire and fertility rites as well as individual water and earth spirits. . . . In the seventeenth century mbumba literally meant fecund, and the rites of the nkimba mbumba cult, which appealed to mbumba, appear to have concerned fertility. (Hilton 1985, 13) However, "certain modern sources consider mbumba to be no more than one-amongst many spirits" (Hilton 1985, 13) though among the Shongo sub-group of the Koongo, Bumba is the creator (Laman 1953, 1:13). Ma' bumba is one of the divinities of the Boni Maroons of French Guyane (Bastide 1971, 110), as well as among the coastal peoples of Suriname (Price 1975b, 463), ma- being a respectful title of address for kings, senior officials and divinities. In the relatively dry coastal areas south of the Congo River, nature spirits were known as simbi (Hilton 1985, 13), a term which occurs in the religious concepts of both Cuban palero and Haitian vodun. The Haitian configuring of Simbi places this loa at the "crossroads" of both the benevolence of the Rada deities and the aggression of the Petro pantheon. The hybridity which attaches to Simbi stems from its conceptualization as a snake, and in this it resembles Dambala, the python deity prominent in the Rada sector of vodun rites; at the same time, the Koongo aspect of Simbi allies it with the water and with the snake associations of the mbumba dimension. As such, an aspect of Simbi is the principle of Simbi-a-de-zo 'Simbi in two waters', which "straddles the waters above and the waters below the earth", and which correspond to "the heavenly and the abysmal waters", or "the sweet and salt waters" (Deren 1970, 117). Again, one may see a correspondence between this image and that reported among the Ovimbundu, who "regard the ndala snake with great awe, describing it as a magical serpent which dwelt high on the inaccessible slopes of mountains and could fly mysteriously through the air" (Miller 1976, 96). The dual aspect of simbi spirits appears captured in the iconography of termite hills which stand tall above the land and yet conceal a fecund underground life. For among 155

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some Koongo-speaking peoples, such as the Suku, the term bisimbi 'spirits of the waters, forests and bushes' was absent from their vocabulary, and they equated it with what they labelled instead bikuku, "termite hills which were sometimes inhabited by a mvumbi [spirit of a dead person] or a muloki [a witch]" (Lamal 1965, 174; my translation) This correspondence probably accounts for the observation that in Tobago, the "nests of wood ants are supposed to be the abode of spirits. If the workman [healer priest] thinks that such a nest is the abode of an evil spirit he performs various rites and cuts it through with one stroke of his cutlass" (Elder, "Jack Lantern . . . " in Pearse 1955). Yet another Koongo imaging of simbi is Mbumba Lwangu, the rainbow serpent . . . patron of the Yombe KiNkimba initiation cult, in which it was represented by a double-headed statuette (the upper and lower rainbows). He was spoken of as arising from the water, climbing a tree, and launching himself across the sky; in some myths he is opposed to Nsazi the thunder dog, a sky dweller. (MacGafifey 1986, 79-80) In Cuba, the rainbow is known as bumba ~ mbumba (Cabrera 1984, 24). The Haitian Simbi thus unites these various worlds in the form of a snake, which signifies the revolution of the soul through the spiritual cosmos (Rigaud 1953, 341). In the "well watered middle zone [of the Congo Basin], the nature spirits tended to be known as nkita and to be more closely associated with the earth". Another group of spirits was associated with the sky, the locus of the nkadi mpemba dimension. These spirits "were concerned with the social and cultural world of man" (Hilton 1985, 13, 16). They enabled the acquisition of wealth, provided defence against external evil, and allowed manipulation of the natural world for material ends.21 Here again, in the polarities of the bumba and nkadi mpemba trajectories, one encounters the conflict between sublimity and worldliness, purity and impurity, idealism and pragmatism which infuses the perception of the quizzical inter-relationship between good and evil outlined by Bockie (1993) with regard to witchcraft. One may see in these quasi-oppositions, the distinctions between male and female, aggression and passivity, proactivity and compliance, the engineered and the natural, yet with neither quality belonging exclusively to 156

Religious Cosmology and Praxis

one or the other spiritual tendency., though the dominance of aspect predicates one or the other classification (MacGaffey 1986, 171). The Petro rituals of Haitian vodun are in several respects linked to Koongo spirits, although there is a cluster of rites known specifically as "Congo". In his analysis of this association, Heusch suggests rather perceptively that the Don Pedro, after whom the Petro rituals are named, may not have hailed from Santo Domingo but may be a recall of "the name of the four kings (Pedro I, II, III and IV) who reigned over the Kongo Kingdom from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. . . . Don and Dona were honorary titles used by the Kongo in imitation of the Portuguese" (Heusch 1995, 108). But there may be some truth to the idea that Don Pedro was a Maroon leader, given the example of Makaya (chapter 3). It is therefore possible that a Maroon leader deliberately took the name of the Koongo king as a reconstitution of the type of spiritual Koongo kingdom which Heusch himself noticed at Nansoukry in northern Haiti in the 1980s. In general, Petro loa are considered "bitter", "salty", or "harsh",22 and the Congo Zandor rites of vodun feature gods who are violent and aggressive. Similarly, Maroon possession in Jamaica takes a martial and violent character. Perhaps Maroon connection or source may explain why Petro himself is addressed as Petro criminel> why the Petro simbi "are sometimes thought to be criminals" or, for some Haitians, linked with the "baka squad of bad loa with whom sorcerers make deals" (Heusch 1995, 111-12). There may indeed be a link between "criminal" in this sense and the semantic field one detects in the term mambi.23

Manipulative Power: Ritual and Competitive It has been observed that Central African religion is heavily involved with manipulation of spiritual force, involving the agency of organic substances, more so than with spirits which are praised and supplicated. "Force, the potent life, vital energy are the object of prayers and invocations to God, to the spirits and to the dead, as well as of all that is usually called magic, sorcery or magical remedies" (Tempels 1969, 45). Religion among lineages is, on the other hand, largely concerned with ancestral conciliation and veneration, but this does not debar lin157

Central Africa in the Caribbean

eage religion from involvement with manipulative or coercive engagement with, and display of, power. In the tradition of Central African religious emphases, the Cuban palero works with energy-bearing natural substances such as "sticks, bones, blood, forest trees" (Montejo 1968, 139) - the reason in fact for the religion in Cuba being given the name derived frompalo (Sp) 'stick, branch'. It is possible for an nganga or pot in a palero's shrine to be filled with bundles of short sticks darkened by the various offerings made to the nganga. Furthermore, the term vititi nfinda, which forms part of the subtitle to Lydia Cabrera's book El Monte, derives from bititi . . . nfinda (Ko) 'leaves of the forest', oviti being as well 'tree, stick' in Umbundu (McCulloch 1952, 37). Even though a significant aspect of African traditional religion throughout the continent was concerned with herbal knowledge and with imitative as well as contagious magic, Central African religious practice has been perceived to be closer to magic than some other African-derived religious traditions in the Caribbean. For example, the following distinction, made in Cuba, is also made in Trinidad: while the Yoruba deities cannot be commanded, the dead and the spirits manipulated by the palero or mayombero are ordered and obey (Cabrera 1986a, 122). As such, the palero rites are more secretive than are those for the Yoruba orisha 'deities', even though the latter are capable of procuring benefit as well as causing harm (Cabrera 1986a, 120-23). This is because the bases of the distinction in the Christian ethos drawn between good and transgression are differently sited in Koongo, and for that matter African, religion. In strongly clan-centred societies, what is good is that which works towards the communal interest, whereas in its ideal formulations Christianity espouses a transcendent ethos, one not contingent on context or circumstance: absolute principles such as humility, self-sacrifice and forgiveness are not only endorsed but required to be promulgated. This, however, does not preclude clerics and practitioners from infringing these precepts for ethnic, political, or personal convenience and rationalizations. A major difference between Yoruba or Rada (Fon) religion and "Congo" religion lay in a greater preoccupation, in the latter, with the hermetic practice of manipulative religion and the avenues available for its realization. Because of this secrecy, and the possibility of harnessing manipulative power for destructive and vengeful purposes, in Haiti the 158

Religious Cosmology and Praxis

"Iwa Congo ["Congo" deities] are thought to be cruel and malevolent" (Montilus 1993, 162). A parallel perception presented itself in Cuba: "There was no love lost between the Congolese magic-men and the Congolese Christians, each of whom thought they were good and the others wicked. This still goes on in Cuba. The Lucumi [Yoruba] and Congolese did not get on either; it went back to the difference between saints24 and witchcraft" (Montejo 1968, 37). Similarly, in nineteenthcentury Trinidad, "the Yoruba considered the Congos unclean, hygienically and spiritually, and too boastful of the efficacy of their 'science' [witchcraft], which the Yoruba saw as a distortion of spiritual wisdom" (Warner-Lewis 199la, 23; Elder 1988, 20). The Guyanese were also in awe and fear of the vengeful power of "Congo science" (Sinclair 1994; Morrison 1994). In Trinidad, the paternal grandmother's uncle of the calypsonian Growling Tiger was a "Congo" medicine man who could twist someone's mouth in revenge for some wrong which the person had committed. He had a domineering personality. Another Trinidad informant recalled a "Congo" man called Joe Wanga. Wanga < u-anga (Mb) meant 'necromancy', 'witchcraft, criminal and non-criminal' (Chatelain 1894, 288). Cognate terms, bwanga among the Luba (Tempels 1969, 45) and owanga, with the same semantic content, exist in Umbundu (McCulloch 1952, 39; Childs 1969, 22). Wanga, for the related Chokwe, Lunda and Lwena of Angola, means sorcery as well as the material substances used in sorcery and the supernatural power inherent in these substances, a range of meanings which apply in Haiti (McCulloch 1951, 79, 80; Rigaud 1953, 83). In Tobago, herbalists and ritual specialists are known as "wanga-men" or "workman". One tale of such a practitioner's powers was recalled in the essay "Mamba" (Elder, in Pearse 1955, Envelope 6). A child was taken by his mother to a wanga-man "who duly held a dance. At this dance this Wanga-man was ridden by a spirit from Africa named Mamba. The spirit prescribed the remedy and in a few months he was completely cured. . . . At Reel Dances and Congo Dances, [the old man] was ridden by the spirit Mamba", Mamba being a Koongo water spirit. A Trinidad Koongo descendant boasted: "The Koongo have wanga." They were more "scientific" than the Yoruba. "They will fight a lion and destroy it." Magic even enabled science-men to fly like birds (Pierre 1972). "Amulets of various kinds were always worn when the 159

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Kongo appeared in festive attire at dances and so forth, as they then met other people who might easily cast a spell upon them or 'eat' them by resorting to magic" (Laman 1953, 1:76).25 There were further instances of "Congo" magical potency in the following tales from Trinidad. Before a dance started, drums would start to beat and there was a test of every headman who had brought groups to the dance. Sometimes, the women who had been brought by a particular group would desert the group and go with another company of men. The headman whose women had left would jump into the air and say: "Tonight, boli epi boli,26 that mean 'man and man' . . . they going to test out each other." The headman had to cut that spell. Another time, "You notice out there a lot of women with snake all round them crawling on them, that head fellow now he's going to jump up in the air and cut that. You notice out there again a set of people like they sleeping, they cut that. When they done, all the headmen shake hand, drum, dance. You must do that f i r s t . . . to test each other to see whether you is a good man or not" (Pierre 1972). Another tale followed: Once my grandfather and them dancing out there. Union Village there. Some of the children, the bwa sa nputu and them, they want to dance kariso.21 So they came in the tent and they start: "You damn old Koongo, we want to dance we kariso" A old African man, he got up from the seat, and he took out a little stick and he hit it on the palais [covered enclosure], bom, this red jack Spaniard [wasps] come out by the hundred. Swell everybody face. All who is dancing Koongo, nothing. All the kariso dancers, their face got swollen. Face big big they can't see. They had to come and beg, "Do, papa" ['be kind to us']. (Pierre, 1972) In Jamaica, the Koongo were also known to be "scientific people" (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 35). Many tales are told of how the "old Africans" could make drums beat by themselves, or rather, by unseen spiritual forces. Sometimes the drums would be covered by a sheet before the mystical sounds would emanate. One person narrated that spirits in the form of two frogs played the drums one night. This type of feat is called "sala bilongo", glossed as "working obeah" (p. 46). These types of contests found their counterpart in other parts of the Caribbean. In Cuba, there was a game called quimbumbia. 160

Religious Cosmology and Praxis

At sunset the various groups got together to play quimbumbia, which was like witchcraft, and they almost always used drums as in the stick game. Quimbumbia was a Congolese thing. At one time two teams of magic-men used to compete with each other. First they planted a plantain-tree in the middle of a circle drawn on the ground and then each magic-man cast a spell on the plantain-tree to make it grow fruit. They would pass in front of it, kneel, squirt two or three mouthfuls of alcohol over it, and the first one to make it grow fruit was the winner. The winner could eat the bananas or share them out among his team, if he liked. . . . Whenever these groups wanted to play quimbumbia they got handfuls of magic sticks from the forest and tied them in bundles of five, to give each man strength Quimbumbia was almost always played at night. . . kerosene lamps . . . [were] used . . . to light the quimbumbia ceremony. (Montejo 1968, 142-43) Similar performances are common in the Koongo, where they are used by master drummers to show the community that they are experts in the art of drumming, and have undergone the proper training and initiation. At such times, drummers may cover themselves with a white sheet before beginning to play, claiming that in the next few moments they will produce an animal from inside the drum (most commonly, a snake). If their drumming is up to the standards of a nganga . . . then the animal that was named should come crawling from the open end of the drum, while the player continues performing under the sheet. The very best drummers are said to be able to cover the drums and make them sound by themselves. . . . In such cases, it is understood that the power controlling the drums originates from an ancestral spirit belonging to the drummer's clan. Sometimes . . . this spirit will manifest itself in the form of an animal, such as a snake, which crawls around in the vicinity of the drums until it is ready to return to the world of the ancestors. (Bilby and Bunseki 1983, 46-47) Magic is also employed by Kumina people in times of trouble. Thus, if someone was involved in a court case, the Kumina followers would 161

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open a flask of rum and call the spirits with libation, saying "Gwankas, wainda from a yaandi.28 Wainda drUmantadi ZD", meaning 'Ancestors, come from yonder/your home. Come (to) police house'. Then the police would not show up in court because they would fall asleep until the case was over. It is also believed that one can send a malevolent spirit to somebody who has offended you. On the client's behalf, the priest or priestess can call the mundongo29 spirit by blowing rum through the mouth, and the spirit will find the house of the person to be attacked. Then the spirit will either "shat [shoot, hit] you a box or queeza [squeeze] you troat [throat] or suck you, suck you, feed you, and suck you out to nothing [reduce you to skin and bone]" (Kennedy 1971b). This harmful aspect of religious ideology was expounded on by a Cuban Maroon: The Congolese worked magic with the sun almost every day. When they had trouble with a particular person they would follow him along a path, collect up some of the dust he walked upon and put it in the nganga [sacred pot] or in some little secret place. As the sun went down that person's life would begin to ebb away, and at sunset he would be dying. I mention this because it is something I often saw under slavery. (Montejo 1968, 34) These beliefs echo the Haitian conviction in the capacity of a person with mystical powers to deprive another person of his or her soul and life-force, without physically destroying the victim. The victim becomes a zombi, a word no doubt derived from nzumbi (Mb) 'spirit of a deceased', and related also to nzambi (Ko) meaning 'spirit'.30 The soul of a zombi has been "eaten" by an agent with greater spiritual power than that possessed by the victim. In this "metaphorical cannibalism" one " 'eats up one's enemies' (and friends!). A surviving twin is proud of the death of his brother or sister because he has 'eaten him up'. It is ... part of the process of acquiring extra-normal powers" (Williams 1933, 43). The use of the verb "to eat" in these contexts parallels its use in Koongo. "The verb -dia, to eat, expresses the action by which the muloki [witch]31 annihilates or diminishes the vital force of its victim with a view to eventuating its physical death" (Lamal 1965, 199, fn., my translation ). "To eat means to acquire something or to 162

Religious Cosmology and Praxis use something., for instance money in trading, in order to get hold of coveted articles. Thus, to eat debt means to acquire a debt" (Laman 1962, 3:54). Likewise among the Mbundu "eat" includes the European meaning of the word but has "much broader senses which could apply to capture or appropriation of another's possessions for oneself. Enemies thus 'ate' their captives by killing them, enslaving them, or actually consuming parts of their bodies. Chiefs 'ate' the tribute which they received from their people whether it consisted of food-stuffs or of palm cloths and ivory" (Miller 1976, 249).

Ritual Icons Nkisi The preoccupation of Central African religion with ancestors is concretely realized by the use of relics of the dead in the composition of religious icons. Thus, "medicine hearts of the images [which constitute nkisi, the objectification of spiritual force] contain a live insect or an object from a grave that is possessed by a nkuyu, which may thus be incorporated with the image and the nkisi" (Laman 1962, 3:74). Similarly, after an nkisi is prepared in Cuba, some priests take it to the graveyard - nfinda Kalunga [forest of Death] - for three weeks and then to a ceiba [silk cotton tree (Bombax heptaphyllum)] or banyan in the forest - nfinda anabutu - for an equal length of time. When taken back home, it is fed cock's blood and spices (Cabrera 1986b, 124). Many Koongo nkisi are wooden carvings which represent the power of a deity. Sometimes nails were driven into nkisi to rouse the spirit they contained to proceed on tasks of inflicting violence, disease and nightmares (MacGaffey 1993, 76). Clubs studded with nails were retributive minkisi. A type of avenging nkisi is called nkondi 'hunter' (pp. 75-76), a term for a type of amulet in Cuba (Cabrera 1984, 30). Minkisi (plural) are described in the following way by an early twentieth-century Central African Christian convert: They receive . . . powers by composition, conjurating, and consecration. They are composed of earths, ashes, herbs, and leaves, and of relics of the dead. They are composed in order to relieve and benefit people, and to make a profit . . . to visit 163

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Figure 6.1 An nkondi-type nkisi, aggressive in posture., metal studded to rouse the spirit to hostile action, and reflecting evil back to its sender from its glass centre. Museum Kura Hulanda, Curasao.

consequences upon thieves, witches, those who steal by sorcery, and those who harbor witchcraft powers. Also to oppress people. They are the properties of minkisi, to cause sickness in a man, and also to remove it. To destroy, to kill, to benefit. To impose taboos on things and to remove them. To look after their owners and to visit retribution upon them. The way of every nkisi is this: when you have composed it, observe its rules lest it be annoyed and punish you. It knows no mercy. (Simon Kavuna, Cahier 58, in MacGaffey 1993, 21) Priests owned and operated important minkisi. A Trinidad informant indicated that she had in her possession a little metal statue of a naked man, with its hands missing, which her Koongo grandfather had previously kept. While its use was no longer known, it was assumed that it had served as a talisman (Nicholls 1989). Minkisi (plural) are not 164

Figure 6.2 Koongo tnakuta

Figure 6.3a Wrapped nkisi, Congo

Figure 6.3b Haitian paquette

Figure 6.4 Cazuela of the mayombero, J.L. Baro (Cabrera 1986b)

Central Africa in the Caribbean

usually of metal, rather of wood. Perhaps the African had not shaped it himself, but had found a figurine which to him resembled an nkisi and related to it as such. Meanwhile, within the Haitian vodun "powerful Congo Petro paquettes" are used: they are described as "doll-like, roundbellied figures full of many magic and spiritual powers" (Dunham 1983, x). The paquette has a round gourd as its base, surmounted by a bottle neck to which two handles are attached, representing shoulders and arms. The handles are tied to the base of the bottle neck by gold strands, while multi-coloured ostrich feathers are plugged into the mouth of the bottle neck. Within the gourd are placed the multifarious items which go into an nkisi: animal substances like chicken paste, powder made from cow or deer horn; earth taken from a churchyard, cemetery, forest, or crossroads; and vegetal matter such as guinea pepper, cinnamon powder, ginger, mustard (Maximilien 1982, 185, 187). This type of nkisi resembles the "two calabashes covered with shells . . . and topped with a bash of feathers, decorated with iron hooks" which formed part of the assemblage to Boessi-Batta, a major public nkisi seen in seventeenth-century Loango (Janzen 1982, 52). "Clay cooking pots were among the most common containers for minkisi', one term describing the preparation of medicines is that they were 'cooked'" (MacGaffey 1993, 67). In Cuba iron cooking pots (cazuela), three-legged cauldrons (caldero) and coiled-work baskets (canasta) are recipients of the multitudinous objects heaped to make an nganga, as the Cuban equivalent of the Koongo nkisi is called. The reason for this crowdedness was explained as follows: A Prenda is like the whole world in miniature and through it you dominate; this is why the ngangulero puts in his cauldron all the spirits: in there are contained the cemetery, the bush, the river, the sea, the thunderbolt, the whirlwind, the sun, the moon and the stars. A concentration of forces. (Cabrera 1986b, 131) Another powerful nkisi is a packet wrapped in burlap sacking or a kerchief. In Cuba, this is called either a kita or a macuto (bag). Kita (Mb) is referent for "a bundle" which "consists of bones, claws, rags, hairs, etc., which the diviner shakes in his divining basket before throwing them on the ground" to read divinations from their positions (Chatelain 1894, 288). Descendants of black Venezuelans who 166

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migrated to Trinidad and settled in areas such as Lopinot, a village at the foothills* of the Northern Range, Coryal near the island's centre, and in Fyzabad in the south-west, apply the term makuta to an oblong packet inscribed with the diyowa cross within a circle, which can be placed in the cleft of a woman's breasts, and to a square version which can be tied with string around the waist (Agard 1995).32 These drawings resemble the/z'rraas 'signatures' (Cuba) and pantos riscados 'drawn points' (Brazil) which are based on the Koongo "emblems of the crossroads and the union of the worlds of the living and the dead" (Thompson 1991, 4).

Figure 6.5 Some forms of the Koongo sacred diyowa. Adapted from Bunseki 1969.

Figure 6.6 Mokongo sign in Abakua religion, Cuba. Adapted from Sosa Rodriguez 1982.

Figure 6.7 Petro veve, Haiti. Adapted fromDeren 1970.

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These rnakuta contain earth from a new grave of a relative which is taken up on a moonlit night. Makuta is the plural form of kuta (Ko), referring to "medicine sold in the market in little packets of leaves of an nkisi Kuta" (Laman 1964; my translation). In the Cuban case, within the macuto is encapsulated a spirit called boumba. One may hypothesize a relationship between the Cuban boumba and Mbumba, a powerful nkisi used in Yombe and along the Loango coast, as well as in other parts of Koongo. In fact, among the Shongo sub-group of the Koongo, Bumba is the creator god (Laman 1953, 1:13), though the role is more often identified as Nzambi or Bunzi, the Yombe term for Nzambi. The term Mbumba may even have been used as "an honorific title applied to all supernatural forces inhabiting an nkisi (fetish), and . . . it always implied the idea of mystery" (Geggus 199la, 28). Indeed, MacGaffey indicates that mbumba is a generic term for minkisi along the coastal area north of the Zaire River (MacGaffey 1993,71). The kita contained grave dirt, twigs, a skull. The base of the bag was marked in chalk with a circle containing a cross. This bundle hung from the loft, a wooden platform close to the ceiling which served as a granary. Before the kita was lowered, the floor was swept and then marked by the mayombero or palero with the chalk sign of the circle and the cross on which the kita would rest (Cabrera 1986b, 126-28). Thompson quotes Fu-Kiau Bunseki: "To stand upon this sign meant that a person was fully capable of governing people, that he knew the nature of the world, that he had mastered the meaning of life and death" (Thompson 1984, 109). This same meaning of universality, the constitution of the "four winds" or four corners of the cosmos, is understood in the sign of the Mokongo grade or office within Cuban Abakua, a male secret society.33 The placing of the boumba upon this cosmogram therefore signified domination, and the invocation of ubiquitous power. This sign is reproduced in a cross-shaped maracas called the joukou-joukou [jukujuku] in Haitian vodun> also called asson Wangol 'Angolan rattle' by the Central African descendants in the Jacmel area of southern Haiti. The figure is made up of two rods, with two gourds stuck at the ends of the short transverse cane and another affixed at the top of a longer vertical pole. A fourth gourd is made to spiral up and down along the lower section of the vertical pole as it catches in notches along the pole, producing sound. This sound is the Word of the First 168

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Principle, for which the cross bears the name of one of the Igbo words for the Creative Force, Chukwu. The cross itself replicates in its divisions the earth and the sky; the movement of the fourth gourd along the stake represents the fluid and the fixed, as mirrored in the rigid poteau mitan 'centre post' of the vodun shrine bearing a painting along it of the snake deity Dambala (Rigaud 1953, 256-58). Minor minkisi are small and cheap; "everybody had one or two that were worn about the body, hung up in the house, or placed in gardens to protect crops from theft" (MacGaffey 1993, 49). These arrettes, as they are known in Haiti, are "magical safeguards . . . whose efficacy depends on the technique of careful wrapping (the idea being to enclose the soul well, so as to keep it from evil)" (Deren 1970, 275). These bundles or objects are hung in the house or in a nearby tree, or buried in the house precincts (Courlander 1960, 98). In Cuba, another kind of charm took the form of a stick or a bone (Montejo 1968, 136), and the following comment made with reference to nineteenth-century Martinique may not be unrelated: "A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might be a malefice which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken and swell up" (Hearn 1890, 185). In Cuba, there are also minkisi which utilize thunderstones. Thunderstones - matari - were regarded as minkisi, and either placed at the top of the components of a sacred cauldron or, if kept separately, were given offerings of metal objects, iron or steel filings, an egg, and the blood of a white dove or cock (Cabrera 1986b, 137, 141). In addition, amulets were composed of stones: The best charms are made with pebbles. All you have to do is fill a little leather bag with them and hang it round your neck, but the important thing is never to neglect it. The bag needs to be fed from time to time . . . and the food is chosen by the lord of the magic pot, who is the one who gives out the charms; usually it is garlic and pods of the guaguao-tree, also a little alcohol to drink, and an occasional pinch of Guinea pepper. (Montejo 1968, 137) Sexual abstinence had to accompany the wearing of a charm. To break this taboo would result in failure to secure an erection (Montejo 1968, 136). The habit of carrying celts in the pocket is also noted as a custom among the "Congo" of La Guinea in central Cuba (Garcia 169

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Herrera 1972, 156). Thunderstones were also used as minkisi to produce rain. Old "Congo" men in Cuba would place matari Mamba Mamba being the spirit presiding over the waters - among other offerings at the foot of a royal palm tree in order to secure rainfall. Rain could also be produced by nailing a needle empowered by a matari to the trunk of a palm tree (Cabrera 1986b, 266-67). The connection between the matari and rain is due to the fact that "a pebble is a water spirit" (MacGaffey 1986, 14), and the connection of rain and the palm tree is that by its height, the palm tends to attract lightning. In fact, it is reported that the "Congo" at La Guinea in Cuba would take note of places where lightning had struck, so that seven days later they could collect the celts there, which they considered charged with mystic energy (Garcia Herrera 1972, 156). The stone is representative of the quality of immortality because [T]hose sojourning in the otherworld live for a very, very long time. When they grow weak from age, they shed their skins as snakes do, are rejuvenated, and become sturdy and strong. Then they live again, weaken, shed their skins and are renewed once more. After shedding their skins five or six times they become water simbi and go to live in pools, wherever there are very hard rocks, and there they settle with those who have previously become bisimbi. (Thompson 1984, 108)34 Thus, as "the dead become more remote, they become more like stones, resistant to subsequent transformation by the organic processes that change the living, animals, and plants. Minor local spirits (bisimbi and bankita) are said to be smooth round stones from the bottom of a river." Indeed, Nzambi, himself associated with rain and thunder, is sometimes conceptualized "like an immovable rock" (MacGaffey 1986, 76). The ability of Koongo "sciencemen" to produce rain is also remembered in Trinidad (Warner-Lewis 199la, 23). Indeed, "Congo people were believed to be able to make rain fall on their own farms without touching those of their non-Congo neighbours." In central Trinidad, at "Congo Hill on Mayo Road, we found old house-sites overgrown with bush or covered with sugar-cane. There were mounds of stones surrounding large old euphorbia trees, at the root of which were many thunderstones (celts)" (Elder 1988, 20). In the light of the Cuban evi170

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dence, such stones bear silent testimony of their use by "Congo" in Trinidad, probably also for rainmaking. Furthermore, the presence of the particular trees where the celts were found stands as a further link to the ethno-cultural past of the people who lived there, for of Angola we read that "the villages are generally situated in places where trees and shrubs abound, and the different huts are mostly separated by hedges of different species of Euphorbiaceae. Many villages are entirely surrounded by a thick belt of these milky-juiced plants, effectually guarding them from any chance of fire from the grass outside" (Monteiro 1875, 1:41). Certain rocks were likewise invested with sacred power. Not only did the forebears of the "Congo" enclave in La Guinea in Central Cuba keep in their pockets little stones that were "attributes of some deity", but also, in the doorway of their temple, there was placed an enormous stone, which is still considered sacred but whose significance is now forgotten. "It is only known that the 'Congo' respected it and taught their descendants to do likewise." For special feast days, the stone is recipient of libations of fresh water, perfume and honey (Garcia Herrera 1972, 156; my translation). While the word nkisi has not been recorded either in Trinidad or Jamaica, in Cuba the concept bears various names, such as nkisi, nkiso, nganga and prenda (Cabrera 1986a, 126). On the other hand, Montejo recalls the "Congo" using the term nkise for "the dead" (1968, 34). Indeed, in some areas of Koongo, the meaning of nkisi overlaps with nkuyu, in that it designates "the spirit of a deceased person that has been captured and incorporated with a sculpture" (Laman 1962, 3:67). In other areas, nkuyu refers to the living dead, while nkisi is the word for a sacred charm or amulet which contains spiritual power. In Suriname and the Guyanas there exists the belief that certain individuals possess and control baku. The term seems an apocopation of bakulu (Ko) 'ancestors'. The spirit is a small dwarf-like androide, about knee high, who speaks with a nasal voice and lives in a bottle. . . . [BJakulu are made by men and are bought by a witch to work for him or to harm his enemies. The owner can give the spirit instructions, and point out people to injure or kill. The bakulu demands 171

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compensation. He must be provided with certain kinds of food, such as eggs . . . (Sterman in Beet and Sterman 1981, 299) The role of the baku is to enrich its owner as well as punish or harm individuals. Some conceptual overlap appears, however, to blur the distinction between the Suriname reference apuku 'the little people of the bush', defined by some as "the bakru whom 'God' makes" and the "bakru whom sorcerers make", who are "the messengers of black magic" (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936, 66).35

Chalk "[C]halky white stone and white clay are very common ingredients in Kongo magic and religion" (Geggus 199la, 34). For instance, ndembo, or coronation chalk, used in the consecration ritual of the Nsundi paramount chiefs, is kept in a bag which constitutes one of several ritual items. The coronation chalk protects the Mansundi clan, and it must therefore not be thrown away, for this would mean that the people of the country would be afflicted with the Nsi sickness and die. ... The coronation chalk, which also has great significance for a secret society, surpasses nkisi in point of greatness and power. It was brought by the Mansundi when they came from the Congo. Other ndembo exist in pots, bark-baskets or calabashes, and are used as ordinary nkisi, with which sick persons are cured. But for this purpose the ndembo of the tribe is not used. (Laman 1953, 1:16) Lineage heads among the Mbundu and more southerly peoples "used a sacred white powder called pemba to insure the fertility of the women" of their lineage, while a red powder called takula was given to men for the same purpose (Miller 1976, 48). Echoes of the more routine use of chalk for magico-religious reasons are to be found in the Americas. In eighteenth-century Haiti Jerome Poteau was a mulatto slave who, according to Moreau de St-Mery, sold maman-bila. (small chalky stones) contained in bags called fonda, red and black seeds of a sort of acacia, which he called poto, but above all sticks called mayombo^ in which were placed 172

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powdered maman-bila by means of a drill. This gave the ability to fight, without danger to oneself, another slave whose stick had no mayombo. (Geggus 199la, 33) While Moreau de St-Mery used mayombo to refer to the sticks, Geggus points out that his source used the word to refer to a pouch containing the chalky powder (Geggus 199la, 33, fn. 56). This word may indeed refer to sticks in the sense of the Lunda, Lwena and Chokwe muyombo, which signified the sacred protective tree of the village group (McCulloch 1951, 75). As such, the possession of such a stick could have been a socially and spiritually binding mechanism and force among those who united under Poteau. Geggus derives fonda from funda (Ko), a package made of folded leaves and functioning as a charm. Poto may derive from mbiito 'seed'. Bila "refers, not to pebbles, but to bags attached to a fetish, containing such magical substances, generically known as bilongo" (Geggus 199la, 34). A late-nineteenth-century account from Grenada reports modified chalk balls among the following "implements of the [obeahman's] trade": rags, feathers, bones of cats, parrots' beaks, dogs' teeth, broken bottles, grave dirt, rum, and egg-shells. . . . under the bed a large canari or earthen jar containing an immense number of round balls of earth or clay of various dimensions, large and small, whitened on the outside. . . . Some seemed to contain hair and rags and were strongly bound round with twine. (Bell 1889, 16) This listing is very close to that provided in Reports to Lords of Committee, 1789, by Stephen Fuller, agent in London for Jamaica. He described the thatch roof and walls of an old woman's house as stuck with . . . rags, feathers, bones of cats. . . . [A] large earthen pot or jar, close covered, was found concealed under her bed. - It contained a prodigious quantity of round balls of earth or clay of various dimensions, large and small, whitened on the outside, and variously compounded, some with hair and rags and feathers of all sorts, and strongly bound with twine; others blended with the upper section of the skulls of cats, or stuck round with cats teeth and claws, or with human or dogs teeth, and some glass beads of different colours; there were 173

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also a great many eggshells filled with a viscous or gummy substance . . . and many little bags stuffed with a variety of articles . . . (Great Britain 1789) In Koongo, ritual objects like chalk and small charms are often kept in baskets, the latter constituting part of the sacred paraphernalia of diviners as well as chiefs (MacGaffey 1970, 236).

Divining Rods With further regard to divination, there may be a connection between magical stalks, sticks and pipes and what is called in Guyana the zambi stick, or muungu nti (Adams 1994). Zambi refers to the Creator god, muungu seems a variation on Koongo words like mungezi 'reed', and mungezila ~ mungelezi 'stalk, rod'; nti (Ko) means 'stick, tree'. This is a divining stick, and is referred to in a story told by a Guyanese in which two girls unwittingly married to man-eating giants are rescued by a young man who crams them into his zambi stick which flogs the giants, emits violin music in the sky, and eventually is the vehicle by which the girls return to their original home (Morrison 1989, 54-58).36 A Trinidadian made reference to the magical wand when alluding to people in Africa who possessed the power of enchantment. "They see you and they say woku wop wop and they take a blue pipe and they shoot you and you remain same [right] there, you can't move" (Victor 1971). The pipes to which he referred were tube-like matuutu grass stalks, or blown hen's eggs, which an nganga would load with stones, medicines and powder. They were called 'guns of the night' and would be blown onto objects or persons either to remove witchcraft or to inflict it. A more indirect form of using these magic guns was to place them at the corners of a cultivated field to ward off bandoki (witches). If the stalks split open it was interpreted that an ndoki had come across the path of the guns and had been hit. Magic guns were also buried at the threshold to houses and suspended in houses (Laman 1962, 3:69, 190). Another type of pipe was made of sheep, goat, or antelope horn, into which a charm was inserted. The nganga blew into it to become invisible (Johnston 1908, 2:659). The type of spells to which the informant referred may be compared with those related as examples of malevolent magic among the Luba. These include the placing of a charmed horn in the earth, and the priest covering this with twigs upon 174

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which the targeted person walks, only to have his leg contract, his sinews shrivel, and to be eventually overcome by death. Another was to cause a person to believe that his soul had been stolen by a muloshi37 or witch who had called his name, without of course being seen. The stolen soul is thought to reside in a jar retained by a priest, who is the only person capable of returning die estranged soul to the grieving, pining victim. "There are, of course, cases in which it suits the sorcerer's book to let the 'soulless' man gradually lose his sanity under this powerful delusion", writes Johnston (1908, 2:660-61) to conclude his exposition on these beliefs and manipulations. These beliefs, together with ritual actions and objects, were the results of evolving concepts about the quizzical nature of life and death, of the strategic placation of the good and neutralization of the evil in the universe, of the energizing of well-being, if not exclusively of power, for the individual and the community. Both morality and spiritual power are seen as intrinsically identified with the ancestors, an extension of the social and political concepts regarding respect for age, so that much religious ceremonial is focused on mediating relationships with the ancestors. Ancestors share the spiritual realm with both lesser and greater spirit forces, many of which express and objectify the power of natural objects and phenomena. All these beliefs were to evolve into further syncretic ideas when the indigenous religions of West Central Africa were exposed to the foreign religion of Christianity and its sects. The next chapter examines some of the results of these culture contacts, both in Africa and in the West Atlantic.

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Chapter

christianity and Associated Religions Catholicism Catholicism had been introduced to the Koongo court in 1491 when the king, Nzinga a Nkuwu, had been converted to the European religion, and took the Portuguese name Joao I. One theory advanced is that it was an "absence of a unique source of legitimation under their direct control which caused the mani Kongo and the ruling elite to welcome the Christian cult" (Hilton 1985, 49). For while the king of Koongo and the king-electing clans of the capital, the Mwisikoongo, were sanctioned by the various branches of Koongo religious priesthood, in their turn the priests were not subject to aristocratic control. However, by aligning their own power with the Catholic Church, "the kings of Kongo and the noble classes could guarantee control over the formerly democratic and somewhat untamed religious sector of the country" as "nganga were not officially commissioned or ordained by some other nganga, but won their respect through general acclaim". Now the court "could move loyal clients into clerical positions, bolster [its] own legitimacy, and suppress rival religious claimants under the rubric of witchcraft" (Thornton 1983, 65). In their embrace of Catholicism as the royal cult religion, the Mwisikoongo gave new meaning and impetus to pre-Christian rites of commemoration for royal ancestors: veneration of the royal graves in Mbanza Koongo, called Sao Salvador by the Portuguese, became a 176

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pivotal aspect of the Church's calendrical cycle. "San Salvador itself was explicitly connected with the other world. By the late eighteenth century the capital region was called Mpemba3 a word for the dead, and was the site of the burial ground for nobility in the twelve ruined churches of the capital" (Broadhead 1979, 627). The first of these . . . rapidly fell in ruins. Another - perhaps the one known as the Church of the Holy Cross - was built before 1517. . . . The most important church, Sao Salvador, which gave its name to Mbanza Kongo in the late sixteenth century, must have been built between 1517 and 1527. . . . Finally, in 1526, the king ordered the construction of 'Our Lady of the Victories', known to the people as Ambila, 'the church of the graves', because it was located near the sacred wood where the dead kings lay. (Balandier 1968, 58) The last may have been the church on the hilltop of which a Trinidad informant spoke (Modeste 1971). In addition, the site of the church and the cemetery accords with the practice in Koongo where, if possible, the dead were buried "on the mountains in cool and pleasant places which they call infindas" (Balandier 1968, 251).1 Interestingly, one of the meanings of nfinda in Cuba is 'cemetery' (Larduet 1988), and the second element in the name of the Cuban Koongo-derived religion, Palo Monte., covers not only the literal reference to 'mountain' but subsumes as well the notion of nfinda (Ko) 'the beyond, the esoteric, the hidden forest setting'.2 The recollection of the hilltop church is one of several fragmentary records of Catholic legend, ritual and practice among Koongo who were eventually sent across the Atlantic. While one cannot be sure whether such evidence is due to the Christianization process within Koongo, or to catechist activity while slaves were lodged in the barracoons, the former is more likely. One legend, recounted by a Trinidadian's Koongo grandmother, concerned a town with a bell on a hilltop that rang every hour, miraculously, without hands. Indeed, the bell had not been placed there by any hand. Another person said that Mbanza Koongo was a place where there was a bell and a church. Another attributed the church's construction to unknown people who lived before his father's time. The people of this town were called Koongo Za Nguunga, from Koongo 177

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dia Ngunga 'Congo of the bell'. The residents considered themselves superior to others (Nicolas Jones 1968). Pride in Mbanza Koongo was evident in the Trinidad references to it and its people. Although many of its inhabitants were slaves who worked the lands of the nobility, or were their domestics, slaves too may have imbibed the stance of the urbanized nobles towards rural villagers. This attitude rested on both class and ethnic divisions, and also on differences in economic organization: each of the two sectors of Koongo - urban and rural - had "its own pattern of production, distribution and exchange, its own structure of status and power . . . means of control and continuity, and to some extent, even its own ideology", in which the "towns dominated the country" (Thornton 1983, 17, 16). In turn, the socio-economic and political status of Mbanza Koongo underpins the religious ideology that it "is the perfect kingdom to which the BaKongo hope to return, a place of peace and prosperity where each clan, and therefore each individual, has its honored role, and where a benevolent king protects his subjects from all evil and settles all disputes" (MacGaffey 1986, 22). Furthermore, the particular attention which Christian church bells registered in the folk imagination doubtless had its roots in the significance of indigenous bells. "The ngonge . . . synonymous with ngunga . . . is made of iron, and consists of a double bell in the shape of U, each leg of the U representing one bell. There are no clappers in these bells. They are rung, or rather played, by striking with a piece of iron on either cup alternately" (Chatelain 1894, 271). Single gongs were also used; these, in fact, historically preceded the double variety. The latter functioned musically like talking drums, so they could be used in warfare, among other occasions: There is a regular code of signals, and as each bell has a different note, a great number of variations can be produced by striking each alternately, or two or three beats on one to the same, or lesser number on the other; a curious effect is also produced by the performer striking the mouths of the bells against his naked stomach whilst they are reverberating from the blows with the stick Only one 'engongui' can be allowed in each town, and belongs to the king, who cannot part with it on any account, as it is considered a great 'fetish,' and is handed down from king to king. (Monteiro 1875, 1:203)3 178

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Figure 7.1 Single bells

Figure 7.2 Double bells. Adapted from Claridge 1969.

A king "must have a large retinue and a gong to strike, so that the people in the villages shall know that a ntinu is passing. All must then fall on their knees, and the children must conceal themselves in the houses or in the grass" (Laman 1957,, 2:155). Ngonge or ngunga, therefore, were specific to kingship. They also were associated with trade caravans that moved through the territories of various chiefs or kings. Such caravans sounded these bells to inform the ruler of the town that they were approaching, in order to alert the officials and taxcollectors of that town that they should prepare for negotiations. The sounding of these bells, therefore, implied a proclamation of great importance.4 The intrinsic relationship of Catholic churches with bells and belfries cemented the link between European religion and African royalty and status. Further sacred aura surrounded aspects of church etiquette, ritual and taboo. Women were not allowed to enter a particular Catholic church in Koongo, but men stayed upstairs and children downstairs (Modeste 1972). There, one approached the altar while kneeling and 179

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singing a particular chant. The informant who said this was herself extremely reluctant to tape-record the chants she knew, and in the end I was able to tape only one of the two she sang (Modeste 1971). The particular sanctity with which she treated this material finds an echo in the particular regard accorded the missionary graves at Sao Salvador. Up to the 1870s, these were "still carefully tended and preserved, with every sign of respect, and . . . missals and other books, letters, chalices, and other church furniture of the olden time still exist, and the natives would not part with them on any account" (Monteiro 1875, 1:212). Similar treatment was given to crucifixes, whether large stone ones, called by the Portuguese term padraos, or smaller ones originally attached to rosaries. These became objects of religious awe and spiritual manipulation. "Crucifixes are often seen as 'fetishes' of the kings in Angola. Nothing will induce them to part with them as they belong to part of the 'fetishes' that have been handed down from king to king from time immemorial, and must not be lost or disposed of (Monteiro 1875, 1:88). This selective integration of indigenous and foreign religious and political ideologies was possible at that time, just as to many presentday Koongo "Christianity is acceptable only when it can be reconciled with traditional beliefs" (Bockie 1993, 78), and because similarities between traditional beliefs and the pre-Enlightenment and folk practices of Catholicism facilitated ritual transfers. On the other hand, during the nineteenth century there was "a changing definition among European clergy (including Rome) as to what constituted Christianity, coupled with more chauvinistic attitudes towards non-Western (and especially colonial) peoples that arose after 1850" (Thornton 1984, 148). Prior to this, at various times between the late fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries, several Catholic brotherhoods ministered in Koongo and Angola - Jesuits, Capuchins and Franciscans. Many converts were baptized yearly by Capuchin priests, whose sphere of work was the rural ministry, as opposed to the Jesuits, who were based in administrative centres. The Capuchins travelled on long journeys, accompanied by interpreters who were Koongo nobles, together with mission slaves (Thornton 1983, 66). The Capuchin Cherubino da Savona reported in 1775 that he had baptized more than 700,000 children and adults over his fourteen-year mission to Koongo; in the 1780s, the Franciscan Rafael Castello da Vide recorded 380,000 180

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baptisms in seven and a half years; and the Jesuit Raimundo da Dicomano admitted 25,000 children to the Church in his three years during the 1790s at Sao Salvador (Vanhee 1999, 13). Meanwhile, secular clergy were school teachers who opened rural chapels and churches (Thornton 1983, 66). The labours of the Catholic clergy among Central Africans were recognized by several observers in the Caribbean: in the 1670s , by the Jesuit Jean Mongin writing on the French part of St Kitts; in French Guyane by the captain and traveller Jean Goupy des Marets, who noted in 1690 that all the Kongo slaves on a particular estate had been baptized by the Portuguese in Angola (Thornton 1988a, 268); in the 1720s by Jean-Baptiste Labat, remarking on Catholic-Bantu religious pluralism among "Congo" and "Angolan" slaves in St Domingue (Haiti) (Vanhee 2002, 243). Yet another eighteenth-century missionary, this time in the Danish West Indies, commented: The Negroes from the Congo nation who came to the West Indies as slaves usually have for the most part some knowledge of the true God and of Jesus Christ, and they are more intelligent and better mannered than other Blacks. For this they have to thank the Portuguese who, since their settlement along this coast, have made a great effort to enlighten and improve these ignorant people with Christian teachings. (Oldendorp 1987, 168) Evidence of such "Christian teachings" was available well into the twentieth century in the form of two hymns from Trinidad, which again reflect one of the aspects of routine Christian observance in Koongo, the singing of litanies and chants. This first hymn is in adoration of the omnipresence and omnipotence of God the Father. Its andante pace, frequency of long notes, and second movement bearing widely spaced melodic intervals all recreate European melodic and rhythmic forms: TKo Tala Mukiinji Tala muloonde Ikoona tata ikoo Jam bye Mpoongwe Itaata Jaambye Mpoongwe Itaala Meeno kiina imwaana Ye ha ha haa hai ya ha . . .

181

Central Africa in the Caribbean Ko

Tala mukiinji

Look at the earth

Tala muloondi

Look at the sky

Kuna Tate ikoo

The Father is there

Zambia Mpuungo i taate

God Almighty is the Father

Zambia Mpuungo i tala

God Almighty I look to

Mono ngina i mwaana

I am the child (Modeste 1972)

Ta/a mukiinji

Another hymn, this time from Jamaica, but in similar mood, conveys a "sense of dependent helplessness" on the Supreme Being. "To the dawn" expresses Nzambi's power, while "eat" conveys power over and thus resignation on the part of the subservient party: Nzambi Mpungu!

Nzambi most high!

0 Nzambi! Wandya waleka!

0 Nzambi! He ate me, he slept!

Nzaambi! Ku kya!

Nzambi! To the dawn!

Wa Nzambi! Wa yetu, wa yetu

Listen to Nzambi! We are who we are!

Nzambi! Ku kya!

Nzambi! To the dawn!

Nzambi! Yala waya la!

Nzambi! You are the lord!

Nzambi! Ku kya!

Nzambi! To the dawn (Schuler 1950,152 n. 29)

The second Trinidad hymn appears inspired by adoration of the Crucifixion scene: the dying Christ and his mater dolorosa at the foot of 182

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the Cross. The pictorial quality of the scenes in this hymn and the preceding two is reminiscent of one of the methods of religious instruction adopted by the Jesuits in the proselytizing of Central Africans. For instance, Pedro Claver, the Catalan priest whose early-seventeenthcentury mission among the Africans and their descendants in Cartagena, New Granada (Colombia), earned him sainthood, would arrange that when the slaves had disembarked from the slave ships, they would be "gathered in the plaza near the harbor, divided by gender and then by 'nation' "or ethno-linguistic group. "Claver then stood in their midst on a makeshift altar decorated with two striking pictures: one showed Christ suffering on the cross with blood flowing from his wounds, while a priest used the blood to baptize Africans. The other showed various Popes, Emperors and Kings bowing down before the cross" (Thornton 1988, 272). Similarly, an Italian Capuchin reported on his exhibition of "a beautiful representation of the Divine Mother" after one of his baptisms in 1780 in Koongo, a methodology he must have repeated several times (Vanhee 1999, 14). In contrast to the European music qualities of "Tala mukiinji", "E lupwa" demonstrates typical features of Koongo music, such as the bar-initial unaccented beat, the rapid succession of syllables in some lines, and the triple note sequence: TKo E lupwa E luwawa $u ndye Zambl Ampungwe Ye bundle Madia E lupwa E luwawa $a klfwe ka fwidi I3odi chaka lele/bodi e>ak\le kalele Ye lufwa Maria Sundle Zambl Ampongwe Ko

E! lupwa/lupwapwa

E! the running teare>

E! luivaawu

E! the \o$e>

5a ndye Zambia Mpungu

Surrounds God Almighty

E! Sundi Madia

E! the Virgin Mary

Sa klfwe ka fwidi

While the Crucified \\a$ indeed died

3odi saka \e\el

?&lood flowe more (gradually) 183

Central Africa in the Caribbean &od\ sakala lele

The tears die down gradually

YeMufwa

0 death

Maria Sundi Zambi Mpungu Mary the Virgin of God Almighty (Nicolas Jones 1965)

£ lupwa

The Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary resonated in Koongo as a fertility cult aligned with mbumba spirituality, given the Madonna's identification with family. Also, her virginity paralleled that of the kivela maiden, who was invested with the power of mbumba and guarded the chiefs arms. Yet in Sonyo, the statue of the Virgin at Mbanza Sonyo was appealed to in time of war, a protective function linked with nkadi mpemba and the heavenly forces (Hilton 1985, 102, 207). Another instance of religious independence and the investiture of a public icon with both African and Catholic resonance is demonstrated in the local canonization of San Juan Congo among the townsfolk of Curiepe in coastal Venezuela. The people, but not the Vatican, 184

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declared Juan Congo a saint, and his statue was retained in the Blanco family from the late eighteenth century at least, and was at some stage moved in procession from one of the Blanco family homes to the local Catholic church, where it was enshrined under a roof of coconut palms and reeds, with side posts hung with cacao and plantains. The saint receives ongoing intercessions for protection and fertility, and his festival takes place annually on the Saturday following the feast of another favoured saint in the Barlovento (Windward) region, St John the Baptist. "The creation of an Afro-Catholic imaginary to express the memory and presence of a culture involving the African, mulatto, European and Amerindian", an icon of "the community with its failings and virtues", created to project their strengths and weaknesses, San Juan Congo, fondly called Conguito 'little Congo', combines the colour and wavy hair of the mulatto with the semi-erect phallus of many Koongo nkisi figures. Furthermore, the instruments used for his feast are the culo e'puya> drums similar to those used by the Mbamba. The refrain for the songs sung during his religious procession is (Ko) malembe, 'gently, peaceably' (Garcia 1992, 35-37; my translation). Speaking of Christian-type practices of "Congo" slaves, Oldendorp also commented on some of their systems of solidarity, at the same time noting the connection they made between baptism and death. He recognized that their baptism, regrettably as it seemed to him, had less to do with genuine spiritual conversion and more with the re-formation of kinship links in an alien environment. As regards the ritual actions, he noted that on all three of the Danish islands in the Caribbean, "the Negroes from the Congo" were often requested by "the Bussals",5 to baptize them. In general, baptism involved pouring water over the head of the neophyte, placing some salt in his mouth, and praying over him in the Koongo language. After the ceremony there was "a Negro celebration, provided by the more prosperous of the slaves, and the baptizer receives several reals6 for the effort" (Oldendorp 1987, 263). Oldendorp, as a Moravian, was critical of this Catholic-type baptism on the religious grounds that the ceremony was preceded by no period of spiritual training and religious commitment on the part of the neophyte. But in Koongo, Christian practice consisted mainly in receiving baptism, which was an initiatory rite sanctioned by the king, the mani Koongo, who supplied nkadi mpemba protection against witchcraft (Hilton 1985, 101-2). There was little demand for other Christian rites. 185

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Another significant aspect of the baptismal rite was the fact that before the actual baptism took place, the adult initiate had to "receive five to six lashes from the baptizer for the sins which he had committed in Guinea" (Oldendorp 1987, 263). This rite was not part of the Catholic ritual, but instead was one of the rites of passage involved in initiation into Koongo religious cults. As such, it indicates that Christianity was conceived of in a way not dissimilar to cult membership in Lemba, Kimpasi, or Nkimba, important religious associations in various parts of Koongo. In joining Nkimba, for instance, the neophyte was made to lie down, and was kneaded by the officiating priest; later, she or he underwent a rite involving being whipped with a broom of bamboo sticks; in Kimpasi one was flogged with a stick on the thigh. All this was part of a ritual of death and rebirth (Jonghe 1907, 33, 36, 54, 56). Flogging was also part of the puberty rites among the Ovimbundu (Hambly 1968, 232). The concept behind the Christian baptism - that of spiritual rebirth - was therefore analogous. Although Oldendorp would hardly have decoded this "pagan" background, and although he was critical of Catholic methods of Christian incorporation, he was sympathetic to the social and affective relevance of this ceremony for the newly arrived migrants. He saw its "essential purpose" as that of providing foster parents for people who were now "total aliens, without father, mother, or other relatives". "Negroes of some means of both sexes" often stood as godparents for the baptized . . .", they and the baptizer being considered baptismal fathers and mothers. They took a particular interest in the welfare of their charges, among their responsibilities being to provide them with a coffin and burial clothing when they died. As for the officiant, he usually buried those he had baptized, singing at the graveside and delivering a short oration to those in attendance (Oldendorp 1987, 263). This adoptive parental connection was undoubtedly in keeping with the traditional role played by godparents in the Catholic system, and as such may have derived from practices within the Catholic fraternity in Koongo itself. Similar practices were observed in Angola, where Monteiro (1875, 2:98) commented on the adoption of Catholic-type christenings and godparenting among the Bunda-speaking peoples between the Dande and Kwanza rivers. Other syncretic conceptualizations developed around the semantic content of Koongo linguistic terminology (Thornton 1984:152, 186

Christianity and Associated Religions

157-58). The semantic transference into the Christian sphere of the term nganga was possible because both traditional and Catholic priests performed interlocking roles at state and communal functions, served the same mission of healing, and destroyed witchcraft, which was as real in seventeenth-century Europe as it was in Africa (Thornton 1983, 64). This similarity of function between nganga and Christian priest lay at the root of the convergence explained in the following story told by a nineteenth-century Protestant missionary to British Guiana: Early one day an old African came to my door, and he said, "Morning, my massa. How you do, Gorgonzambe?" "I am well, thank you," I replied; "but you speak to me in an unknown tongue. What do you mean by calling me Gorgonzambe?" "My massa," he said, "me sal tell you. In Africa de medicine man am de doctah for a' we [our] body, but you am de doctah for a' we soul; and de African name for de minister am Gorgonzambe, which mean God-doctor. When de soul am sick you mus' gib us medicine . . ." (Crookall 1898, 132) The African speaker, evidently a Koongo, had used the term (n)ganga a Nzambi 'sage/medicine man of the Spirit', to refer to the Christian minister of religion. Analysing the absorption of Christian concepts into Koongo, Thornton points out that the seventeenth-century Catholic Church "was willing to tolerate syncretism", and indicates the co-optation of certain indigenous terms into the Catholic vocabulary in Koongo. "For example, the Kikongo term Nzambi a Mpungu (Highest Nzambi) was used to translate God, where Nzambi ('Zombie' in the New World) refers to an ancestor or other deity.7 Similarly, priests referred to themselves as 'nganga' - a word used locally for a spirit medium or priest" (Thornton 1988, 267). But the Koongo perceived Christian priests as capable of giving protection against witchcraft, and of making rain, functions associated with various types of Koongo priesthood (Hilton 1985, 101; Broadhead 1979, 633). The overlap between Koongo and Catholic priestly functions, and the autonomy of some of the Catholic pastoral activity in Koongo, appears to have replicated itself in Haiti, for example. There, "a set of lay Catholic roles was imported from Central Africa in the eighteenth century and in the absence of a formal church organization incorpo187

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rated in a complex of ritual practices that we now denote as Vodou" (Vanhee 2002, 262). From at least the early nineteenth century, rural Catholic churches in Haiti have been dominated by a churchwarden, heading a hierarchy of officials such as sacristans, rectors, choristers and cross bearers. This is because before 1860, when a Concordat was signed between Rome and the Haitian state, "a hierarchy of roles . . . had been established without much interference from regular Roman Catholic priests. As such, the Catholic cult was integrated in a pluralism of heterogeneous cults which were controlled by local rural elites" (Vanhee 2002, 262). In certain respects these church roles mirrored those held in vodun shrines by the pret savanne 'bush priest', and the chapitreur, a diviner using a book and a needle. The pret savanne recites Catholic prayers and chants church canticles, either in Creole or Latin, at baptismal ceremonies within vodun, and leads prayers during funeral processions. Given "the absence of any meaningful missionary activity in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Saint-Domingue/Haiti", Vanhee (2002, 254) advances that these syncretic roles and behaviours did not begin on the island, but can more fundamentally be understood as a continuation of autonomous Catholic-related activity in Koongo.

The Antonian Movement So indigenized was Catholicism in Koongo that it was made to conform to the requirements of Koongo nationalism by the incorporation of Christ's story into the historical evolution of Koongo. So that in nineteenth-century Cuba, one Koongo averred not only that in his homeland "there were churches and many Kongo Christians", but also that "[i]n ancient times, Jesus Christ existed in the Congo" (Cabrera 1986a, 108). This was indeed an echo of belief among some Koongo Christians during the seventeenth century, that Mbanza Koongo was the birthplace of Jesus, a belief again reasserted by the Koongo/Angolan Antonian religious movement of the early eighteenth century (Thornton 1983, 108). In Haiti, the deity Roi Wangol 'Angolan King' is equated with Gaspard, the black member of the Maji who witnessed the entry of Jesus into the world (Rigaud 1953, 257-78 fh.). One of the indices of the Catholic background to Caribbean Koongo expressions is the choice of the patron saint of Cuba's Las Lajas "Congo" community. The choice of this saint represents a transposi188

Christianity and Associated Religions tion of the cult of St Anthony of Padua in Koongo itself, the saint having been adopted as patron saint of Koongo from the mid-seventeenth century.8 Anthony was also perceived by a charismatic female nganga as the inspiration for the resurgence of Koongo unity, and for restoration of the Koongo kingdom. In about 1702 a Koongo woman, by name Dona Beatrice Kimpa Vita, began claiming to be the reincarnation of St Anthony. Her movement was yet another instance of the adaptation or incorporation of Catholic beliefs within Koongo religious and political systems. The immediate cause for the emergence of Beatrice's movement was the devastation and disruption occasioned by a series of civil wars that followed on the defeat and death of the Koongo king at Ambwila in 1665. Beatrice, who had been born into the nobility, emerged out of the hunger for reunification of the empire: she announced that God would secure unity. However, her movement was independent of papal control and of the Catholic religious brotherhoods, though she did collaborate with certain monks. Rather, her religious ideology linked the operation of a simbi cult with "the Kongoized message of the Christian priests". In this syncretic belief system, the Christian sacraments of baptism, marriage and confession were discarded, and in keeping with her own "direct, unaided communication with the other world", she "claimed to die each Friday, visit heaven, and return to earth on Mondays" to deliver her heavenly messages. She also burnt objects, including the cross, used by traditional and Catholic priests (Thornton 1983, 106, 107). She herself was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1706, her death due as much to the unorthodoxy of her teachings as to her political interventions in the conflicts between contending royal lineages. But echoes of the Antonine movement continued into the nineteenth century in Guyana, where the ascription santanton (St Anthony) was used to identify certain African immigrants there (Small 1996). The Antonian movement, itself a syncretic religion, attempted to suppress other aspects of syncretized beliefs and rituals which the encounter between Koongo traditional religion and Christianity had produced. One of these was the veneration as nkisi of sacred objects apart from the person of the king himself - such as crucifixes, images, medals, rosaries and crowns (Hilton 1985, 102). In predominantly Protestant areas of the West Atlantic, this ritualistic orientation was to be deprived in large measure of its cultivation of concrete objects as

189

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repositories of ancestral and divine forces. One such location where Central African religion encountered Protestantism was Jamaica, an important slave-importing plantation society after British conquest of its Spanish occupants in 1655.

Mayaal Mayaal may be considered a transatlantic echo of the Antonine movement, insofar as it manifested an amalgamation of religious observances in Jamaica which contained, in varying proportions, elements of both African and Christian religious concepts and practice. First documented in the late eighteenth century, it has constituted the crucible out of which present-day Revival, Zion and Pukkumina religions have evolved. It is possible that the Jamaican term mayaal (generally spelled myal) derives from mayaala,9 the physical representations of power. In a secular context mayaala are agents of a paramount chiefs authority. The abstract power mayaala wield is called kiyaazi, a Yombe cognate of the term nkisi. Thus Laman, writing out of his early-twentieth-century experiences, averred that "Nkisi and nkisi nsi do not correspond to what is now connoted by nkisi [the physical talismans], but to what higher up-country [in the hinterland] is called kiyaazi (from yaala, to rule), thus a power of religious character that is needed to strengthen the authority of the regent" (Laman 1957, 2:150). Mayaal [myal], so seminal a concept in Jamaican religious culture, may thus be said to refer to spiritual power and/or a person possessing spiritual power on behalf of another: a mayaal man or woman exercised the power of the Creator God, or of powerful spirits or of ancestral presences. Mayaal, therefore, arose out of the syncretic synergies of African and Christian religious beliefs and rituals; the extent of each of these influences obviously varied from one mayaal leader to another, and in response to the absorption and/or rejection of various tenets of Christian indoctrination over time. In Jamaica, mayaal was identified as the source of "good obeah", or good, that is, healing, sorcery, as against obeah [obiya] which inflicted harm.10 The two types of and motives for magic were acknowledged in Koongo: "Beneficent nganga magic is practised openly to heal the sick. Malevolent nganga 190

Christianity and Associated Religions

magic is ruled by envy and wickedness" (Laman 1962, 3:177). The Lunda, Lwena and Chokwe peoples of eastern Angola similarly distinguish between healing rituals and sorcery (McCulloch 1951, 79). The formal and objective distinction in Jamaica between two types of magic - formal in the sense that they were accorded differentiating terms - is further indication of a Central African conceptualizing influence. It is instructive that Hilton categorizes Koongo indigenous religion as composed of two dimensions, one being mbumba, the other nkadi mpemba. Mbumba was that aspect of religion concerned with terrestrial nature., healing and community well-being; its priests of both genders were intermittently possessed by mbumba-type spirits, and thus "incarnated the purity of the other world, were considered altruistic, and imposed ritual prescriptions upon the people of this world" (Hilton 1985, 17). On the other hand, nkadi mpemba conceptualized powers of destruction, of external evil, at the same time as it accorded protection for the individual (Hilton 1985, 16). Its priests were male, were not normally possessed, but manipulated spirit power by imitative magic and reasoning. Priests of both religious aspects used minkisi. Mbumba-type minkisi could be an unusual object in nature, such as a stone or piece of wood; those of nkadi mpemba were manufactured by the nganga, who placed stones, feathers, herbs and other substances in sacks or sculpted wood (Hilton 1985, 15, 17). While, according to this schema, one may be able to link obeah with the nkadi mpemba dimension of Koongo religion,11 and mayaal with its mbumba aspect, the neatness of such a fit is undermined by the fact that mayaal operators cleansed the land of witchcraft just as many of the nkadi mpemba priests "specialized in discovering evil doers" (Hilton 1985, 17). The essential ambivalence behind this understanding of spiritual power stems from the fact that not only do "BaKongo see the ability to survive in the universe as a function of the play of power" but also that "[pjeople who have power obtain it directly or indirectly from the otherworld" and "are relatively successful; they live longer and have more children and more wealth". Similarly, "[cjhiefs, initiated to particular titles, wield the same power as witches and magicians (kindoki), with the difference that a chief wields it on behalf of the community, whereas a witch uses it to benefit himself or to satisfy personal grudges". One of the secret religious associations in Koongo, Lemba, "claimed to give 191

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protection against witchcraft . . . yet at the same time it tended to make use of the powers of the latter" (Balandier 1970, 328). Such concepts regarding the essential ambivalence of power apply equally to a reading of the powers exercised by the dead. Thus, "[a]s with the spirits themselves, the occult powers of the human actor exhibit the pervasive tension between the values of public versus private interest, production versus destruction, none of which belongs exclusively to one class of actor or spiritual force" (MacGaffey 1986, 170, 171). In the general public perception, the term mayaal has in large measure dropped out of current Jamaican vocabulary, so that Kumina "private workings" may fall within the category of obeah, whether for good or for evil. In such ceremonies, "[I]ncense, oil, water, dead men's bones, herbs, chicken feathers, blood, and egg shells are some of the ingredients used" (Moore 1953, 158). And when a duppy [ancestral spirit] is used in undertakings known as "cutting [obeah]", "clearing [one's way towards a goal]", or other "special working", the dead person's "skull, teeth, hair, or fingernails together with his grave dirt are employed in the controls" (pp. 158-60). Divination is another aspect of "private working". According to Moore, The power key for this ceremony is a crooked stick and a glass of water placed in the centre of the circle between the drums. Answers to questions may come from the fall of the stick after it is twirled by the obeah man, from spirit transmission through water, or through visions incurred during the ceremony, (p. 160) But the term mayaal is still used as descriptive of ancestral possession within Kumina, and has borne great significance in Jamaica's cultural profile and its links to Koongo cultural manifestations. At the end of the eighteenth century, and at intervals during the nineteenth (1760s, 1831-32, 1842, 1860-61), Jamaica experienced "outbreaks" of mass spiritual revival called mayaal or mayaal dance, which involved a "circular gathering or ring of devotees, surrounded by a larger group of onlookers. The gathering sometimes took place under the sacred cotton tree . . . but sometimes in a yard over a spot where Obeah [was] believed to have been buried". A blood sacrifice of fowls was made; adepts wore headwraps "tied in fantastical manner" and waistbands tied "as tightly as possible". Dancing involved wheeling [giddying 192

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turns] and was "accompanied by rhythmic beat of hands and feet . . . leading to ... spirit possession". The onset of possession took the form of "walking 'up and down' ". Baptism by immersion was a way of signalling conversion (Chevannes 1993, 4-5). The first written documentation on mayaal indicates that it offered "invulnerability to death caused by Europeans. . . . [A]ccounts of the 1830s and 1840s make it clear that Myalists believed that all misfortune - not just slavery - stemmed from malicious forces, embodied in the spirits of the dead." Mayaal leaders purported to identify the spiritual source of problems and exorcise it (Schuler 1979a, 67). Furthermore, misfortune was due to sorcery, which was sinful, not in the Christian sense of "an offense . . . against God but against society". Thus, mayaal "offered a cure for society's ills which, since sorcery caused them, could be eradicated by anti-sorcery ritual, public confession by sorcerers, and the construction of a society which would minimise antisocial behaviour within slave communities" (Schuler 1979b, 134). Schuler's analysis is that Myalism demonstrates many of the characteristics of classical Central African religious movements. . . . First is a collective group's acceptance of a new religious form consisting of rearranged existing rituals, symbols, and beliefs combined occasionally with new beliefs. Second, the originator is a charismatic leader, inspired by dreams or visions. Third, the aim, in a culture which believes that good can and should prevail, is to prevent misfortune and maximize good fortune for the community. . . . Fourth, a movement must move beyond its original community. . . . Fifth, the focus of all classical movements is a charm for the protection of the community from disease and death. (Schuler 1979a, 66) Schuler echoes other modern analysts who assert that "modern Central African movements have not been purely or even primarily reactions to the stresses of the colonial experience or modernization, but rather form "an integral part of the precolonial Central African tradition and [are] primarily religious in nature" (Schuler 1979a, 66-67). Even during the seventeenth century, the cult known as Kimpasi dominated in central Koongo, while the "closely related" Nkimba cult dominated Kakoongo and Loango, and the Lemba cult was based 193

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north of the Zaire River. These were secret associations of an ancient date, which met regularly outside villages and towns in dark groves. Entrance to the grove involved the use of passwords, and the initiate underwent a ritual of death and revival (Hilton 1985, 26-27). Another writer on Nkimba describes an induction ceremony during which the candidate is required to drink a certain potion which renders him insensible. He is then declared to be dead, and is carried into the forests, where the operation of circumcision is performed. After a while he is restored, and by the simple village folk he is believed to have been raised from the dead. He then receives a new name, and he professes not to be able to remember his former tribe or even his parents. . . . They also adopt a new language . . . (Ward 1890, 54-57) Janzen, in his survey of Koongo cults, notes that "they seem to lapse into nonexistence over a period of ten, fifteen, and sometimes twenty years, then all of a sudden they are there again in full force" (1977, 83). Among some of the reasons advanced by European observers for the resurgence of cults are the ridding of witches from the land in order to secure "remedy for generalized evils and ills which strike the society, such as widespread sterility, epidemic, or a high rate of abortion", or "breakdown in social relations evident in the rise of the level of feuding" (pp. 83, 84). Even in modern times, Lemba's function has been "the maintenance of order in market places, regulating trade over long distances, establishing marriage alliances between local lineages, and healing the personality disorders of the 'marginal' mercantile elite" (Janzen 1982, 21). Similar periodic religious movements are reported among the Mbundu. Miller speaks of "curing cults and witchcraft eradication movements" as structured but ephemeral. "These provided institutional vehicles through which people could temporarily abandon their primary loyalty to their ngundu [patrilineal descent group] in favour of ties to non-kinsmen based either on common affliction with a given disease or on a common effort to eliminate witches from their midst. Among the Mbundu, these rituals characteristically involved techniques of spirit possession" (Miller 1976, 50). This type of correspondence between Jamaican mayaal outbreaks and Koongo cult resurgence leads me to hypothesize that members of 194

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the Koongo and Mbundu communities in Jamaica may have initiated mayaal as a recurrent cultural and religious phenomenon, one that touched a responsive chord in the emotive and spiritual life of slaves generally, incorporating as it did elements of African religious thought and practice that were not peculiar to the initiating ethnic groups motifs such as blood sacrifice, trance behaviour, the use of dance and circular dance structures in religious expression, and the localization of an antidote to evil in a protective charm. Yet, [b]y the early nineteenth century [mayaal] had adopted Christian elements. In 1831-32 Myalists assumed a leading role in the last Jamaican slave rebellion. The postslavery period saw it reemerge stronger than ever from a period of persecution, acquiring new converts and openly challenging Christian missionaries in the early 1840s, only to be driven underground by the Jamaican government. In the early 1850s it gained new life under the aegis of a religious revival whose missionary sponsorship Myalists soon rejected. (Schuler 1979a, 66) The periodic recurrence of mass religious 'hysteria' is what seems particularly West Central African, in addition to the use of the Koongo term to name the cult. Furthermore, in mayaal, the charm or 'medicine5 which could exert its force against the evil under attack earned the name amba, etymology unknown. It is described as "a transparent little ball with red lines about it and something blue inside" (Beckwith 1969b, 32 n. 34).12 An apparently analogous movement to mayaal - not necessarily in its recurrence, since there is as yet insufficient evidence of this, but in the protective assurance it offered - was that led by Jerome Poteau, a Haitian revolutionary leader who was tried in 1786. He was accused of holding meetings "which the slaves called 'mayombe5 or 'bila'. . . . Attendance was said to provide protection against punishment by slaveowners" (Geggus 199la, 33). In this connection, we need to appreciate the rationale for the protection that slaves in Haiti and Jamaica sought. Enslavement presented itself to the slaves themselves as a type of witchcraft. Already in seventeenth-century Loango, nocturnal witches were believed to "drag off the souls of the dead to slavery and forced labour" (Janzen 1982, 53). To Central Africans, witchcraft was "ambition, hatred or greed", in 195

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addition to "a failure to accept equality" (Vansina 1983, 86). There is oral evidence that the enslaved perceived their captors and owners as thieves, a perception that recurs at the folkloric and popular level but is absent or muted in the scribal medium which hardly reflects the views of the subaltern.13 We need also to recall that theft was and remains a most reprehensible type of behaviour in many African societies, where thieves are put to death with little compunction. Added to all this, slavery was, in the West Atlantic, a form of spiritual and physical subjugation, which equated with zombification. One of the powers of witches was to steal a person's soul and force the physical shell/ to work for its possessor. Conceptually: [t]he soul should be round, like the sun, but witchcraft attacks may cause it to crumble at the edges (vezukd), rendering the body vulnerable. Witches may suck out or draw off (vola, hold) all or part of the soul, depriving all or part of the body of its inner essence, so that in a short time it will be seen to sicken or die. (MacGaffey 1986, 161) Even in the twentieth century, Koongo believe that it is possible for a zombi to "be sold to another master or even shipped to America to be put to work in factories making textiles and automobiles" (MacGaffey 1986, 162). This latter notion suggests itself as a modern survival of a submerged memory of the region's long experience of the transatlantic slave trade, and partial truths about the fate of those who underwent that enforced loss of natal community and the coerced exploitation of their labour power. Extrapolating from the connection between witchcraft and enslavement, it becomes clear that enslaved Central Africans resorted to several measures to shake off the debilitating and subhuman effects of bewitched enslavement. These measures did not in every case deliver the "slave from slavery, but it may have been expected to deliver them from its punishments. Yet the fact that many slaves did "sicken and die", either on slave ships or on plantations, may not be unconnected to this particular self-assessment of their situation. Having passed through Kalunga14 and come into another world, some may have considered the West Atlantic as the world of the dead. Others, conceiving their condition to be that of zombification, may have utilized Christian baptism as a means of release from the evil that bound them. At other times, African Christian religions like mayaal may have 196

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recommended themselves as an antidote, especially since they taught that "victims [could] be rescued by healers able to discover where the soul [had] been taken and to force or negotiate its return" (MacGaffey 1986, 162). Spiritually, this curative, restorative function was the main goal of mayaal and its associated manifestations. One can more deeply understand, then, the reason why some of the major slave rebellions in Jamaica have been inter-related with mayaal fervour. A similar West Atlantic effort to suppress the inequity that is witchcraft and to reestablish social and economic equilibrium appears to account for the rise of the cult of Gaan Tata (Great Father) among the Maroons of Suriname and French Guyane at the turn of the twentieth century. Janzen (1982, 19) interprets this new cult as a revival of Lemba ideology. Lemba was a public corporate "cult of healing, trade, and marriage relations" in the "triangular region extending from the Atlantic coast to Malebo Pool . . . and from the Congo (Zaire) River northward to the Kwilu-Niari River valley" (Janzen 1982, 3). It "emerged in the seventeenth century in connection with copper trade and consolidated its strength in the eighteenth century" (Janzen 1982, 58) at a time when royal hegemonies were being challenged by a new mercantile class and their decentralized trading posts between the hinterland and the coast. In a similar paradigm, Gaan Tata emerged among the northern South American Maroons from the 1880s when they controlled the river traffic for gold exploitation in the Guianese interior. From dispersed cults along the river network, the movement merged into "a regional cult with a central shrine and a hierarchic structure . . . monopolizing river transport and maintaining high wages and freight prices" for the Maroons. The sudden influx of wealth upset the equities of Maroon communal society, creating an urgent need to allay people's anxieties about witchcraft manipulation on the part of the wealthy, to protect them from kin envy, and to institute common moral goals (Janzen 1982, 19).15 Thus we have seen various aspects of the interaction between Central African religious ideologies and those of Christian sects, both Catholicism in the first place, and later Protestantism. What emerged is the assimilation of Catholicism from the late fifteenth century into the politico-religious framework of the Koongo kingdom, with Catholic symbols and ritual and its international networks being co-opted by the ruling classes to solidify their legitimacy and power, while on a broader 197

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front, its icons and sacraments became enmeshed with the purposes of already extant Koongo and Mbundu religious sects devoted to social and personal renewal, as well as release from sickness, from social and economic inequalities, and all which was conceived of as coming under the umbrella rubric of 'witchcraft'. Catholic terminology likewise was subjected to semantic extension to accommodate existing Central African understanding of religious roles and identities. The Antonian movement, which began in the late seventeenth century and took various shapes and forms well into the nineteenth, represented yet another syncretic religious manifestation meant to cure a malady in the Koongo body politic, and transatlantic echoes of this syncretic dynamic may be read into the emergence of mayaal in Jamaica in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Gran Taata movements in the late nineteenth century among the Maroons of Suriname and French Guyane, messianic memories of Koongo in Cuba and Haiti echoing the induction of "Congo" blessed into the Catholic saint pantheon in Venezuela, the proliferation of lay Catholic pastoral workers in rural Haitian Catholicism, and the urgency and appeal of water baptism among Central African slaves in the West. The "catholic" embrace of multiple religious ideologies and practices is paralleled in secular activities at one remove from the overtly sacred, which will be the subject of the following chapter. These other activities revolve around public displays of aggression and artistry, the contestation between opposing forces which govern the physical and moral universe, and the extraordinary outbursts of imagination, ridicule and gaiety that affirm what is life-giving, at the same time as they concretize - through masquerade, costume and verbal invention mental and spiritual challenges to, and forced (though temporary) inversion of, the systems, roles and individuals which function to sustain the domestic, social, economic, political and metaphysical spheres.

198

Chapter8r:

^Sicc^siKt j^dwer: ^ibidl "War &Kcl3\i cither< The Stick-Fight Genre: Origin and Parallels On analysing the interviews done in Trinidad, it is not clear whether stick-fighting, called there kalinda, was in fact performed by the first generation of Central Africans. What is more certain is that it was a cultural pastime of second- and third-generation Central African descendants and others. From a male Yoruba descendant I collected some "Yoruba kalinda" songs,1 but discussion of stick-fighting, its champions, its locations, personal involvement in the sport and songs, were forthcoming, without specific prompting on my part, from several Central African-descended Trinidad informants. And some of the terminology associated with the game is of Central African origin. There are several parallels to Trinidad stick-fighting in the West Atlantic. An eighteenth-century painting done by Agostino Brunias, A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in Dominica, is a night scene showing two male combatants facing each other withlong staves, the central figures in a semi-circle of onlookers near a slave hut. A nineteenth-century novel describes a performance by white Creoles in Bequia, an island off St Vincent, in which "the male dancers carry what they call a beau-stick,2 which is a heavy piece of cinnamon-wood . . . about thirty inches in length. . . . [Tjhey, at irregular intervals, strike at each other still keeping time to their rude music" provided by "two or three negro drums, beaten with their hands" while dancing "with more agility than grace, though not entirely without the latter" (Joseph 2001,51). 199

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Stick-fighting was also played in Barbados, where it was called 'sticklicking' (Farmer 2001), and in Curasao, where it is called wega dipalu, and is now virtually extinct. In the Danish West Indies, this "blood sport; a brutal business for a brutal time" (Hall 1992, 120), this "structured violence" was carried on in duels fought with "the Bangelar, a stick mounted with iron or copper rings and a metal point" and was popular with blacks and whites alike (p. 63). More information exists about the Cuban mani. Its main performance zones were in the cities of Matanzas in the west, Marianao in Havana, and Las Villas in Cienfuegos province, where it was called bombosa. Described as a gymnastic sport involving contortions, dance movements and fisticuff feints, the aim of the dancer was to box one of the bystanders or other dancers in an unguarded moment (Ortiz 1974, 344-45). "A man, in the centre of a tight ring, moving to yuka drums and songs for the game, attacked the men in the ring who had to ward off his blows with parries and counter-attacks while still dancing" (Leon 1974, 67; my translation). I don't know whether it was really a dance or a game, because they punched each other really hard. This dance they called the mani or peanut dance.3 The dancers formed a circle of forty or fifty men, and they started hitting each other. Whoever got hit went in to dance. They wore ordinary work clothes, with coloured print scarves round their heads and at their waists. . . . The men used to weight their fists with magic charms to make the mani blows more effective. . . . Mani was a cruel game. (Montejo 1968, 30) Broken bones, noses and teeth were run-of-the-mill in mani (Cabrera 1986a, 92). But women admired the good mani players (p. 90) .4 "The women didn't dance but stood round in a chorus, clapping, and they used to scream with fright, for often a Negro fell and failed to get up again" (p. 30). Some women even played the game themselves (Leon 1974, 67; Pearse 1955, Envelope 4, 8d) and, as in the Danish islands with stick-fighters, slave masters cultivated teams of mani players and sponsored tournaments. In Guyana too there was a form of stick-fight called setu [? < sexto (Po) 'sixth']. It involved six or more men playing together using sticks of three and a half feet in length from the akya tree. As in Trinidad, the stick was held resting on the thumb and the little finger, and clasped by 200

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Figures 8. la and 8.1b The Cuban mani choreographed, performed in rehearsal by the Ballet Folclorico de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, 1995. the three middle fingers. Setu was a sport that required good, quick eyesight since, as with mani., the person hit did not need to return a blow to the person who had hit him, but could hit any of the number in the ring. Since the fighter held both ends of his stick he could choose to release either end, so a good fighter could manipulate an element of surprise regarding the direction of his blow. This contest was sometimes accompanied by a drum and flute, but there was no singing. Bets were placed by on-lookers on different players in the same way that players themselves, when fighting in pairs, would bet each other as to who would make the first "cut". These sessions were held in cane field clearings, at Christmas or during holiday times, when players from different villages would challenge each other. There were friendly competitions, but there were also contests held "in wrath". Sessions also took place in "the bush", that is, the jungle clearings in the interior of the country, where men went to dig for diamonds and pan for gold (Jordan 1994). As with the Cuban mani and the Guyana setu, there was also a type of stick-fight which in Trinidad was called a la twa 'for three' (Elder 1966, 195). Other performances in the stick-fight genre are the Martiniquan rivie lezar> fought with hoe sticks in the north of the island (Cyrille 2001), as well as the laja> also called kokoye, wonpwen, or damye. Like the mani, laja is described as involving "acrobatic, mock combat set to music" (Lewis 1992, 20), but it does not involve the use of sticks. Rather, 201

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combatants can strike with several parts of the body: knees, elbows, head, feet, closed or open palms (Behanzin-Joseph-Noel 1998, 439). One of its opening activities can be for a player "to run in a mystic circle to 'close5 . . . off ... emanations of jealousy and envy" (Thompson 1991, 7). And an opening pose, called a parade, is struck by players to throw power against their opponents. It involves the player standing with the left arm akimbo and the right hand up and forward. That pose signifies ecstasy and the presence of the spirit. The stance is posited as similar to the Koongo ascription yaangalala, in which the hands are thrust above the head with fingers spread wide (p. 6). This pose also occurs in the dance for the Haitian Petro rites: "Women sometimes use a typical Congo pose, with the left hand on the hip and the right hand held poised in the air" (Courlander I960, 131). Yet another of the types of stick-fighting is the Brazilian makulele. The latter is a stick-fight "practiced for many years, no one knows exactly how long, in the region around Santo Amaro da Purificagao" in central Bahia province. Around the 1940s it was introduced to the state capital, Salvador. For touristic purposes, machete fights are sometimes substituted for the basic stick-play (Lewis 1992, 54-55). Although capoeira [kapwera]5 is not played with sticks, there is an avowed relationship between makulele and capoeira, since the latter also involves kicking, tripping, butting and acrobatics. From well before the turn of the twentieth century "male competitions of strength (especially tripping contests)" have existed in Brazil. Within Brazilian batuques, or dance and drumming sessions, there developed extended competitions of samba leg-blows among the dancers, which were often combined with verbal duelling (Lewis 1992, 35). A further link between makulele and capoeira may reside in the physical placement and displacement of the two combatants in the ring, and it certainly exists in the fact that there are - or have been - forms of capoeira which involve the use of weapons other than the fist. In 1809, one Major Vidigal, of the Guarda Real de Policia in Rio de Janeiro, was described as "a competent capoeira, with cool composure and an agility worthy of any test, respected by the most feared toughs of his time. He excelled at stick, knife, fist, and razor play, absolutely unbeatable with blows of the head and feet" (Lewis 1992, 44).6 The game was first mentioned in written Brazilian literature in 1770 (p. 43). Comparing it with the Trinidad sport, a commentator observes: 202

Accessing Power: Ritual War and Masquerade

The Maculele seen in Santa Amaro, Bahia . . . uses two sticks . . . but these are shorter and thicker than those of the Kalinda. In the Maculele, the players consist of a group which work in circular form or change patterns and partners. . . . The dancers or players beat their sticks together in time with the music and hit one another's in between. They must be on the alert at all times as a miss can mean a blow. (Ahye 1978, 118) Ahye further notes that "the Mousondi [Nsundi] use only one long stick like that of the Kalinda". She also notes that a kalinda-like dance was danced, in Haiti apparently, in honour of Wangol-Mousondi, that is, the king of Angola and the Nsundi (p. 118), evidently a king of a champwel (also spelled shampwel).1 Yet another observer links stick dance with the Nsundi. Writing of his experience in Haiti between the 1930s and 1950s, Courlander reveals: Near the town of Jeremie in southern Haiti . . . I saw a performance of the Mousondi "battle-dance," an activity of the Congo "nation." The dance was performed by six men, several of them stripped to the waist, the others wearing the traditional blue denim peasant jackets. The leader of the dancers was a bearded man about fifty years old, lean and athletic. On his legs he wore anklets made of seed pods and beer-bottle caps which rattled rhythmically as he moved. On a string around his neck he wore a wooden whistle, which he blew from time to time to accent the beat of the drums and to give signals. The dancing took place around a bonfire. The music was provided by three musicians, two playing Congo drums and the third beating hardwood sticks against a board. Each of the dancers carried a stick about thirty inches long. They moved first clockwise, then counterclockwise, then half of them . moved in one direction and half in the other, weaving in and out, holding their sticks like sabers. On a signal given by the older man, they leaped into the air and came together in mock combat. First, one would strike and the other would parry, then the second would strike and the first would parry, always in time to the beating Congo drums. On another signal all six dancers leaped into the air vertically, twisting into a full turn 203

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CO

Figure 8.2 A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in Dominica., Agostino Emmas, c.1810

each time, landing in position to strike and parry. (Courlander I960, 131-32) One of the songs accompanying this display went: Mousondi, we will maka war! Eya aya ay a!

Wa ara a nation of war! Don't you haar my cannon shooting?

Some older people called this dance kalinda, others the Mousondi; either way it was a stick dance (Courlander 1960, 132). Could this description amplify the information concerning war drills in Central Africa? There appear to be grounds for linking the Haitian Musundi battle dance with the war drills, for example, among the Koongo and Ndongo. Among the latter, there were special soldiers who could be considered professionals, though they did not necessarily live in barracks, and who "were recruited from among either the free population or slaves who were specially trained for war" (Thornton 1988b, 362). The skills displayed by these itnbare (pi.) by dint of long practice "included facility in hand-to-hand combat with sword, club, battle ax, and stabbing spear, and in some cases use of the shield. . . . Thus the important skill was, above all, the ability to twist, leap, and dodge to 204

Accessing Power: Ritual War and Masquerade

avoid arrows or the blows of opponents" (pp. 363-64). These manoeuvres were known by the Portuguese term sanguar, "which is to leap from one side to another with a thousand twists and such agility that they can dodge arrows and spears" (p. 364).8 This parallels a form of training for Trinidad stick-fight in which experts taught young men "by tying them to a tree and pelting them with stones. In order to protect himself from being struck by the stones the learner had to use the hardwood stick with which he was armed" (Elder 1966, 194). Hard seeds or hibiscus whips were also used in practice attacks (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). The term sanguar appears derived from, or rather related to, the Southern Koongo word sanga, meaning "to perform the sword dance which the chief executes alone in certain circumstances when someone is to be put to death". It is also used in the Central Koongo-speaking areas as a noun to mean "triumph, cry of joy, war-cry during the sword dance" (Laman 1964).9 Sanga activity was not however limited to the chief, as the following extract shows: Before 1680, when soldiers fought hand to hand, dancing was a form of training to quicken reflexes and develop parrying skills. Dancing in preparation for war was so common in Kongo that "dancing a war dance" (sangamentd) was often used as a synonym for "to declare war" in seventeenth-century sources. (Thornton 1991, 1112) Indeed, the operative word turns up in Curacao, exactly in the context of the stick-fight. Stick-fights appear to have been one of several elements in the corn harvest festival known on the island as Seu> Wapa> Simidan and Corta Maishi 'cut the corn' (Lekis 1956, 227). One writer describes the stick-fight as taking place in the open air and performed by dexterous combatants who struck each other blows to the head and pummelled each other's muscles, all this to the accompaniment of the tambu or drums.10 Then the drummer could say: "The drum wants blood", and one of the participants would put his head over the drum and the drummer would hit him on his head so that the blood flowed and soaked the drum (Leonora 1988, 89).n Or the blood of the man wounded in the stick-fight was spread over the skin of the drum (Rosalia 1996, 234). This, says one writer, was what was earlier meant by the phrase sanger pa tambu, interpreted as 'bleed for the drum'; but 205

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in urban areas during the twentieth century this blood-letting served as a type of payment for entry to the tambu dance occasion by persons who could not afford to pay with money.12 Another writer indicated that blood-letting occurred when, during the tambu dances, men wished to partner a female who was being monopolized by another man. The claimant shoved the male dancer with his shoulder in order to take his place. If the recipient disapproved of this intrusion, he challenged the claimant to sanger pa tambu. On these occasions, the men fought with sticks called coco makaku.13 These were between thirty and thirty-five inches long. At one end of such a stick there was a hole with a leather strap inserted, which made it possible to grab the stick with greater ease. The men would continue fighting until one had wounded the other in the head. Once this happened, they would make friends with each other and continue dancing, except that this time the winner danced with the contested woman (Leonora 1988, 90-91).14 It appears from this confluence of acts that the sanguamento associated with sword and battle dances came by analogical deduction to be interpreted as sangre para ntambu 'blood for (the) drum'; or, since there were sacrificial offerings made to sacred drums, a phonological and semantic convergence took place between sangre, as an oblation, and sanguamento^ associated with war drills and stick-fighting. These aggressive danced sports diffused across the Atlantic from various locations in Africa. The game is found both in the Arabic areas of North Africa such as Mauritania on the Upper Guinea Coast, as well as among the Bedouin in Egypt.15 It is also practised in West Central Africa, as well as in Southern Africa, where the Zulu stick-fight is called mkangela, the stick itself undugu; the art is practised as well among the Sotho. Abrahams, in his recreation of the Matabele military culture of eastern South Africa, includes a man-to-man sport involving the manipulation of "two stout, long sticks made of young willow trees", capable of maiming and even dealing death (1950, 232-33). "They met in the centre of the circle. On the balls of their feet they circled each other, watching, weighing, waiting for an opening. In a lightning move Langa struck for Dabula's head. The crowd roared. Dabula caught the blow with his left stick. It slid off his shoulder" (p. 232). A comparable but not identical form of combat is to be found in a nineteenth-century account from the Gabon in Central Africa: "The natives in their quarrels use the knife, and inflict dreadful gashes on the flesh, but carefully 206

Accessing Power: Ritual War and Masquerade

avoid dealing a mortal wound, as the relatives of the deceased never allow the murderer to escape/' The knives, made by hinterland Bulla people, were between six to ten inches in length and two to four inches in breadth, the broadest part being in the centre, with an exceedingly sharp edge and point. In their conflict they use much activity, each dancing round the other like the single-stick players of Devonshire, watching the eye of their adversary and, when striking, bringing the knife up with a quick motion. Many severe wounds are inflicted before the contest ceases, one generally falling from loss of blood or being disabled. (Owen 1833, 2:183) Thus, as far as the African diaspora in the West Atlantic is concerned, the sport had its origins in several parts of Africa rather than in one, and it is these variations that led to the further evolution of several transatlantic forms during the period of slavery. These various transatlantic forms must already have been established by the time of the arrival of nineteenth-century African immigrants, whose descendants I interviewed in Trinidad, and these variants must already have constituted part of plantation Creole culture. On the other hand, there must have been salient Central African inputs into these West Atlantic forms, to account for marked Koongo-Angolan descendant enthusiasm for kalinda, as well as for the fact that capoeira angola is the name for the traditional, more conservative type of that sport in Brazil. One may therefore hypothesize that in differing West Atlantic locations, morphological elements of African core combat types were either abandoned or elaborated with varying emphases. Yet, given the wide-scale occurrence of migration throughout the Americas in past periods, whether legal or illegal, with masters or as runaways, in groups or individually, the complementary factor of diffusion within the Americas cannot be ruled out.

Trinidad Kalinda Kalinda, or kalenda, is the traditional Trinidad term for stick-fighting. The word perhaps derives from lenda (Ko) 'to oppose', with ka-, a nominal diminutive prefix found in southern Koongo and Mbundu. All the same, ka was a term for 'drum' because, according to Hearn 207

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(1890, 143) it was "made out of a quarter-barrel" or [Fr] quart, pronounced [ka] in French Creole. It was usual for Trinidad stick-fighters to call out "Give me keg/&a", meaning that the drummers should play in such a way as to give them encouragement and verve. In fact, stickfighting was also known by the phrase "to sing a ka" (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4, 8.22). Kalenda, or stick-fight, is clearly related to warfare, except that it is more ritualized and involves the choreography of a sport. As aggression, however, Anthony, one of Pearse's informants, recalling stickfight in the early twentieth century,, considered it a sport which was "necessary for self-defence, and people of all classes regarded it as necessary to know". He concluded by affirming that boys used to learn it "just as they learn cricket now" (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). Young boys would gather "in the evening about a teacher, all armed with chipon (or cocoa shoot) [< jupon (Fr) 'slip'], cut to reach from the ground to the Navel. First, drums were beaten and foot works learned according to the beat. The Teacher stands in the middle, the drums beat, teacher shouts, 'boys, you going to breaks;' he dances and suddenly gives a blow in some unsuspected direction" (Guitierrez in Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). Another of Pearse's sources stipulated: "You must have good eyesight, and watch your opponents' feet. You have to be stepping: 'you must move with the keg [drum].' The drummers must be neutral, but they control the fight by their tempo and beating" (Fortune's gardener, in Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). "The aim of each player is to deliver a blow that will hit the opponent on the body - any part above the waist - hard enough to fell him to the ground" (Elder 1966, 195). It was, however, also a means of settling scores between individuals, gangs and villages. Spurred on by the percussion of spoons against bottles, or of short bamboo lengths called kwa-kwa,16 or drums, stickfight sessions could go on for three to four hours of an afternoon, with various contestants entering the ring OTgayal~gayel. A connoisseur was accompanied by drums whose "tones and rhythms could talk . . . and warn him of some error in his strategy or instruct him on how to take advantage of an enemy's weakness" (Hill 1972, 26). The worst blow an opponent could strike was to the head. For this reason, holes were prepared near the gayal so that when a fighter was wounded he could lean his head over the hole so the blood could drain out into it. 208

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One informant who "played stick" while old African people were still alive would go to his grandfather to secure protection for his fights. His grandfather would give him a "guard", or amulet, and hold prayers to ensure his success. In Grenada, "ranging stick" was the term for drilling the stick head and infusing it with ingredients (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). These activities were done to defend the stickman against fighters with "bad stick: men hit you a stick in those days, you blow like that and worm come from your nose" (Pierre 1972). It is reputed that a Trinidad stick-fighter called Meyler even had snake poison put on his stick, and his mother wiped it before use with a red cloth17 (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). Because of the power of the "guarded stick, as soon as we hit them a lash, bam their stick burst in half (Pierre 1972). Sticks were also called bois 'wood', and bon rai (Fr bonne raie 'good strike'). Careful preparation was put into fashioning a stick. They are described as ranging between five and six feet in length and about seven-eighths of an inch in diameter. Made from the cog-wood or yellow poui tree principally, or from the gasparee, anaree and sour-guava, the sapling . . . should be cut "when the moon is weak" and the nights are dark. The bark is then peeled off and the stick is pushed into the heart of a rotting banana tree trunk and left there for seven days and seven nights. It is then taken out, covered with tallow, and buried in a manure heap where it will "cure" for fourteen days. After this it is removed and is bent and rolled to distribute the pliancy evenly through its length. It is next concealed in a dark place for seven more days before it is ready for use. (Elder 1966, 194) Spiritually motivated preparations were an integral part of the ritual. So were magical formulations of the sport itself. For instance, Pierre related: Once I was playing with a fellow right here so [in this vicinity] by the name of Altenar. As soon as Altenar cane [held the two ends of his stick in a defensive guard position] like that so, I notice a big door in front of him. I call a fellow . . . "I say Buddy Maitland, watch that man." He say, "Buddy, me see long time." He [Altenar] have a door and he behind the door stooping down, but you seeing a man in front of you with a stick, but he is behind the door. As soon as he move that door 209

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you see a big tree coming down on you, you have to run. So Maitland tell me, "Buddy, lef him give me [leave him to me]." And Maitland just watch him and give him a cross [made the cross in front of him] and walk up on him and hit him bow. He gone do lai do, do lai do [wavered], and shortly after he die. (Pierre 1972) A more public and egalitarian way to combat magic was to arrange to have all the sticks to be used placed in a barrel. Such sticks were not the private property of any of the fighters. The link between ritualized fighting and magical protection has been indicated in the instances of Martiniquan /a/a, Trinidad kalinda and Brazilian capoeira. The /a/a fighter is called majo (Fr major)18 and met savan (Fr maitre de la savanne 'master of the bush', that is, herbalist, spiritualist), and is an ascetic contemplative who is careful with his diet and spends much time among plants and at watercourses. La/a fighters are both admired and feared, because of their supernatural involvement (Beharizin-Joseph-Noel 1998, 438, 439). In Curasao, stick-fighters were called "stick priests", to mark their near-invincibility (Rosalia 1996, 234). Many miles to the south, one synonym for a capoeira player is mandingueiro, a word formed from the ethnonym Mande or Mandinka, people from Upper Guinea or Senegambia. In Brazil, as they also did in Africa, these people had a reputation for their knowledge of herbal healing and related magic. Eventually the term mandingueiro became synonymous with anyone of African origin who had esoteric knowledge related to healing, especially the making of protective fetishes to ward off evil influences, regardless of ethnic identification. Capoeira adepts were frequently known for this kind of knowledge, since they employed fetishes, known as patud, to protect them in the dangerous game, and in street fighting in general. Some of these patud were said to be able to defend the wearer against bullets (Lewis 1992, 49). While "few capoeira masters will openly admit to this form of belief today . . . the patud is still used by some in secret" (p. 111). In his accounts of Cuban mam, Montejo indicates that magical aids formed a part of the game ritual, and one good mani player he knew was also a well-known magic-man (Montejo 1968, 90). Magical powers were also invoked into the koko makak sticks carried on a daily basis by blacks in Martinique during the last century. 210

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The stick is carried both as a protection against snakes and as a weapon of offence and defence in village quarrels. . . . The sticks are usually made of a strong dense wood. . . . On inquiring whether any of the sticks thus carried were held to possess magic powers, I was assured by many country people that there were men who knew a peculiar method of "arranging"19 sticks so that to touch any person with them even lightly, and through any thickness of clothing, would produce terrible and continuous pain. (Hearn 1890, 173; author's emphasis) Among the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Trinidad daredevils who made pain into a sport, there was Willie Bawa, who rarely got injured. His father, the informant's great-uncle Tuyi, had come from Africa (Yearwood 1991). In the 1880s, there was Johnny Zizi, and One Man Bisco; later, in Freeport, there was Bundo Maybone,20 and Black Prince, and in Port of Spain, Eli Walke, and a Barbadian named Turnbull, nicknamed "White and Blue" (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4, 8f). Another Trinidad informant had been dubbed Pierre) zen zekle 'Pierre, young lightning'. He started playing in school at the age of sixteen and stopped after fourteen years, in 1924. The famous stick-fighters he recalled were Fredi Mungo ~ Fedi Mungo alias 'the Dentist' because he liked to hit out the teeth of his opponents. Then there was Mongamush21 in the north, also Chitambi and Cut-out-er /kUtowta/22 in Port of Spain, Mansley in Gasparillo, Willie Dolly from Couva, and Peter Ejan from Freeport. The last was short; both his mother and father were Koongo. He was a bad character who would receive money to kill people. His surname was Peter. His father was John Peter and he was Jim Peter, but Peter Ejan /ejUn/ was his "badjohn"23 name (Pierre 1972). The relationship between stick-fighting and "badjohn" or ruffian activity is reminiscent of the link between capoeira and the malandro 'street tough, hoodlum'. This is because the "development of capoeira in the urban setting was associated with criminality, in the minds of the police and the upper classes. . . . Therefore calling someone a 'capoeira' was the same as calling him a malandro., though not all malandros knew capoeira" (Lewis 1992, 47). This outlaw dimension to the Trinidad stick-fighter is ably portrayed in the fact that "in the old days when the weapons broke in the hands of the great stickmen they reverted to 211

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butting each other like oxen until they fell bleeding and exhausted or were pacified" (Elder 1966, 195). In this aspect, the stick-fighter consciously identified himself with the power of the devil, a sentiment expressed in a prayer when the Grenadian stickman placed his stick on a grave and said: "Lucifer, O Lucifer Devil, defend me, help me" (Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). This demonic self-identification occurs in lines of songs such as: Who bar mi' ban'

They who block my band [from advancing]

Thay barring the Devil

They are impeding the Devil24

This internalization of evil was largely a psychological response to the ostracism of Africans in plantation and colonial societies; such regimes elevated whiteness of skin colour as an ideal, and concomitantly espoused European cultural forms as desirable, while deprecating African cultural expressions as uncivilized and despicable. Thus one anonymous stick-fight song of the 1870s polarized morality as two oppositional colours: Jab eeyo neg

The Devil \e a black man

Me Die ee nom-la b/a

I3ut God \e> a white man

A calypso of the late nineteenth century elaborated on this theme of demonizing blacks and their habits: God, you le a white man I want to know de truth Who but the Devil Could make these nigger brutes "Lord Hannibal" (?1g>60s)25

On the other hand, another calypso lamented: Me neg-la vye, led e move

E3ut this black man \e old, ugly and bad

Tut mun, tut mun pa eme-i The whole world, the whole world rejects him "Possum" (18>60)

Since the ascription of "badness" was so intrinsically attached to the skin colour black, badness was elevated into a skill as well as a threat. One stick-fight song boasted: 212

Accessing Power: Ritual War and Masquerade U tan Hal move?

You hear Eli Is bad?

Hal la Mwe vie kote Hal

That Eli

llai gaeo Kongo

Eli, Koongo boy

Hal ga$o bongo

Eli, young bongo dancer

llai tombo jab la

Eli, spirit of the devil

I want to relate Eli's story

Hal Kongo eala

Ell, true son of the Koongo

Tumoro in Kuva

Tomorrow in Couva

Nu ke tire dl fe

We will shoot fire (Pierre 1971)

U tan Elai move

In the 1910s and 1920s, stick-fight was played in La Cour Harpe, in Belmont, at George Street in downtown Port of Spain, and in rural areas like Tunapuna, Sangre Grande, Gasparillo and Moruga. Stick213

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fight was a war exercise that indulged the casual attitude to death associated with warrior societies. War, and death in war, were regarded as heroic. The songs that were sung told of death as a likely outcome of the upcoming encounter, and contained messages of stoic consolation for the mothers of the men going into the fray. The following is an account of casual, limited, and even ritual warfare in the Nsundi region. When a war is to start the chief for the accusing party flings his cap to the ground and orders his baleeke [younger brothers and assistants] to take part. They snatch their guns and fire several salvoes as a sign that war is declared, and the following morning the contestants begin the fighting at some spot between the villages. If the quarrel is of a xjiore serious character and it is feared that the struggle will be bitter, they may call on their friends in neighbouring villages to take part. . . . When the fight is to begin the men rush off over the plain with their guns and begin to insult the opposing party in the coarsest terms. The latter reply, of course, in kind. The women follow in their wake, egging one another on with gestures and insults. Every now and then one of the men will rush forward and fire a shot. The women . . . now bend down and turn their posteriors towards the enemy.26 If there is a paramount chief [in the vicinity] he may come in person or send his staff with the order that the war be ended at once, whereupon hostilities are stopped. (Laman 1957, 2:161) Among the Koongo and Mbundu, women accompanied the army to battle carrying food supplies, cooking, and egging on their own side with contemptuous terms for their martial inadequacies and with challenges to their valour. Similarly, in Trinidad, women accompanied the band of warriors and singers who made up the retinue of the "king" stickman. They "were responsible for ammunition: spare sticks, food, rum and, according to some police reports, stones and bottles for use when two bands met and clashed in open combat" (Elder 1966, 196).

214

Accessing Power: Ritual War and Masquerade

Kalinda, Carnival and the Liminal Interestingly, the outfit worn by Trinidad stick-fighters and a related masquerade, the neg jading1 featured an emblem which was constant in Koongo religious statuary called minkisi. This was a mirror on the chest. The negjadin's chest decoration was "made of swansdown in the shape of a heart" (Joseph Clarke in Pearse 1955, Envelope 4). This decoration, whether for stick-fighter, or negjadin, was called a/aW, or /