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Overview
This volume examines the influence of African Catholics on the historical development of Black Christianity in America during the seventeenth century.
Black Christianity in America has long been studied as a blend of indigenous African and Protestant elements. Jeroen Dewulf redirects the conversation by focusing on the enduring legacy of seventeenth-century Afro-Atlantic Catholics in the broader history of African American Christianity. With homelands in parts of Africa that had historically strong Portuguese influence, such as the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Kongo, these Africans embraced variants of early modern Portuguese Catholicism that they would take with them to the Americas as part of the forced migration that was the transatlantic slave trade. Their impact upon the development of Black religious, social, and political activity in North America would be felt from the southern states as far north as what would become New York.
Dewulf’s analysis focuses on the historical documentation of Afro-Atlantic Catholic rituals, devotions, and social structures. Of particular importance are brotherhood practices, which were critical in the dissemination of Afro-Atlantic Catholic culture among Black communities, a culture that was pre-Tridentine in nature and wary of external influences. These fraternal Black mutual-aid and burial society structures were critically important to the development and resilience of Black Christianity in America through periods of changing social conditions. Afro-Atlantic Catholics shows how a sizable minority of enslaved Africans actively transformed the American Christian landscape and would lay a distinctly Afro-Catholic foundation for African American religious traditions today. This book will appeal to scholars in the history of Christianity, African American and African diaspora studies, and Iberian studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780268202798 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Notre Dame Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 334 |
| Sales rank: | 959,684 |
| File size: | 495 KB |
About the Author
Jeroen Dewulf is director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and professor in the Department of German and Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of a number of books, including The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves and From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians.
Jeroen Dewulf is director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and professor in the Department of German and Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of a number of books, including The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves and From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians.
Read an Excerpt
Scholars have long been puzzled about the apparent ease with which black converts abandoned dances rooted in century-old African traditions. After all, this decision stands in contrast to claims that African Americans adapted Protestant rituals to fit indigenous African traditions. John Catron confirms that the rejection of dancing in black evangelical churches contradicts “claims by many authors that blacks chose evangelicalism because it allowed them to freely express their African cultures,” but failed to provide an explanation for why dancing suddenly lost its appeal other than that it was opposed by missionaries.
If viewed from an Afro-Catholic perspective, however, this rejection was a logical decision. We should not forget that, in a brotherhood tradition, such practices were never intended as a mere form of entertainment. Rather, they were closely associated with the making of vows. Once people cease to believe in the power of saints, however, vows become meaningless and hence also the tradition to honor the latter with music, song, and dances. In this respect, Kingsley’s desperate reaction only illustrates how little slaveholders like him understood of black performance culture. What they perceived as entertainment was in actuality a set of rituals embedded in a complex set of social and religious traditions.
As the above-mentioned ring shouts reveal, however, the rejection of musical elements in black evangelical communities was not absolute. Certain traditions like hand-clapping, foot-tapping, and antiphonal singing continued to be part of black evangelical worshipping. While it may be tempting to interpret all of this as survivals of indigenous African cultural practices, it should be acknowledged that such traditions thrived just as well in Afro-Catholic brotherhoods. Rhythmic singing in call-and-response form, for instance, has characterized the way in which African Catholics pray the rosary for centuries. As an example, we could cite from Merolla da Sorrento’s report on a late seventeenth-century journey up the Congo River, where he observed how on a market place in Lemba, a “large crowd, divided into two choirs” was singing “the rosary in the Kongolese tongue.” He also experienced how people reacted to his sermon with “a great clapping of hands and humming, which are tokens of great joy among these people,” and noted that “the rosary was being sung by women while they were working in the fields.” We could also refer to the Cape Verde Islands, where local folklorists have argued that the islands’ batuque dances appear to be of purely indigenous African origin, yet the drum rhythm, dance movements, and call-and-response songs all derive from “a ritual enactment of the rosary prayer.” Certain practices of evangelical churches are virtual copies of Afro-Catholic brotherhood traditions. In nineteenth-century Missouri, for instance, the members of an African Methodist Church used to elect their king, and, in 1911, a report in the Owego Gazette revealed how members of the Bethel African Methodist Church in New York’s Tioga County used to organize colorful parades to the accompaniment of the beating of a drum. Not unlike those who in previous decades had marched in one of the region’s Pinkster processions, participants “were grotesquely costumed, representing historical personages, who were gorgeously arrayed in discarded regalia of fraternal societies.”
These parallels suggest that the genesis of black evangelical churches should not be reduced to a mixture of white Protestant and indigenous African elements. Rather, they suggest a third source of influence, namely that of fraternal practices rooted in ancient Afro-Atlantic Catholic traditions. The importance of mutual-aid and burial societies in organizing spiritual and material assistance during the era of slavery also suggests that the birth of black evangelicalism did not represent a radical break with the past but, rather, a transition to new forms of community building that increasing numbers of blacks deemed necessary in view of rapidly changing social conditions. We should not forget that the ancient brotherhoods were rooted in a tradition of accommodation and had essentially served to attenuate the hardships, humiliation, oppression, and pain of slavery. The approaching abolition required the development of new societies, adjusted to a post-slavery society.
Nowhere along the East Coast has this transition from brotherhoods to churches been more clearly documented than in the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Portugal
2. Africa
3. The Americas
4. The Catholic Roots of African American Christianity
Conclusion
Bibliography