Religion on Barbados

Obeah on Barbados

        Religion on Barbados developed in different ways to those described by Sensbach in Rebecca’s Revival. English missionaries journeyed across the Atlantic to convert the ‘heathen’ hordes to Christianity. According to John C. Appleby, “English interest…was mobilized by a crude combination of profit, patriotism, and Protestantism” (Paquette and Engerman, 87). The missionaries’ religion of choice was Protestantism in the form of the Church of England. The missionaries were overjoyed by the conversions they achieved. Much like Rebecca’s Revival, the missionaries were wary that the slaves were converting to take advantage of the reading and writing the missionaries offered or to cover for their continued practice of their native religion. Unlike Rebecca’s Revival, the planters saw Christianity as a way to civilize the African slaves.

The African slaves brought their religions with them across the Atlantic. The English masters did not like this and tried to stamp it out at every opportunity. One in particular proved extremely resilient, it was called Obeah (Beckles, 52). Obeah is defined by Udal as “a  kind  of  pretended  sorcery  or  witchcraft practiced  by the  negroes in  Africa” (Udal, 255). Udal also said that Obeah sometimes masked itself as Voodoo. Despite legislation outlawing it, it survived in underground social movements for years. Thousands of miles away from their homeland, the African slaves still held allegiance to their tribes and tribal religion. It was not uncommon to see people from the same tribe gathering after the work day was finished to participate in sacred rituals that were part of their religious life. The masters did not like this one bit. They saw this as a continuation of the savage life they led back in Africa. The planters did everything they could to wipe any form of African religion off of the island. The slave codes explicitly outlawed the practice of any non-Christian religion by the African slaves on Barbados. The legislation and threatened punishment did nothing to deter the practice, they simply drove them underground.

After the slave codes failed to have the desired effect, the planters welcomed the missionaries with open arms. They thought that by exposing the ‘heathens’ to Christianity, their ‘savage’ instincts could be suppressed. The planters wanted the slaves of African descent to act more like their Creole brethren. So the slaves obliged to achieve their own ends: “by openly assimilating European-derived elements of the Creole so as to achieve social and material betterment” (Beckles, 52). Their public expressions of faith and their private ones were by no means identical. By appearing to adhere to the Christian faith, slaves were able to mask and hide their African religion. There is no way of knowing who took their conversion seriously and who did it simply as a means to an end.

The differences between Rebecca’s Revival and the development of religions on Barbados are marked. The planters on Barbados encouraged their slaves to convert to Christianity so that it would hopefully quell the ‘savage’ instincts in them. In Rebecca’s Revival, the planters threatened, intimidated, and beat slaves trying to discourage them from converting and attending religious services. The planters on Barbados thought that Christianity would prevent the slaves from rebelling against their masters, in Rebecca’s Revival the planters thought that the religious education would encourage the slaves to rebel. The only similarity between the book and real life was that the missionaries could not be sure that the conversions were genuine. As in real life, the only people who could know that are the person undergoing the conversion and God.

Bibliography:

Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (New York: Cambridge, 1990), 52-57.

Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, editors, The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville: University Press of Flordia, 1996), 87.

J.S. Udal, “Obeah in the West Indies,” Folklore Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 30, 1915): 255-295.