“The Bad Thing”: Obeah and the Politics of Afro-Caribbean Religion among Slaves in Berbice (British Guiana)

This paper examines the practice and politics of Obeah—an Afro-Caribbean spiritual system of healing, harming, and divination—within two slave communities in Berbice (British Guiana) in the early nineteenth century.  It argues that enslaved people in Berbice responded in diverse, competing ways to the practice of Obeah within their communities, that Obeah rituals were sometimes quite dangerous to anyone who participated in them, and that Obeah practitioners—men who inspired great fear among their contemporaries—achieved and maintained their authority in large part through public displays of physical violence and intimidation.  Central to this study is an attempt to use Obeah to better understand the internal politics of slave communities.        
This paper also makes a methodological argument.  In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah and Afro-Caribbean religion more broadly, which have been based primarily on descriptions provided by white observers or modern ethnographic research, this study focuses on a body of rich legal documents—including testimony from more than a dozen slaves—generated during the criminal trials of two men convicted of practicing Obeah.  Instead of highlighting Obeah’s well-known role in slave revolts or other efforts to resist whites, the slave voices at the heart of this study emphasize the role that Obeah played in slaves’ interactions with one another and its potential for creating rifts within slave communities.  These observations challenge the widely accepted notion of a homogeneous “slave community” in which shared cultural and spiritual beliefs and practices enabled slaves to live in harmony with one another while resisting whites, and prompt us to consider the destabilizing and divisive effects that certain spiritual traditions could have for slaves.