Secret Knowledge, the Supernatural, and Slavery in Western Africa
Secret Knowledge, the Supernatural, and Slavery in Western Africa
- Jessica Catherine ReutherJessica Catherine ReutherDepartment of History, Ball State University
Summary
Slavery deeply impacted West and West Central Africans’ collective understandings of the structure of the universe and humans’ place within it. These societies widely accepted a supernatural realm that required secret knowledge to maintain health, prosperity, justice, and balance in the human world. Indigenous African religious systems engaged in a constant process of transregional spiritual exchanges in an effort to ensure survival, safety, and status in the context of the predatory environments created by the transatlantic and intra-African slave trades. The manifestations of slavery’s impact on Western Africans’ lived experiences of the supernatural are most prominent during the early modern period in their psychotherapeutic and judicial practices. After circa 1900, the focus shifts to how to appease slave deities and address the unresolved debts that Western African societies owed to those that they had enslaved. Traumatic pasts, such as those associated with trading and owning slaves, have surfaced in secret knowledge that posits supernatural explanations of phenomenon unfolding in the visible world. In these societies, the histories of the trauma of incorporating large numbers of enslaved persons in the 19th century intimately informed their interpretations of 20th century lived experiences.
Subjects
- Cultural History
- Religious History
- Slavery and Slave Trade
- Social History
- West Africa