Empire of Religion by David Chidester;

Author:David Chidester; [Chidester, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Humanity and Divinity

The idea of the “barbarous Negro” is a European invention.

LEO FROBENIUS

In Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) insisted that the religious life of African Americans did not begin in America, because it was built on “definite historical foundations,” the religious heritage of Africa. Characterizing indigenous African religion as “nature worship,” with its incantations, sacrifices, and attention to good and evil spiritual influences, Du Bois invoked the African priest as both the guardian of African religious tradition and the mediator of religious change under slavery in America. As a result of colonization, passage, and enslavement, African social formations were destroyed, “yet some traces were retained of the former group life,” Du Bois observed, “and the chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicine-man.” With the destruction of established African social relations of kinship and political sovereignty, which bore their own religious significance in Africa, the African priest represented a relatively mobile, transportable focus of religious life. Assuming multiple roles, operating as bard, physician, judge, and priest, the African ritual specialist “early appeared on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.”1 In these evocative terms, Du Bois recalled the creativity of the African priest, who deployed indigenous African religious resources under radically altered conditions.

Although the religion of the African priest came to be known by different names, such as “Voodooism” (Vodou) or “Obe Worship” (Obeah), Du Bois provocatively proposed that another name eventually adopted in America for indigenous African religion was “Christianity.” Within the limits of the slave system, but also within the space opened by the African priest, “rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first Afro-American institution, the Negro Church.” According to Du Bois, this church, in the first instance, was not Christian but African, since it only placed a “veneer of Christianity” upon the ongoing adaptation of indigenous African beliefs and practices under slavery. Suggesting that the Christianization of indigenous African religion should be regarded as a gradual process of religious transformation, Du Bois observed that “after the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.” In reviewing the “faith of the fathers” in Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois sought to establish a basic continuity in religious life from Africa to African America. The “study of Negro religion,” he insisted, had to carefully track a transatlantic process of religious development “through its gradual changes from the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro Church of Chicago,” which began with indigenous African religion.2

Among his many interests, Du Bois was an African historian. During the long course of his life, he took up the challenge of providing general historical overviews of Africa and the African diaspora in five books, The Negro (1915), Africa: Its Place in Modern

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.