'Setting things right': Medicine and magic in British Guiana, 1803-38

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'Setting things right': Medicine and magic in British Guiana, 1803-38
Juanita De Barros a
a Department of History, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan
Online Publication Date: 01 April 2004
To cite this Article De Barros, Juanita(2004)''Setting things right': Medicine and magic in British Guiana, 1803-38',Slavery &
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‘Setting Things Right’: Medicine and Magic
in British Guiana, 1803–38
1
JUANITA DE BARROS
In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, two men in the British
colony of Berbice were convicted of practising obeah. In European eyes,
obeah and allied practices were ‘ungodly’ and ‘evil’ and seemed to present
a challenge to the white plantocratic power structure. Within slave commu-
nities in the British Caribbean, obeah represented something quite different:
it was part of an attempt to reconstruct African cultural practices in a new
and hostile environment. In particular, as the obeah cases examined in this
paper show, it served a medical function. In a world where death was frequent
and sickness a constant companion, where European doctors were few and
seemingly incapable of preserving life, enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles
turned to each other. As healers, they drew on remembered skills and
rituals, some learned in Africa and others acquired in the new world. This
paper examines the varied responses of enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles
to sickness in the British colonies of Demerara-Essequibo and Berbice in
the first decades of the nineteenth century, exploring the diverse roles
played by slave health workers in the estate hospitals (or ‘hothouses’) and
in the slave quarters. It emphasizes the communal nature of Afro-creole
healing practices and the necessity of community support, particularly in
the successful completion of medical/magic healing ceremonies. This kind
of public cooperation was not inevitable, however. The obeah cases addressed
in this paper demonstrate that this assistance, facilitated by a shared cultural
lexicon, could at times give way to popular obstruction when the rituals
were misunderstood or misapplied.
Originally Dutch possessions, Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo changed
hands frequently during the European wars of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, passing between the Dutch, the French and the British
before finally becoming a permanent British possession in 1803. Demerara
and Essequibo were united in 1813 as one colony and joined Berbice in
1831 to form British Guiana.
2
The Dutch initiated plantation agriculture in
Juanita De Barros is in the Department of History, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo,
Michigan 49008-3899.
Slavery and Abolition, Vol.25, No.1, April 2004, pp.28–50
ISSN 0144-039X print /1743-9523 online
DOI: 10.1080/0144039042000220919 #2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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the three colonies and the production of sugar, coffee and cotton.
3
Sugar cul-
tivation expanded with the arrival of British planters and enslaved Africans
and Afro-creoles from Britain’s other Caribbean colonies. They quickly trans-
formed the new colony into a major exporter of cotton, coffee and, after 1810,
sugar. So successful were they that between 1810 and 1834, sugar production
in British Guiana outpaced that of Britain’s other West Indian possessions. By
1832, over three-quarters of the colony’s slaves (78 per cent) lived on sugar
estates.
4
For enslaved men and women, life on a sugar plantation was often filled
with sickness and early death. In the Guiana colonies, as well as in the rest
of the Caribbean, they suffered from the effects of poor housing, poor food
and overwork.
5
Deficiency diseases and epidemics took a terrible toll, as
did work-place accidents and physical punishments. Despite this, there were
relatively few European and European-trained medical practitioners in the
region. Richard Sheridan has argued that they were always scarce, although
their numbers increased by the late eighteenth century as planters responded
to the rising price of enslaved Africans, and the strengthening movement to
abolish the slave-trade, by attempting to preserve the lives of those slaves
they already owned. The passage of ameliorative legislation requiring slave
owners to provide medical attendance for their slaves contributed to the
increase in the number of medical practitioners. Sheridan has concluded
that in 1834, there were likely in excess of 400 European doctors in the
British Caribbean.
6
The doctor-patient ratio varied, however. Barry Higman
has estimated that it ranged from 1800:1 in Jamaica to 1000:1 in Berbice,
with other colonies falling somewhere in the middle. This ratio was much
higher in rural areas. In some parts of rural Jamaica, there was one doctor
for 5,000 slaves; in Kingston the ratio was one doctor to every 700 persons.
The numbers for Georgetown, Demerara were similar; there, the ratio was
750:1.
7
Henry Bolingbroke, in his 1813 account of Demerara-Essequibo, con-
cluded that although the number of European physicians was ‘inconsiderable’
other European-educated ‘medical men’, notably surgeons, were more numer-
ous. Many of the latter were former military men, cast into the colony by the
wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then choosing to
remain afterwards.
8
They were joined by apothecaries, midwives, and ‘prac-
titioners of physic’.
9
Doctors’ reports from the 1820s reveal the large numbers of slaves for
which each doctor was responsible, implying a deficit of European-trained
practitioners and irregular oversight. Doctors P.F. Watt, Thomas Bell and
Robert Mackie (who practised on the West Coast of Demerara, Essequibo
and Essequibo’s Leguan Island, respectively) were responsible for between
1,000 and 2,500 slaves. Like many physicians in the region, they were retained
on annual contracts and were responsible for visiting each estate every few
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days, more frequently if called upon, seeing to ‘all the sick negroes, and fur-
nish[ing] the requisite medicines’.
10
Many estates also relied upon untrained
or informally trained whites to fill in between doctors’ visits. The Jamaican
overseer Thomas Thistlewood was, through observation and close reading
of medical books, able to treat the estate’s slaves for minor ailments in the
absence of the regular doctor.
11
Overseers and plantation managers performed
similar services in the Guianese colonies. According to one early nineteenth-
century account, these men ensured that the doctor’s ‘prescriptions [were]
carried into effect’ and that medicine was ‘administered’ when the doctor
was absent. Enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles on the estates invariably
took their complaints of illness and injuries to the ‘man on the spot’, one of
the estate officials. When McGregor, a slave on Plantation Goldstone Hall,
was sick, he first approached the estate manager who dosed him with a
‘glass of bitters’ and sent him back to his work. Likewise, Toubi of Plantation
Lancaster, on becoming ill, appealed to the estate manager who gave him pur-
gatives.
12
The number of European doctors seemed irrelevant to the overall health of
enslaved peoples. Some Caribbean-based physicians had been trained at the
top European institutions of the day and were willing to incorporate empirical
observations about the effects of malnutrition, over-work and poor sanitation
on slave health. But even the best of this medical care was inadequate, mostly
due to current notions of disease causation. As Barry Higman has argued, the
fact that contemporaneous ‘European medical knowledge ... rested on weak
foundations’ had a much greater impact on the health of slaves than did the
aggregate number of doctors. Dominant medical theories – such as the
‘humoral-climatic’ theory – and heroic treatments such as bloodletting,
purging, blistering and the like constituted a real threat to patients’ health
and ensured that ‘the doctors killed more often than they cured’. In the first
part of the nineteenth century, a belief that ‘miasmas’ produced by filth con-
tributed to the spread of disease was widely held, but as many historians have
argued, these ideas co-existed with an acceptance of the humoral theory.
13
These methods were applied on estates in Berbice and Demerara-Essequibo
as they were elsewhere. Slaves’ complaints to the fiscals are filled with
tales of being dosed with a variety of purgatives. Toubi was given ‘tartar
emetic and salts’ for a ‘pain in his right side’ and the slaves of Plantation
Profit a combination of ‘salts, jalap and calomel’ when they were ill. These
purgatives were frequently unsuccessful. When Henderina became sick
while working on Plantation Providence, the overseer promptly gave her
some ‘salts and a vomit’. This ‘physic’ caused her to ‘vomit for some hours
in the morning’, leaving her ‘weak’ and ‘unable to do any work’.
14
One wonders whether the discomfort resulting from these treatments and
their lack of success discouraged the sick from approaching plantation officials.
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The frequency with which complaints of illness were greeted with disbelief
and corporal punishment likely added to slaves’ disinclination to this treat-
ment. Plantation Profit’s Romeo claimed that the sick were ‘flogg[ed]’ and
Toney quoted the manger as saying that the ‘stocks is our physic’.
15
These European doctors, apothecaries, and estate officials were not the
sole providers of health care on plantations. They were outnumbered
by African and Afro-creole healers. As accounts of plantation life in the
United States and the British Caribbean have demonstrated, enslaved Africans
and Afro-creoles worked in plantation hospitals (‘hot houses’) as doctors and
doctresses, sick nurses, midwives and nurses, their number and degree of
specialization dependent upon the size of the estate. Whereas large holdings
employed a wide range of slave health workers, smaller ones relied on just
one or two who were responsible for a variety of functions,
16
sometimes
doubling as house slaves. Jonas, of Berbice’s Plantation L’Esperance, was a
‘sick-nurse’ and a house-servant.
17
The various slave healers in the estate hospitals were responsible for a
range of medical and more mundane duties. Nurses carried out such tasks
as ‘administer[ing] the medicines, provid[ing] food and other comforts, and
[keeping] ... the hospital and the patients clean’.
18
The Demerara-Essequibo
sources distinguished between ‘nurses’ (or ‘assistants’) and ‘sick nurses’, each
with a separate set of duties. Thomas Bell, who practised in Essequibo, noted
that the ‘assistant’ to the sick nurse concentrated on ‘nursing’. By contrast, the
sick nurse was ‘generally capable of performing all the duties of the apothec-
ary’, in the words of P.F. Watt. Donald McDonald, manager of Plantation
Maria’s Pleasure, claimed that this individual (the ‘most intelligent and
trusty negro’) was tutored by a ‘medical practitioner’ for a year or two, ‘learn-
ing to bleed, to know the medicine, and weights and measures’. The sick nurse
also seemed to manage the affairs of the hospital and in particular, was in
charge of the ‘book’ in which the estate manager listed all the patients,
their prescriptions, and sometimes a brief description of their illness.
19
The
sources also suggest that the two categories of nurses were distinguished
by gender as well.
20
Higman has drawn similar conclusions for Berbice.
According to the 1819 Berbice slave register, of the 38 sick nurses listed,
26 were male. Most of those described as nurses, rather than sick nurses,
were female (80, or some 97 per cent).
21
Hospital-based slave medical practitioners included slave doctors,
although these seemed to have been fewer in much of the British West
Indies. Barry Higman, in his analysis of the 1819 slave registration returns
for Berbice, found seven (male) doctors.
22
Contemporaneous accounts also
note the presence of slave doctors. George Pinkard, a European military
doctor resident in Demerara-Essequibo in the late eighteenth century,
described ‘Doctor Bob’ as the ‘resident black physician [italics in original]
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at the negro hospital, and sub-medical attendant of his brother slaves’.
Slave doctors, claimed Pinkard, ‘had the charge of the sick-house’ and were
responsible for particular medical duties which did not ‘usually’ come within
European doctors’ purview, such as caring for the ‘sores from punishments’.
23
Their place in the hospital hierarchy is ambiguous. Although Pinkard charac-
terized them as ‘in charge of’ the estate hospital, Higman believes that they
were probably supervised by European doctors. He has concluded that it is
hard to distinguish their role from that of the various kinds of nurses employed
in the hospitals and that there was ‘only a fine line between doctor and
nurse’.
24
They may well have played a role similar to that of the sick nurse,
functioning as a kind of apothecary. Kiple and King have suggested that the
‘sick nurse’ or ‘doctor woman’ on US estates had a role similar to that of
the slave doctors/nurses in the British Caribbean; they assisted white
doctors, but also supervised other, more subservient slave practitioners,
especially on large estates where they ‘could frequently be found overseeing
a staff of midwives, nurses, and the children’s cook’.
25
Although slave medical practitioners are described as functioning within
the sphere of European medical practice, some seemed to straddle two
worlds – Africa and Europe. Kiple and King have argued that in the United
States, the hospital nurse and the local ‘herb doctor’ were often one and the
same, ‘ambidextrously practic[ing] both black and white man’s medicine’.
26
In the British Caribbean, slave doctors used ‘herbal remedies’ to treat patients
in the estate hospitals.
27
According to James Philippo, a Baptist missionary
stationed in Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century, spiritual/medical special-
ists (or ‘myalmen’) were ‘employed in attendance on the sick in the hospitals
of estates’.
28
And in Berbice, Willem, a slave who was convicted of practising
obeah, treated sick slaves in the estate hospital, ritually washing and ‘flogging’
them.
29
Historians of slavery in the United States and in the Caribbean have
suggested that enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles placed greater confidence
in their ‘own’ doctors.
30
This confidence may have been responsible for
the greater success attributed to slave doctors,
31
but it may also have been
due to the treatments they employed. Inoculation for yaws, for example,
served a prophylactic function and the application of herbal remedies may
have helped soothe and alleviate a variety of physical ailments.
32
As Sheridan
has argued for the Caribbean, the pharmacopoeia employed by slave healers
was occasionally efficacious and certainly more benign than the often brutal
methods employed by European-trained doctors.
33
Kiple and King present another possibility: they suspect that the rituals
employed by slave doctors – the ‘many flourishes and charms to enlist the
supernatural in buttressing the remedy’ – may have contributed to their
success.
34
W.E.B. Du Bois called these individuals ‘Priest[s] or Medicine-
m[e]n’ and described them as the ‘healer[s] of the sick, the interpreter of
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the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, [and] the supernatural aven-
ger[s] of wrong’.
35
This characterization illustrates the varied roles they
played and the otherworldly powers they seemed to possess. It also implies
that they were an elite minority, privileged in their possession of a body of
knowledge that was inaccessible to the majority of enslaved men and
women. Yet this monopolization of medical knowledge was not absolute
and was at times contested. Two obeah trials held in Berbice in the late
1810s and early 1820s reveal such tensions; as well, they show that healers
depended on the assistance of the wider slave community in performing
healing rituals, which were, above all, communal ceremonies.
Enslaved peoples obtained medical assistance from members of the wider
slave community, including lay healers who operated outside estate hospitals.
When Henderina (of Plantation Providence) was unable to find relief for her
sickness from the estate overseer and her owner, she went to ‘town’ (likely
New Amsterdam) and saw ‘Mama Lucy’, remaining in her house for three
days until she recovered.
36
‘Mama Lucy’ was probably African or Afro-
creole, and, if a slave in New Amsterdam, one of few female slaves in that
town (only 42 in 1819).
37
She had a house and a yard, so perhaps she was a
freed woman, or a ‘jobbing slave’, allowed to live and work away from her
master in exchange for her earnings. Henderina’s decision to stay with
‘Mama Lucy’ until she was a ‘little better’ implies that the woman possessed
some healing skills, although their extent is uncertain. She may have been a
lay healer, one of the many black women who provided medical care for
slaves outside the estate hospitals. Sheridan has described these women as
the heirs of a West African lay medical practice and has speculated that
their skills as herbalists were likely transplanted to the Americas.
38
Regardless
of the kind of training she possessed and her degree of skill, ‘Mama Lucy’s’
willingness to provide Henderina a place to heal hints at the varied and signifi-
cant roles that African and Afro-creole healers played, both inside and outside
the hospital walls. Parents, relatives and friends could also provide medical
assistance. When Frances, a 45-year-old Ebo woman living in Georgetown,
discovered that her child had a ‘cold’, she tried to alleviate the symptoms
by rubbing candle grease on the child’s stomach.
39
And when Roosje (of Plan-
tation L’Esperance) went into early labour, she was attended by at least six
other women, including the estate midwife and two women described as her
sisters, one of whom was Roosje’s ‘elder sister or shipmate’.
40
As these cases show, family and friends provided medical care for sick
fellow slaves. Their actions were commonplace and almost banal: parents
everywhere care for their sick children, and kin and friends invariably
provide assistance when possible. Their very ordinariness means that details
of these healing roles is often elusive. On the other hand, the sources contain
much more information about ‘elite’ healers, those doctors and nurses who
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seemed to possess privileged medical knowledge. As the cases of two
such individuals show, success rested upon the assistance of the wider com-
munity. In 1819 and two years later, in 1821, epidemics struck two estates
in Berbice, plantations Demtichem and Op Hoop van Beter.
41
Local healers
were called in ‘to set things right’ by identifying the person responsible
and preventing the spread of further sickness. These healers led the estate
populations in a dance, a collective ritual designed to uncover the wrong-
doer (the ‘obeah’ man or woman). Although the colonial authorities held
the two healers – Hans and Willem – responsible for orchestrating the
‘evil’ ceremonies, the two men were part of a larger, collective ritual which
illuminated the efforts of enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles to respond to
a social crisis.
When the epidemic hit Plantation Demtichem in 1819, one of the drivers,
January (with the knowledge of the other drivers, La Fleur and Benjamin),
called in Hans. ‘So many deaths had occurred’ that January wanted Hans to
‘put everything to right’. This meant discovering ‘the bad people [from] the
estate’. January had the estate residents – men, women, and children –
gather at his house. A night of singing and dancing followed, culminating in
the identification of the estate carpenter, Frederick, as an ‘obeah man’, the
one responsible for poisoning the children. Frederick reported the events to
the estate overseer who called in the attorney and launched a search for
Hans. Hans, January and Frederick’s accuser, Venus, were tried and convicted.
All three were sentenced to be whipped; as well, Venus was to work for 12
months in chains, while Hans was to be branded, jailed for a year, and after-
wards made to ‘work in chains for life “for the benefit of the colony”’.
42
January initiated the proceedings by drinking rum from a ram’s horn and
ordered a ‘dram to be given to the officers’ (perhaps the other drivers). After
collecting money from all those present, Hans embarked upon the first phase
of the ritual. He placed in the children’s hair feathers from a pullet he had
killed. He then put a bell, an ‘Image and some other things’ in a tub of
water, along with part of a wild cane root which he claimed to have brought
from ‘his country’. He washed the children’s faces with the water ‘from [his]
Country belief ... that that would make the children come good’. Hans
believed that the root-infused water would help them ‘recover ... from
fever or anything else’ and would also protect the healthy. He anointed every-
one who gathered, either ‘sprinkling’ their faces or ‘washing’ their heads.
Hans had a second task: to find the ‘bad thing which was there to destroy
children’. To uncover the wrong-doer, everyone who gathered participated in
ceremonial singing and dancing. Hans sang his ‘country song’ and was joined
by the others who sang its ‘chorus’. Hans then sang ‘the dance called Water
mamma dans’ while everyone danced, some eventually falling into convul-
sions as if possessed. Venus felt her ‘head beg[i]n to turn, as if [she] were
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mad’; others, ‘whose heads turned in such a manner, ... fell to the ground’.
According to January, those gathered ‘became as if crazy, some thr[o]w[ing]
themselves in the mud [while] others jumped’. Hans and another man
(apparently under the latter’s orders) ‘flogged’ the ‘most turbulent’ with
‘wild canes’ and bamboo that seemed to have been gathered for that purpose.
He also put ‘guinea pepper in their eyes which he [had] chewed’. A circle
formed, and Venus – after dancing within it – accused Frederick of being
the poisoner, the ‘bad man on the estate’; she saw this ‘from the water that
ha[d] been sprinkled over [her] face and eyes’. She then led the crowd to
Frederick’s house to find the ‘poison’. Once there, Hans directed a child
(Gabriel) to stand over a hole in the floor (which the others had dug),
holding a pot of water; he covered her head and the pot with a piece of
cloth. Pompandour removed the cloth, revealing blood, ‘negro hair’, nail
clippings, a snake’s head, and ‘other things’ in the pot. Hans told those
gathered that ‘the stuff in the horn was the bad thing which destroyed the
children, but it would do so no longer’.
43
Several years later, disease struck Plantation Op Hoop van Beter, also in
Berbice, killing or sickening many of the children. As on Plantation
Demitchem, the widespread sickness convinced some of the local people that
obeah was responsible and that a specialist skilled in healing and anti-obeah
antidotes should be called in. Though there are some similarities between
the two cases, the differences are striking. According to many witnesses,
the healer called to Plantation Op Hoop van Beter, Willem, was expected to
‘discover the person [responsible] and counteract the effects, ... [and] to
put things to right’.
44
As had happened several years earlier on Plantation
Demtichem, a ceremony was performed involving dancing and, likely, spirit
possession, leading to the ‘discovery’ of the guilty person. During the ritual
on Plantation Op Hoop van Beter, an African woman who lived on the
estate – Madalon – was accused of being the ‘bad woman who caused so
many strong healthy people on the estate to become sick’. At this point,
the similarities between the two ceremonies become less apparent. During
both, the healer ritualistically flogged at least some of the participants and
rubbed pepper on them. On Plantation Demtichem, most of those gathered
shared in the physical pain of the rite (they were all flogged and had guinea
pepper rubbed in their eyes); this was part of the attempt to uncover the
‘guilty’ person, a necessary step in the divination ritual. On Plantation
Hoop Op van Beter, however, the flogging and the application of pepper
were directed at one person, Madalon, who was so badly beaten that she
died. On two successive nights, Madalon was suspended from a mango tree
and beaten with sticks (and a shovel, according to British missionary John
Wray). Guinea pepper was rubbed not into her eyes but rather into her genitals.
Witnesses presented several reasons for this treatment. The beating was to
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elicit a confession from Madalon and to both ‘punish’ and ‘purify’ her, to force
the obeah from her (to make the ‘bad thing ... come out of her head’).
45
Despite these differences, the choice of both Hans and Willem to conduct
these ceremonies seemed to rest on a similar appreciation of their skills. The
two men enjoyed a certain local renown as healers. Although employed at the
Fort, Hans attended slaves on different plantations. When John Wray asked
about the frequency with which he ‘exercis[ed] this power ...on estates’
Hans responded that although he was occasionally unable to help those who
asked for his aid – their disease being ‘above [his] art’ – the ‘Negroes in
general kn[e]w that [he] possess[ed] the power of helping them if any thing
[was] the matter with them and [that a] great number of Negroes [had]
applied to [him] and [he had] helped them’. The drivers and carpenters of
Plantation Bachelor’s Lust asked for his help to stop the women from miscar-
rying and the children from dying. Hans ‘washed the children and the bellies
of the pregnant women and this prevented the children from dying and the
women from miscarrying’. He was also invited to Plantation New Vigilance
‘for the same purpose’.
46
Like Hans, Willem had a local reputation as a
healer. Fortuyn, who brought Willem to the estate, had called on Willem pre-
viously to help cure a persistent sore on his wife’s foot. Willem had also
helped out Cornelia of Plantation Op Hoop van Beter. He had offered his ser-
vices to the estate’s slaves, asking if anyone was sick and, if so, ‘could he cure
[them]’. As she was ill, Cornelia was willing to give him a chance; she allowed
him to hit her on the head with three ‘twigs’ from a coconut tree and then
washed herself as he had ordered. Feeling much better afterwards, Cornelia
was certain Willem had cured her. Willem also assisted Adolff and his
family. While the family were in the hospital, caring for a sick child, Willem
showed up; saying he had been sent by ‘God Almighty’, he ‘washed’ Adolff’s
children and took ‘two bits’ as compensation.
47
Both Willem and Hans claimed that privileged knowledge and skills, some
of them supernatural, helped them heal the sick. Willem, according to Wray,
declared that he could ‘render himself invisible and ...do many wonderful
works’.
48
Isaac believed that Willem, by spreading ashes across the road,
was able to prevent ‘any body from seeing farther on’.
49
Hans claimed
powers of divination. He knew that the ‘bad thing’ was in Frederick’s house
from its ‘smell’, and said he was one of the few people able to identify
poison in this fashion. Hans declared that his ability to do so and to identify
the ‘bad person’ were special powers he had acquired in his ‘own country’
and that they came ‘from God’.
50
The privileged position of Hans and
Willem was buttressed by their access to the spirit world. Both drew on the
assistance of spirits or gods. According to Wray, Hans requested ‘horses’,
which Wray interpreted as meaning that he wanted ‘Negroes to carry him’.
One of those present carried the child Gabriel and one carried Hans.
51
Hans
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probably was referring to spirit possession, the ‘horses’ likely people
‘capable’ of ‘being possessed [or ridden] by gods’.
52
Willem himself
seemed to have become possessed. Munro (Madalon’s husband) and Issac
both told the examiners that Willem was the Water Mamma (‘Minje
Mama’) or the river spirit.
53
The sources suggest a Central African provenance for at least some of
these healing practices. Hans is described as a ‘Congo’. According to Philip
Curtin, the term ‘Congo’ came to refer to ‘any Bantu-speaking people from
western Central Africa’.
54
Thus, perhaps Hans’ ‘own country’ was located
in that region of Africa. It is also possible that Hans may have been a
Kongo from the Kingdom of Kongo itself. As someone from west Central
Africa, Hans was part of a large minority in both Berbice and British
Guiana as a whole. Most Africans shipped to these colonies came from
West African nations, but Central Africans comprised a sizeable minority
(some 22 per cent).
55
Even before the end of the slave-trade in 1807, West
Central Africans were relatively numerous; Schuler has concluded that they
made up about 21 per cent of the 88,712 Africans shipped to the Guianas
between 1676 and 1808.
56
Members of different ethnic groups were shipped to Berbice from West
and West Central Africa. Higman’s work on the 1819 slave registers for
Berbice shows some six African ethnic groups as numerically predominant;
these included the Popo or Ewe (from the Bight of Benin or ‘Slave Coast’),
the Kormantyn (from the Gold Coast), the Igbo (from the Bight of Biafra),
the North-western Bantu, the Kongo (from Central Africa), and Malinke
(from Senegambia).
57
Despite the diversity of the groups that peopled these
African regions, they held similar views about religion and the relationship
of humans to the spirit world. This commonality was apparent among West
African peoples whose belief systems provided the basis for healing practices
that were transferred to the Caribbean. West Africans divided the spirit world
in two, between a ‘supreme being’ (who was distant from human affairs) and
lesser gods or ‘spirits’ (who intervened in the human world). Central African
peoples such as the Kongo held similar beliefs in a supreme being and a host of
lesser spiritual entities residing in mountains, rivers, and forests. Peoples from
West and Central Africa also tended to see magic and medicine as intimately
linked and often attributed sickness and misfortune to the supernatural, and
specifically to witches.
58
Jerome Handler has argued that ‘African cultures’
linked ‘illness and the supernatural’ and that ‘fundamental’ to this ‘was the
notion that major misfortunes of life such as disease, serious physical
trauma, or death were often ...the result of supernatural forces’.
59
In both
regions, a range of skilled specialists could, often with the assistance of
lesser deities, resolve a variety of social crises.
60
Diviners, for example,
helped detect the witches and sorcerers who caused illness; mediums gave
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‘messages from the gods’, and doctors ‘heal[ed] the sick and prepar[ed]
magical medicines’. Yet in many parts of Africa, these practitioners fulfilled
several, at times overlapping roles. As Parrinder has argued for West African
peoples, the diviner was often a priest and an ‘expert in medicines and herbs’,
and priests themselves were ‘also expert “doctors” and administer[ed] “medi-
cine”’ which could include both ‘natural healing agencies’ (such as leaves and
roots) and ‘the invocation of magical or spiritual influences that are thought to
be associated with them’.
61
In Central Africa, priests or diviners likewise
played multiple roles, acting as healers and diviners. They not only searched
for the sorcerer or witch but also treated the ill with ‘medical herbs, human
reasoning, and imitative magic’.
62
Though these religious/medical specialists
generally served individual patients, they also played a more public role.
Thornton has suggested that in seventeenth-century Kongo, during periods
of social crisis, such as epidemics, priests served the wider community by
orchestrating ‘public rituals’.
63
Although the vicissitudes of the Atlantic slave-trade prevented the intro-
duction of the full range of religious/medical personnel employed in
African societies, slaves with at least some of these skills were shipped to
different Caribbean colonies. As a result, in the Caribbean, slave healers
included herbalists, diviners and ‘sorcerer-healers’, much as they did in
African societies.
64
Individual practitioners in the Caribbean often performed
all these functions. Alvin Thompson has noted that in British Guiana, single
slave healers could produce ‘amulets and various potions to counteract
evil’, concoct ‘herbal cures and poisons’, and conduct ‘exorcisms and funerary
rites’.
65
This ‘multi-tasking’ may have resulted from the small number of
specialized practitioners in the Caribbean, but perhaps it also replicated the
tendency in West and West Central African societies for single practitioners
to provide a range of services.
Hans and Willem seemed to be influenced by this pattern. They were divi-
ners, able to communicate with the spirit world, and were knowledgeable
about herbs and their properties. They were both religious and medical
specialists. Their actions resonate with African practices in another way;
notably, the kinds of healing methods they employed suggest a West and
West Central African provenance. Hans, in particular, seemed influenced by
Kongo Roman Catholic traditions. John Wray suspected that Hans had
‘been instructed in the Roman Catholic religion’. Hans told Wray that ‘he
always prayed to God to bless the means he used for the recovery of
people’. In response to Wray’s request, Hans prayed in ‘the African language’,
kneeling and addressing ‘God by his country name of Mary and Jesus Christ
and then [making] a cross on the ground with his finger’. To Wray, this proved
that Hans had received some Roman Catholic teaching in Africa. With the
exception of Wray’s visits following Hans’ arrest – in which Wray had
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preached of sin, God and ‘Salvation by Jesus Christ’ – Hans had not received
any Christian religious instruction during the 20 years he had been in the
colony.
66
It is likely that Hans was drawing upon belief systems and religious
language acquired in Africa. Scholars who have examined pre-colonial
religious beliefs of the Kongo have noted the influence of Christian, and
specifically Roman Catholic, beliefs and practices. After the late fifteenth
century, a ‘local form of Christianity’ was widely practised in the Kongo,
the origins of which lay in proselytizing carried out by Portuguese mission-
aries and, eventually, by lay Kongo preachers. Thornton estimates that
by the early seventeenth century, ‘most of the people in Kongo identified
themselves as Christians’ and many could to ‘say the minimum prayers in
Kikongo and answer basic questions about the faith’.
67
Wray likely saw Christian elements in Hans’ use of the cross in his healing
ritual. Hans declared that everyone in his country wore the cross, which they
‘worship[ped] ... as [their] God’. The cross, he said, gave him ‘power’,
enabling him to ‘discover all bad people immediately’ and to detect poison
in any house by its smell.
68
Certainly the use of the cross can be seen as indi-
cating a Christian/Roman Catholic influence, but it may also have reflected
more general Central African religious beliefs. Wyatt MacGaffey has
argued that the cross possessed significant cultural meaning; it signified ‘the
[sacred] space in which the spiritual encounter takes place’ and connected
‘this world and the other’.
69
Sterling Stuckey has suggested a similar interpret-
ation: the ‘horizontal axis of the cross signifies the sea or river that divides the
world of the living and dead, the heavens above and the earth below, this
world and the next’.
70
The use that both Hans and Willem made of water in these healing rituals
likewise resonated with West and West Central African practices. They
washed the sick with a herb-infused water mixture (Hans washed the
healthy as well). Hans believed that water had another function: it could
‘fix poison to the spot’.
71
Scholars who have examined healing practices in
Africa and throughout the diaspora have similarly noted the symbolic import-
ance of water. Herskovits declared that ‘bathing the body’ was a key com-
ponent of all healing rituals; bathing was believed to ‘“cool” the body’, or
to ‘set [it] at peace’.
72
Warner-Lewis has suggested that water’s significance
lay in the belief that it was the ‘abode of spirits’.
73
Its use in healing cer-
emonies among diverse African peoples, such as the Ga, means that Africans
may have carried this practice with them to the Americas.
74
The widespread belief held by many West and West Central Africans in
water spirits may have contributed to the readiness with which they saw
water as a key ingredient in healing rituals and remedies
75
and may have
consequently been accepted in those parts of the African diaspora with West
African or Central African populations.
76
Throughout the Caribbean – in
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British Guiana, Trinidad, Suriname and Jamaica, for example – many
Africans and Afro-creoles recognized a river god with healing powers
named variously as the ‘Liba-Mama’, the ‘Watra-Mama’, the ‘water
mamma’, the ‘rubba missis’, or ‘mamma dlo’.
77
Descriptions of this creature
resonated with mermaid beliefs; in fact, in Guyana and Jamaica, the ‘water
mamma’ is called a mermaid. According to Warner-Lewis, she was believed
to be ‘a beautiful woman who [sat] combing her hair on a big river stone’.
78
The missionary Charles Dance described a belief in late nineteenth-century
British Guiana of a mermaid or water spirit who seduced young men, luring
them from their wives. Dance suggested that the basis for this belief lay in
the existence of a local creature, the manatee.
79
Contemporaneous and
modern scholarly examinations of the ‘water mamma’ dance in British
Guiana show that it was performed throughout the nineteenth century and
indicate that its key elements seem to have been more or less constant over
time. Later descriptions by post-emancipation observers such as Dance
reveal these later manifestations as similar to those in 1819 and 1821. In the
pre- and post-emancipation periods, the water mamma dance was performed
in response to misfortune or illness, either of an individual, a family or a whole
community; the spirit was called upon to reveal the causes of the affliction or
the identity of the person responsible for the evil.
80
A religious specialist led
the proceedings which were usually marked by spirit possession and dancing.
Dance’s account of a ‘water mamma’ ritual in which both men and women
danced until they began to convulse and ‘fell on the ground’
81
echoes descrip-
tions of the dances performed decades earlier.
In British Guiana, the water mamma dance has been interpreted as having
a West African or West Central African provenance. Monica Schuler has
placed its origins in Kongo cultural practices, citing an early twentieth-
century account which described an elderly Kongo man carrying out the
water mamma dance (also called Komfo).
82
Brian Moore, however, has
placed the origins of the term ‘Komfo’ (or ‘cumfo’) among West African
peoples; he sees its origin in the Dahomean word ‘Komfo’ and has clearly
linked the water mamma ritual to the West African ‘[w]orship of river gods’.
83
The water mamma dance, in both its form and function, is similar to
myalism, a kind of ‘dancing ritual’ led by a skilled practitioner (often called
a ‘doctor’) who anointed participants with a protective herb and water
mixture thought to protect and heal. It also aimed to identify the individual
responsible for any one of a host of social calamities, including sickness.
84
Nineteenth-century accounts described myalism as a kind of ‘good magic’
or ‘anti-obeah’ practice.
85
The Jamaican-based missionary, James Phillippo,
regarded myalism as an antidote to obeah which he characterized as a
‘species of witchcraft employed to revenge injuries, or as a protection against
theft’.
86
This neat dichotomy between obeah (as ‘evil’ and ‘bad magic’) and
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myalism as a kind of ‘good magic’
87
is misleading. R.R. Madden’s mid-
nineteenth-century observation that ‘myal men’ who ‘administer[ed] potions’
practised merely one ‘kind’ of obeah
88
suggests the extent to which contem-
poraries used words like obeah man, myal man, or doctor inter-changeably.
89
The imprecise nature of such accounts obscures the fact that any one of these
practitioners could carry out a range of anti-social actions as well as a host of
socially ‘redeeming’ ones which were intended to restore social order.
90
Part
of this linguistic confusion lies in the often imprecise use of the term obeah. Its
origins are unclear, but most scholars place its roots in one of a number of
West African linguistic/cultural groups, Akan, for instance, or Twi, Efik,
Igbo, or Ibibio, and argue that it meant something like ‘sorcerer’. Jerome
Handler has provided an interesting variation on this dominant interpretation
and has concluded that the term may be rooted in Ibibio or Ibo words meaning
‘practitioner’ or ‘herbalist’ or ‘doctor’ and thus possessed a ‘positive or
morally neutral meaning’. Part of the problem with defining obeah lies in
the imprecise and negative manner in which it was used by Europeans.
Throughout the period of slavery and into the post-emancipation period,
they tended to use obeah as a ‘catch-all’ term for ‘supernatural beliefs and
related practices that were considered non-European in origin’. As Handler
has argued, ‘over time ... whites ... tended to stress the anti-social or evil
dimensions of what they perceived Obeah to be’.
91
Individual obeah or myal practitioners played an important role in trying
to re-establish social order. Herskovits has suggested that within African
diasporic communities, religious leaders may have exercised considerable
influence over enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles, perhaps because they
played similar roles in Africa.
92
The influence and authority which slave
religious/medical leaders wielded may have been responsible for planter
attacks on African religious practices (including obeah). Alvin Thompson
has suggested that the influence these leaders exercised over the slave
population ‘placed them in positions of authority on the estates not sanctioned
by the planter class’. As a result, planters attacked religious leaders and crafted
laws prohibiting ‘magic, divination, “mediumship”, exorcism, and other
forms of “obeah”’. Ritualistic dances, such as the water mamma dance were
also banned, and offenders faced the death penalty.
93
The trial and
conviction of Hans and Willem both represent the legal attempts to eradicate
these ‘African’ practices as do a series of less notorious convictions against
such practices.
94
The sources indicate that both Hans and Willem possessed considerable
local influence and authority. Other slaves referred to Willem by several
honorific titles – the Attetta Sara, Monkesi Sara and Abdie Toboko,or
‘Almighty’s child’.
95
Higman believes that Attetta Sara may have been
related to taata or tata which had several meanings in a number of African
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languages: it meant ‘father’ or was used as a ‘respectful form of address’.
96
Monkesi’s meaning is less certain, but this word may be related to the name
of the dance (which seemed to have been taken from the name of the spirit
itself). Some of those testifying at Willem’s trial declared that he had
danced the Makisi or Mousekie dance, perhaps a variation on Monkesi.
97
Or
it may have been a corruption of min’ski, which was a Kongo term meaning
‘charms’ or ‘fetishes’ used within the context of supernatural healing prac-
tices.
98
Regardless of the titles used for both men, they seem to have been
regarded with awe and fear by other slaves. A stable boy on Plantation Dem-
tichem was ‘afraid’ to grab Hans, and two estate artisans were reluctant to
remove Hans’ clothes, despite an order to do so. Higman has suggested that
Willem’s ‘authority and power within the slave community ... rested on his
capacity to heal’,
99
but it may also have been based on the fear he inspired.
Physical punishment buttressed Willem’s orders. Several slaves who testified
against Willem declared that they carried out his commands because he beat
them. Willem flogged Kees and Isaac; the latter had refused to report the
events to the plantation manager because ‘he was too much afraid of
Willem, from the severe punishments he inflicted upon them’. He showed
the examiners the scars which he claimed he had received from Willem’s
floggings.
100
For local officials, this was Willem’s ‘true’ crime. In their
words, Willem ‘presum[ed] to judge and prescribe punishments’ and stood
accused of ‘treasonable practices’. In the eyes of the European observers,
he was guilty not of committing the ‘evil’ act of obeah but rather in taking
upon himself the slave owner’s role of wielding the whip and meting out
punishment.
101
The seriousness of Willem’s offence earned an awful and solemn punish-
ment. The place of his crime, the mango tree from which Madalon had been
suspended and flogged, was chosen as the spot where it would be expiated.
Here it was that Primo, Mey, Kees and Corydon (his ‘accomplices’) were
flogged. Head driver Primo and second driver Mey each received 300
lashes and were branded and sentenced to be ‘worked in chains for a
year’. Driver Kees and Corydon received 100 lashes. And here it was that
Willem – following an address by Reverend Austin and an ‘earnest prayer’
by John Wray – was hanged and ‘launched into an awful eternity’. His head
was cut from his body and impaled on a pole on the estate, ‘there to remain
until destroyed by the elements, or birds of prey, and the body to be interred
under the aforesaid Mango tree’. The local political and military authorities
had gathered to assure themselves that justice was done: the governor, the
fiscal, and the members of the Court, the militia, and a ‘great number of
white people’ watched Willem’s execution. So did some 400 or 500 slaves.
102
The punishment inflicted on Willem and Hans implied that the European
authorities held the two men primarily responsible for the obeah rituals. Yet it
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is clear that they regarded these as communal events. This perception was
accurate. These healing rituals were collective events, their success reliant
upon the assistance and participation of the community. On plantations
Demtichem and Op Hoop van Beter, enslaved men and women fetched the
necessary implements, setting the stage, as it were, for the ritual. Yet they
were more than mere assistants. Their active participation seemed a necessary
part of the proceedings. This was particularly the case on Plantation
Demtichem when most of the enslaved men and women were described as
dancing the water mamma dance and falling into trances.
The collective nature of these rituals was doubtless facilitated by the ease
of cultural communication among the different nations present on the Guiana
estates, by the shared cultural ‘grammar’ described by Mintz and Price.
The ‘flexibility’ and openness of African religions that some scholars have
identified may have contributed to this mutual conversance, as did the simi-
larity of the religious beliefs held by diverse West and West Central
African peoples.
103
Historians who have examined cultural practices through-
out the African diaspora have identified the disparate ways in which different
African peoples accepted customs and rituals which, if not identical to those of
their own nation, were at least familiar and provided a common cultural
language that permitted collective actions.
104
Cultural similarities between
West and West Central Africans may have allowed for a kind of cultural
dialogue between the two groups. The fact that such a significant proportion
of the Guianese population in the late 1810s and early 1820s was of West
and West Central African origin and that their healing rituals were mutually
intelligible probably facilitated a similar kind of cultural communication. In
particular, it is likely that the belief of many West and West Central
African peoples in a body of gods and spirits which inhabited rivers and
streams and who must be approached through a specialized practitioner
created an environment in which the actions of Hans and Willem made
sense and seemed a reasonable response to sickness and death.
Despite the widespread participation in these rituals, some individuals
refused to cooperate. On one level, self-interest seemed to lie behind their
opposition. On Plantation Demtichem, the carpenter Frederick – who was
accused of practising obeah and of being responsible for the deaths – reported
Hans to the plantation overseer and testified against him. Frederick’s decision
to turn on Hans can be seen as defensive. Condemned not only by Hans but by
his fellow slaves – Venus had pointed to him as the poisoner, and the other
slaves had indicated his house as the place where the poison was hidden –
Frederick was understandably concerned.
105
He believed that he was targeted
because some of his fellow slaves wanted to ‘remove [him]’ and suspected that
it may have been due to his age (he was one of the oldest slaves on Plantation
Demtichem).
106
It is also possible that the esteem in which Frederick was held
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by the estate authorities damned him; estate attorney W. Ross described him as
a ‘man of good character’.
107
This accusation seemed to have been merely the
latest in a series: John Wray claimed that the slaves had previously accused
Frederick ‘of being a poisoner’.
108
On Plantation Op Hoop van Beter, resistance seemed more extensive but
was also partly based on a desire for self-preservation. Baron, Isaac, Frederick
and several unnamed ‘others’ refused the demand of two drivers – Primo and
Mey – that they bury Madalon’s body. According to David Milne, an overseer
on another plantation, the men told the drivers that they feared discovery.
Once Madalon’s death had been revealed, some slaves may have decided to
denounce Willem in an effort to protect themselves from punishment. Vigilant
declared that Madalon had been ‘killed by the directions of a negro named
Willem’. He pressed Frederic to support his account, encouraging him ‘to
tell the truth’. Frederic eventually came around and claimed that Willem
was ‘the promoter and instigator of what had taken place’.
109
Frederic had demonstrated his unease with Willem’s actions even earlier.
He had released Madalon from the tree from which she had been suspended on
the first night of her ordeal and had taken her to his house. He was not alone in
his opposition. When Primo flogged Madalon, Baron remonstrated with him,
saying that he was going ‘too far’, and other estate residents ‘spoke in favour
of Madalon’. Not surprisingly, Madalon’s husband, Munro, condemned the
proceedings. On hearing that his wife was missing and perhaps murdered,
he sought, and obtained, a pass from the manager of his own estate and
went to Plantation Op Hoop van Beter to look for her. There he showed his
pass to the manager and explained his mission. When confronted by Willem
who demanded to know why Munro had ‘dare[d] to go first to the manager’s
house’, Munro sarcastically asked whether he should have first brought the
pass to Willem and whether he could read it.
110
The behaviour of Frederic, Baron and Munro seemed rooted in concern for
Madalon’s welfare and suggest a rejection of Willem’s attempt to resolve a
social crisis. Maybe, just as the collective nature of healing rites depended
upon cultural communication among the diverse African peoples, the opposi-
tion Willem encountered indicated cultural miscommunication and the
inability of the other slaves to understand or accept the cultural lexicon he
employed. Did those contesting his actions object to the methods he used?
Cornelia and Adolff seemed to have found them acceptable (indeed, Adolff
had invited Willem to the estate in the first place). A misapplication/misunder-
standing of ‘flogging’ may have been part of the problem. The judicial and
planter authorities claimed that Willem had flogged not only Madalon but
also Cornelia and other sick slaves. Was this flogging? Cornelia did not
seem to think it was. She claimed that Willem hit her on the head with
three ‘twigs’ from a coconut tree, after which she washed herself as he had
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ordered.
111
This is suggestive of the practice among the Ga of West Africa in
which, according to Field, the sick were ‘thoroughly swept and swabbed from
the head downwards’ with a broom that had been dipped in a water and herb
mixture to ‘wash away a sickness’.
112
Likewise, Madalon had been ‘flogged’
with a ‘broom from the cocoa-nut tree’. In this case, clearly something went
wrong.
113
It is possible that the other slaves responded by trying to stop the
proceedings: Frederic tried to rescue Madalon, and some of ‘the people’
remonstrated with Willem. Thus, one can speculate that in contesting
the form the ritual took, the enslaved men and women on the estate were
attempting to deal with malpractice and to ‘put things right’.
The cases examined in this paper demonstrate the varied roles that slave
healers played. They worked in the estate hospitals and in the slave quarters,
as lay healers and trained practitioners, alone or as part of a communal effort.
Eugene Genovese has argued that ‘slave folk medicine ... function[ed] as an
agency for the transmission of black religious sensibility into a defense against
psychological assaults of slavery and racial oppression’.
114
Yet slave medical
practices also demonstrated divisions within the community of the enslaved.
These rifts, as this paper has suggested, emerged from any number of
internal stresses and tensions, most of which remain hidden in the sources.
Misunderstanding or rejection of the cultural lexicon employed could
provoke opposition, as enslaved men and women contested ‘inappropriate’
healing methods. These cases, and other accounts of slave health workers,
have another significance: they raise questions about the genealogy of a
post-emancipation Afro-creole medical profession. Contemporary accounts
note the loss of European physicians in the first years after slavery’s end
and the reliance of freed people on Afro-creole healers, some of whom
had worked in estate hospitals.
115
Such observations suggest that skills and
knowledge employed by slaves could become the basis for post-slavery liveli-
hood strategies and constitute the basis of a post-emancipation medical
profession.
NOTES
Abbreviations
BPP British Parliamentary Papers
SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies, London
1. Research for this paper was conducted with the assistance of a fellowship at the University
of Michigan. An earlier version was presented at the Center for Afro-American and African
Studies at the University of Michigan where it benefited from comments and suggestions
made by those in attendance. I’m also grateful to David Trotman, Franklin Knight, Sean
Stilwell and Michael Helm for agreeing to read an early draft of this paper. Any errors
remain my responsibility.
MEDICINE AND MAGIC IN BRITISH GUIANA, 1803– 38 45
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2. B. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807– 1834 (Barbados: The Press
University of the West Indies, 1995; 1984), p.45. However, Raymond T. Smith notes that
from 1792, Demerara and Essequibo were ‘known as the United Colony of Demerary and
Essequibo’. Raymond T. Smith, British Guiana (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p.24.
3. A. Thompson, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana, 1580– 1803 (Bridgetown:
Carib Research and Publications, Inc., 1987), p.41.
4. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, pp.63, 106.
5. R. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the
British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.146,
147, 183, 219; see also K. Kiple and V. Kiple, ‘Deficiency Diseases in the Caribbean’,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11, 2 (1980); Higman, Slave Populations of the
British Caribbean, p.374. For a detailed discussion of African and Afro-creole health
in the Caribbean, see K. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, pp.42, 43, 46.
7. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, pp.261– 2.
8. H. Bolingbroke, A Voyage to the Demerary (Philadelphia, 1813), pp.257– 8.
9. Almanack and Local Guide of British Guiana (Demerary, 1832), pp.39–40; Higman, Slave
Populations of the British Caribbean, pp.261–2; A. McDonnell, Considerations on Negro
Slavery (London, 1924), pp.150, 151, 169, 170, 171, 179, 185; Bolingbroke, A Voyage to
the Demerary, p.77.
10. McDonnell, Considerations on Negro Slavery, pp.150, 151, 169, 170, 171, 179, 185;
Bolingbroke, A Voyage to the Demerary, p.77.
11. K. Kiple and V. King have demonstrated that overseers or mistresses treated sick slaves
on plantations in the United States. See Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black
Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.164, 165, 168; Sheridan,
Doctors and Slaves, pp.294, 295.
12. McDonnell, Considerations on Negro Slavery, pp.150, 151, 171; Copies of the Record of
the Proceedings of Fiscals of Demerara and Berbice, BPP 1825 XXV.825, Further
Papers Relating to Slaves in the West Indies (Demerara and Berbice), p.33. [afterwards
Further Papers, 1825]; Copies of the Record of the Proceeds of Fiscals of Demerara and
Berbice, Further Papers, 1825, p.81; M.S. Bennett, fiscal, to Benjamin D’Urban, 21 Jan.
1826; encl. Investigations of Complaints, BPP 1826 XXVI.461, Further Papers Relating
to Slaves in the West Indies (Demerara and Berbice), pp.15, 16. [afterwards Further
Papers, 1826].
13. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, pp.55, 56, 62, 69, 70, 71; Higman, Slave Populations of the
British Caribbean, pp.261, 269, 270, 273; C. Amory, The Conquest of Epidemic Disease: A
Chapter in the History of Ideas (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1967), pp.236, 244, 245,
248, 249, 251; see also C. Hamlin, ‘Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and
the Natural Theology of Health and Disease’, Victorian Studies, 28 (1985), pp.282, 283,
289. See also Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, ch.9.
14. Copies of the Record of the Proceedings of Fiscals of Demerara and Berbice, Further
Papers, 1825, pp.64, 68, 81.
15. Copies of the Record of the Proceedings of Fiscals of Demerara and Berbice, Further
Papers, 1825, 33, 41, 64.
16. See, for example, Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, pp.168; see
also Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, pp.89, 90. See also Higman, Slave Populations of the
British Caribbean, p.266.
17. Copies of the Record of the Proceedings of Fiscals of Demerara and Berbice, Further
Papers, 1825, p.25.
18. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, pp.89, 90.
19. McDonnell, Considerations on Negro Slavery, pp.151, 171, 173, 182, 185.
20. See, for example, McDonnell, Considerations on Negro Slavery, p.171.
21. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, pp.266, 576. A recent article on the
fiscals’ reports for Berbice and Demerara-Essequibo note the existence of two female
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sick nurses on Demerara’s La Penitence Plantation. See J. Lean and T. Burnard, ‘Hearing
Slave Voices: The Fiscal’s Reports of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo’, Archives, 27,
107 (2002), pp.2, 128, 129.
22. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, pp.557, 563, 569, 576.
23. G. Pinkard, Letters from Guiana. 1796– 1797, ed. Vincent Roth (Georgetown: The ‘Daily
Chronicle’ Ltd., 1942), pp.185, 189; Alvin Thompson has noted the role of slave doctors
in Berbice. See A.O. Thompson, Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice,
Guyana 1803–1831 (Mona: The University of the West Indies Press, 2002), p.181.
24. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, p.266.
25. Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, pp.168.
26. Ibid., pp.170.
27. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, p.266.
28. J.M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (Philadelphia, 1843), p.100.
29. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, for the Crime of Obeah and Murder. Proceedings of the Court of
Criminal Justice of the Colony, in BPP 1823, XVIII.505, pp.24, 28. [hereafter Trial of a
Slave in Berbice].
30. See, for example, Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, p.170;
K. Bankole, Slavery and Medicine: Enslavement and Medical Practices in Antebellum
Louisiana (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp.127 – 8; O. Patterson, The Sociology
of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave
Society in Jamaica (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967; 1969),
p.191; Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, p.266. However, the testimony
of Tom, a slave on Plantation Op Hoop van Beter, suggests that not all slave medical
practitioners were trusted. He said in his testimony that ‘the negroes would not trust
him ...to be present at [the punishment of Madalon] .. . in consequence of [his] being
hospital-mate’. See Trial of a Slave in Berbice, p.37.
31. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, 1953;
1968), p.144.
32. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, and
Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, all refer to such remedies.
33. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, p.73.
34. Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, p.170.
35. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p.144.
36. Copies of the Record of the Proceedings of Fiscals of Demerara and Berbice, Further
Papers, 1825, p.68.
37. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, p.425.
38. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, p.95.
39. D’Urban to Murray, 15 Dec. 1829; encl. Protector A.W. Young to D’Urban, 10 Dec. 1829;
encl. 9, Return of complaints &c. which have been made to the Protector of Slaves in the
colony of Demerara and Essequibo, 1 May to 31 Oct. 1829, BPP 1830– 31 (262) XV.1,
Protectors of Slaves Reports. Reports from the Protectors of Slaves in the Colonies of
Demerara, Berbice, Trinidad, St. Lucia, the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius. Part
I. Demerara, 109. [hereafter Protectors of Slaves Reports, 1830–31].
40. Bennett to D’Urban, 21 Jan. 1826; encl. Investigations of Complaints, Further Papers,
1826, pp.15, 16; Copies of the Record of the Proceedings of Fiscals of Demerara and
Berbice, Further Papers, 1825, pp.26– 7. The use of the term ‘shipmate’ implies that
both women had been on board the same slave ship. As historians of Caribbean slavery
have demonstrated, deep bonds developed between those who had suffered the Middle
Passage together. ‘Shipmates’ referred to each other as ‘sister’ or ‘brother’ and considered
themselves kin. See, for example, O. Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p.150. See also
M. Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South
and the British Caribbean, 1736 – 1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p.32.
41. The cause of the death and sickness on Plantations Demtichem and Op Hoop van Beter could
have any one of the many epidemic and endemic diseases that ravaged Caribbean slave
populations. One early nineteenth-century source noted that a yellow fever epidemic
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struck British Guiana in 1819, causing ‘great mortality’. Thus, perhaps the disease in 1819
was yellow fever or some other similar fever. The British Guiana Almanack for 1832, p.14.
42. John Wray to William Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, CWM British Guiana-Berbice Incoming
Correspondence Box 1a 1813–1822, SOAS; [hereafter SOAS]; see also Emilia Viotti da
Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), p.111. Thompson also discusses this case. See Thompson,
Unprofitable Servants, pp.197– 200.
43. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS; see also da Costa, Crowns of Glory, p.109.
44. John Wray letter, 6 Feb. 1822 in CWM British Guiana-Berbice Incoming Correspondence
Box 1a 1813 – 1822, SOAS. [afterwards SOAS].
45. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.15, 25, 28; Wray letter, 6 Feb. 1822, SOAS.
46. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS.
47. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.24, 25, 26, 28.
48. Wray letter, 6 Feb. 1822, SOAS.
49. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.23, 25.
50. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS; see also da Costa, Crowns of Glory, p.109.
51. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS.
52. da Costa, Crowns of Glory, pp.108, 109. See also M. Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture
(London: Pluto Press, 1988), p.59.
53. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.23, 25.
54. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1969), p.188.
55. For the size of the West African population, see M. Schuler, ‘Akan Slave Rebellions in the
British Caribbean’, in H. Beckles and V. Shepherd (eds.), Caribbean Slave Society and
Economy (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1991), p.374; Higman, Slave Populations of
the British Caribbean, pp.126– 7; see also D. Eltis, ‘The Volume and Structure of the Trans-
atlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 58, 1 (Jan. 2001),
p.17. <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/58.1/eltis.html>
56. M. Schuler, ‘Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana’, in Heywood, Central Afri-
cans and Cultural Transformations, pp.320– 21.
57. These are terms used by Higman to denote ethnicity. Schuler argues that the Elmina, the
Kormantine, the Caromantees and the Delmina are part of the Akan and ‘Ga/Adangme
speaking peoples’, who she characterizes as ‘Akan’. See Schuler, ‘Akan Slave Rebellions
in the British Caribbean’, p.374; see also Higman, Slave Populations of the British Carib-
bean, pp.454– 5.
58. Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture, pp.46, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59; Sheridan, Doctors and
Slaves, 72, 73, 74; see Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p.183; see also M.S. Field,
Religion and Medicine of the Ga People (London: Oxford University Press, 1979; 1937),
pp.115, 116. See also R.G. Willis, ‘Instant Millennium: The Sociology of African Witch-
cleansing Cults’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1976), pp.129 – 31; E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft,
Oracles and Magic among the Azande (London: Oxford University Press, 1958; 1937),
p.478; John Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition 1641 – 1718
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p.60. Feireman and Janzen, however,
have pointed out that ethnographic studies demonstrate that illness was often see as some-
thing that ‘just happened’, rather than as being ‘caused by supernatural or moral force’. See
S. Feireman and J.M. Janzen, ‘Introduction’, The Social Basis of Health and Healing in
Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p.2.
59. J. Handler, ‘Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834’, New West Indian
Guide, 74, 1 and 2 (2000), p.60.
60. See, for example, J. Thornton, ‘Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu
Areas, 1500–1700’, in Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the
American Diaspora, pp.80– 81.
61. G. Parrinder, West African Religion: A Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Akan, Ewe,
Yoruba, Ibo, and Kindred Peoples (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970; 1949), pp.53, 75,
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137, 156. See also Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture, pp.46, 55 –9; Sheridan, Doctors and
Slaves, pp.72– 4; see Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p.183; Field, Religion and Medi-
cine of the Ga People, pp.115–16.
62. A. Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp.17, 18.
63. John Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo, pp.59, 60, 62; see also Hilton, The Kingdom of
Kongo, pp.1, 16.
64. See, for example, Handler, ‘Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados’, pp.66– 8, 80. See also
Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, and Sheridan, Doctors and
Slaves.
65. Thompson, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana, p.132.
66. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS.
67. Thornton, ‘Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas’, pp.72, 83, 84;
see also Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo, pp.xiv, 66 and W. MacGaffey, Religion and
Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1986), p.205.
68. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS; see also da Costa, Crowns of Glory, p.109.
69. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, p.120.
70. S. Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.34 – 5.
71. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS; see also da Costa, Crowns of Glory, p.109.
72. M. Herskovits, The New World Negro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p.301.
73. M. Warner Lewis, Guinea’s Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture (Dover:
The Majority Press, 1991), pp.176, 179.
74. Field, Religion and Medicine of the Ga People, p.122.
75. For example, see Warner Lewis, Guinea’s Other Suns, pp.176, 179; Parrinder, West African
Religion, p.53; Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo, pp.13, 15; Herskovits, The New World
Negro, p.232; see also Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture, p.81.
76. See, for example, R. Slenes, ‘The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike: Central African Water Spirits
and Slave Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro’, in Heywood, Central Afri-
cans and Cultural Transformations, pp.183– 208.
77. Warner Lewis, Guinea’s Other Suns, pp.176, 179; Herskovits, The New World Negro,
pp.281, 284. See also M. Beckwith, Jamaican Folklore (New York: The American Folklore
Society, 1966; 1928); qtd. in Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture, p.81.
78. Warner Lewis, Guinea’s Other Suns, pp.176, 179.
79. C.D. Dance, Chapters from a Guianese Log-Book (Georgetown: 1881), pp.78– 9. Moore
also notes these explanations. Brian Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism:
Colonial Guyana, 1838–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995), p.139.
80. Moore, Cultural Power, pp.138, 139, 140, 141.
81. Dance, Chapters from a Guianese Log-Book, pp.78– 9.
82. Brian Moore arguesthat cumfo was another term for the water mamma ritual. See Moore, Cul-
tural Power,p.138; Schuler, ‘Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-CenturyGuyana’, p.347, fn.57.
83. Moore, Cultural Power, pp.138– 9.
84. See M. Schuler, ‘Myalism and the African Religious Tradition in Jamaica’, in M. Crahan and
F. Knight (eds.), Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1979), p.67; see also Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery.
85. See, for example, Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, pp.183– 5, 188; see also Schuler,
‘Myalism and the African Religious Tradition in Jamaica’, p.67 and Alleyne, Roots of
Jamaican Culture, pp.84– 6, 88.
86. Phillippo, Jamaica, p.95.
87. See, for example, Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p.188.
88. R.R. Madden, A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from
Slavery to Apprenticeship (Westport: Negro Universities Press: 1970; 1835), p.68.
89. J.Handler makesthis pointfor Barbadosin J. Handler,‘Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados’.
90. See Lazarus-Black and Trotman for a nuanced discussion of the complex roles that obeah
and obeah practitioners played in post-emancipation Antigua and Trinidad. D. Trotman,
MEDICINE AND MAGIC IN BRITISH GUIANA, 1803– 38 49
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Crime in Trinidad: Conflict and Control in a Plantation Society, 1838 – 1900 (Knoxville:
The University of Tennessee Press, 1986) and M. Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and
Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994).
91. Handler, ‘Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados’, pp.65, 84; see also da Costa, Crowns of
Glory, p.110. For a further discussion of the origins and diffusion of the term ‘obeah’ in the
British Caribbean, see J. Handler and K. Bilby, ‘On the Early Use and Origin of the Term
“Obeah” in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean’, Slavery and Abolition, 22, 2 (Aug.
2001), pp.87– 100.
92. Herskovits, The New World Negro, pp.106, 107, 232; see also Stuckey, Slave Culture,
pp.15, 34, 35.
93. Thompson, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana, pp.132, 134– 6.
94. For example, see lists of offences committed by slaves in Protectors of Slaves Reports,
1830–31; see also Reports from the Protectors of Slaves in the Colonies of Demerara,
Berbice, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Cape of Good Hope, and Mauritius. Part II. Berbice,in
BPP, BPP, 1829 XXV.255.
95. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.8, 26.
96. B. Higman, ‘Terms for Kin in the British West Indian Slave Community: Differing Percep-
tions of Masters and Slaves’, in R. Smith (ed.), Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin
America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp.69, 70. See also
Parrinder, West African Religion, p.53.
97. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.13, 29.
98. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, pp.8, 75, 37, 137.
99. Higman, ‘Terms for Kin in the British West Indian Slave Community’, p.69.
100. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.15, 23, 28, 32, 33.
101. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.39, 40, 41.
102. Wray letter, 6 Feb. 1822, SOAS; Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.9, 10, 11.
103. For a discussion of the similarity of beliefs among West African peoples, see, for example,
Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p.183; see also Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture,
p.59.
104. See, for example, R. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1998); Slenes, ‘The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike’.
105. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS.
106. Frederick may have been right. As Orlando Patterson observed, the ‘conflicts, tensions and
anxieties’ of slavery ‘naturally come to a head during an epidemic’ and demanded the identi-
fication of a ‘scapegoat’, generally an old African who was ‘poor, abused, ... sick, ... [and]
isolated’, The Sociology of Slavery. Madalon also fit this description: she was an African and
‘rather advanced in years’. See Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, pp.191– 3. See also Beard
to Bathurst, 19 Feb. 1825; encl. Bennett to Beard, 19 Feb. 1825; encl. No. 2, Investigations
of Sundry Complaints of Negroes; encl. W. Ross, complainant against the Negro Hans, on
charge of Obiah, Further Papers, 1825, p.29; Higman, ‘Terms for King in the British West
Indian Slave Community’, p.67.
107. Beard to Bathurst, 19 Feb. 1825; encl. Bennett to Beard, 19 Feb. 1825; encl. No. 2,
Investigations of Sundry Complaints of Negroes; encl. W. Ross, complainant against the
Negro Hans, on charge of Obiah, Further Papers, 1825, pp.28, 29, 30.
108. Wray to Wilberforce, 29 Oct. 1819, SOAS.
109. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.5, 6, 13, 15, 21, 25, 26.
110. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.19, 23, 28, 32, 33.
111. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, pp.24, 28.
112. Field, Religion and Medicine of the Ga People, p.122.
113. Trial of a Slave in Berbice, p.29.
114. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random
House, 1972; 1974), p.228.
115. Phillippo, Jamaica, p.100. See also Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p.191.
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