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Flying Back to Africa or Flying to Heaven? Competing Visions of Afterlife in the Lowcountry and Caribbean Slave Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

Abstract

This article presents a new interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua (to eat salt), meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one's spiritual afterlife.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

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10 On the complexities of the Federal Writers’ Project in the Lowcountry, see Melissa L. Cooper, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 112–50.

11 In Drums and Shadows, twenty-six interviewees refer to flying Africans (17, 18 [twice], 20 [twice], 24, 28, 29, 34, 42, 44, 58 [twice], 79, 81, 108 [twice], 116, 121, 145, 151, 154, 156, 169, 177, 182) and five refer to the use of salt as a form of protection against evil spirits (16, 24, 43, 83, 192). FWP Georgia, Drums and Shadows.

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24 From 1800 until 1808, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database identified seventy-three shipments from West-Central Africa, of which forty-six were identified as originating from the Congo River, eleven from North Congo, nine from Cabinda, one from Malembo, and nine from Loango. Slave Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/.

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29 Powell, “Summoning our Ancestors,” 262; Young, “All God's Children,” 58.

30 FWP Georgia, Drums and Shadows, 66.

31 I would like to thank Jean Nsondé, Felix Kaputu, Raissa Ngoma, Afonso João Miguel, Fernando Mbiavanga, Larry Hyman, Tjerk Hagemeijer, and Koen Bostoen for their assistance in analyzing these sources.

32 FWP Georgia, Drums and Shadows, 69.

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49 António do Couto, Gentio de Angola sufficientemente instruido nos mysterios de nossa sancta fé. Obra posthuma composta pello Padre Francisco Pacconio (Lisbon: D. Lopes Rosa, 1662), 65.

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56 “Informazione sul regno del Congo di Fra Raimondo da Dicomano” (1798), in Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Diversos, Caixa 823, Sala 12.

57 Merolla da Sorrento, Breve, e succinta relazione, 413.

58 Jean Cuvelier, ed., Documents sur une mission française au Kakongo, 1766–1776 (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1953), 127; Liévin-Bonaventure Proyart, ed., Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d'Afrique: rédigée d'après les mémoires des préfets apostoliques de la mission françoise (Paris: C. P. Berton, 1776), 317, 330–33.

59 For more on the religious history of Loango, see “Carta de Frei Diogo da Encarnação” (September 27, 1584); “Relação dos Carmelitos descalços” (1584); “Carta Anua da Missão de Angola” (1603); “Relação do Governador Fernão de Sousa (1624–1630)”; “Relação de Fernão de Sousa a El-Rei (23-2-1632),” in Monumenta missionária Africana, ed. António Brásio, 11 vols. (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1852–1871), III:279–80, IV:393–415, V:82–83, VII:640–54, VIII:131–55; Cavazzi, Istorica descrizione de’ tre’ regni, 564–70; Merolla da Sorrento, Breve, e succinta relazione, 183–85; Phyllis M. Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576–1870: The Effects of Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1972), 33–41; De Heusch, Le roi de Kongo, 39–41, 68; Phyllis M. Martin, “The Kingdom of Loango,” in Kongo: Power and Majesty, ed. Alisa Lagamma (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 33–43.

60 José Emílio de Santos e Silva, Esboço histórico do Congo e Loango nos tempos modernos; contendo uma resenha dos costumes e vocabulário dos indígenas de Cabinda (Lisbon: Typographia Mottos Moreira, 1888), 66.

61 For more on the early European presence in Loango and the slave trade, see David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and Their Neighbours under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483–1790 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1966), 37–39, 157; Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 42–72, 122–23; Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 27–28; Annie Merlet, Autour du Loango (XIVe–XIXe siècle): Histoire des peoples du sud-ouest du Gabon au temps du Royaume de Loango et du ‘Congo Français’ (Paris: SEPIA, 1991), 9, 57; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 35, 200; Arsène-Francoeur Nganga, La traite négrière sur la Baie de Loango pour la colonie du Suriname (Évry: Cesbc Presses, 2016), 57.

62 For more on the origins of enslaved Africans shipped from Loango Bay, see Proyart, Histoire de Loango, 63; Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 122–23; Miller, Way of Death, 35, 200; Martin, “The Kingdom of Loango,” 75.

63 Alfred Dewar, ed., The Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring (London: Cassell, [1726] 1928), 37–38.

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67 Stedman, Narrative, 292, 535. Compare the muteta in Stedman with Güssfeldt, Falkenstein, and Pechüel-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, II:21.

68 Price, Travels with Tooy, 109, 324.

69 Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, 17; John Thornton, “The Kingdom of Kongo,” in Kongo: Power and Majesty, ed. Alisa Lagamma (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 92.

70 Cuvelier, Documents sur une mission française, 127.

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88 Brenneker, Sambumbu, III:525.

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92 Melville J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Knopf, 1937), 93.

93 Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper and Row, [1938] 1990), 45–47.

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95 Barnet, Cimarrón, 46, 129.

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99 James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (Philadelphia: J. M. Campbell, 1843), 103–104.

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101 Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival, 92–93.

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106 Brenneker, Curaçaoensia, 17; Brenneker, Sambumbu, I:105, V:1091, V:1106–107, X:2487–89; Hoefnagels and Hoogenbergen, Antilliaans spreekwoordenboek, 76; Eva Abraham, Van je familie moet je het hebben: Curaçaose verwantschappen (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2013), 233.

107 Brenneker, Sambumbu, V:2196.

108 John M. Lipski, The Speech of the Negros Congos of Panama (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989), 67–114; Ronald R. Smith, “Arroz Colorao: Los Congos of Panama,” in Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America, ed. Gerard H. Béhague (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992), 239–66; Judith Bettelheim, “Carnaval of Los Congos of Portobelo, Panama: Feathered Men and Queens,” in African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds: Consciousness and Imagination, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Klaus Benesch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 287–309; Renee Alexander Craft, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 56–107.

109 James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 174. See also Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo, 96; “Liberated Central Africans,” 350.

110 John Thornton, “Portuguese-African Relations, 1500–1750,” in Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2007), 63.

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116 Annette Laing, “‘Heathens and Infidels’? African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700–1750,” Religion and American Culture 12, no. 2 (2002): 217.

117 Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 14.

118 Jane Landers, “Free and Slave,” in The New History of Florida, ed. by Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 172; Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 32, 48, 110, 113; “The African Landscape of Seventeenth-Century Cartagena and Its Hinterland,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 227–41.

119 Francis Le Jau, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau 1706–1717, ed. Frank J. Klingberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 69, 77, 102, 120, 133. See also Laing, “‘Heathens and Infidels’?,” 197–228.

120 “James Gignilliat to SPG” (May 28, 1710), in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Letter Books, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, Series A 5/119.

121 James Barclay, The Voyages and Travels of James Barclay, Containing Many Surprising Adventures, and Interesting Narratives (London: priv. print, 1777), 26.

122 Erskine Clarke, “‘They Shun the Scrutiny of White Men’: Reports on Religion from the Georgia Lowcountry and West Africa, 1834–1850,” in African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, ed. Philip Morgan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 132.

123 Julia Peterkin, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933), 205.

124 Mason Crum, Gullah: Negro Life in the Carolina Sea Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949), 97.

125 Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 71.

126 Creel, “A Peculiar People”, 2, 231.

127 Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 78–80; Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures, 199, 218.

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131 Marques, Daily Life in Portugal, 225–26; Maria Ângela Beirante, Territórios do sagrado: Crenças e comportamentos na Idade Média em Portugal (Lisbon: Colibri, 2011), 32–76; Hermínia Vasconcelos Vilar, A vivência da morte no Portugal medieval: A Estremadura portuguesa, 1300 a 1500 (Redondo: Patrimónia, 1995), 180–91.

132 “Interrogatória de statu regni congensis fact ulissipone” (1595), in Brásio, Monumenta missionária, III:500–504.

133 “Processo canónico do Bispo do Congo” (December 19, 1603–January 31, 1604); “Relatório da Diocesa do Congo e Angola” (December 19, 1609); “Terceira missão dos Dominicanos ao Reino do Congo” (1610), in Brásio, Monumenta missionária, V:64–80, 524–32, 605–14; Anguiano, Misiones capuchinas, I:109–11, 115, 349; John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1984): 163–67; Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 34–56; Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 202–206.

134 Louis Jadin, ed., “Le Congo et la secte des Antoniens: Restauration du Royaume sous Pedro IV et la ‘Saint Antoine’ congolaise (1694–1718),” Bulletin de l'Institut Historique Belge de Rome XXXII (1961): 454–59, 482–83.

135 Henry B. Whipple, Bishop's Whipple's Southern Diary, 1843–1844 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937), 51.

136 FWP Georgia, Drums and Shadows, 70; Nick Lindsay, ed., An Oral History of Edisto Island: Sam Gadsden Tells the Story (Goshen, IN: Pinchpenny Press, 1975), 72. For king elections in Kongolese brotherhoods, see Jorge Fonseca, Religião e liberdade: Os Negros nas irmandades e confrarias portuguesas (V.N. Famalicão: Humus, 2016), 107; Elizabeth W. Kiddy, “Who Is the King of Congo? A New Look at African and Afro-Brazilian Kings in Brazil,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153–82.

137 Thomas D. Turpin, “May and New River Mission, S.C. Con., to the Blacks,” Christian Advocate and Journal VIII–IX (October 25, 1833): 34.

138 Chlotilde R. Martin, “Negro Burial Societies,” Folder D-4–27B, Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Manuscript Collection, South Carolina Library (SCL), University of South Carolina.

139 Thomas D. Howard, “Before and After Emancipation,” Unitarian Review (August 1888), 142–43; William Francis Allen, Slave Songs of the United States (New York, A. Simpson and Co., 1867), 412.

140 John M. Giggie, “For God and Lodge: Black Fraternal Orders and the Evolution of African American Religion in the Postbellum South,” in The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction, ed. Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, and Jennifer L. Weber (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 200.

141 Mildred Hare, “Burial Societies and Lodges,” Folder S-260-264-N, FWP-SCL.

142 Peterkin, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 205–10.

143 Merolla da Sorrento, Breve, e succinta relazione, 216, 218, 229.

144 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, [1977] 2007), 445.

145 FWP Georgia, Drums and Shadows, 106–08.