Three Worships, an Old Warlock and Many Lawless Forces: The Court Trial of an African Doctor who Practised ‘Obeah to Cure’, in Early Nineteenth Century Jamaica

Abstract

‘Tukontology’ is an approach to studying the process of creolisation (termed ‘hybridity’ or ‘partnerships’ by other scholars) that is grounded in the findings of Science Studies generally and Actor-Network-Theory in particular. A musical metaphor, based on the Barbadian triune Tuk Band orchestra, is used to help elaborate how encounters between groups can be studied symmetrically without resorting to the knowledge of any hegemonic group as a privileged resource for explaining other groups. In the tukontological orchestra, the Penny Whistle represents creativity; the Kettle Drum serves as ways of knowing; and the Boom Drum composes ontologies. In this article, the approach is used to describe the report of an trial that occurred in the slave-courts of Jamaica in 1824. The testimony of the trial provides an excellent text for understanding an encounter between the force of African obeah and English forces. It is argued that the English court as an auditorium – with its forces of science, medicine, and law arrayed against a single accused African and his force – was able to isolate and weaken obeah, a force that was ordinarily held in awe by Africans in their own communities and by some English outside of the court. The article also explains why it was inevitable, though not inherently truthful, that the court would view the work involving obeah as irrational, and in the end deem the African sage, referred to as an ‘old warlock’ by The Times, to be fraudulent.

Notes

¹ J. Layne-Clark, ‘Lickmout Lou: Windies need a obeah-man!’, Daily Nation, 17 March 2004.

² H. Fraser, ‘Ability versus Science’, Daily Nation, 21 March 2004.

³ B. Latour's distinction between ‘Science’, capitalised and singular, and the ‘sciences’ will be used in this article. He defines modern Science as ‘the politicization of the sciences through epistemology in order to render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of incontestable nature’ in B. Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (London, Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 10. The ‘sciences’ is the work done in all modern and traditional societies to construct their cosmos by accessing the real world.

⁴ In Barbados, an island that is representative of what occurred in the wider Caribbean in relation to the legality of obeah, the offence became part of the 1944 Vagrancy Act. It continued to be an offence as part of the amended 1971 Vagrancy Act with fines of up to $3,500 Barbados or a maximum of two years' imprisonment. This Vagrancy Act was repealed in 1998 and replaced by one to cover minor offences, but the term obeah was not mentioned. The practice of obeah is therefore not considered illegal in Barbados any longer. In the wider Caribbean, even though it is still on the statute books, no one has recently been tried or convicted for this offence. K.M. Bilby and J.S. Handler, ‘Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life’, The Journal of Caribbean History, 38, 2 (2004), pp. 153–83.

⁵ ‘Arial for Practising Obeah: St Catherine's (Jamaica), 9 July. Slave-Court’, The Times, 25 August 1824.

⁶ Tuk Band music evolved in Barbados from earlier African rhythms. After the playing of African drums was outlawed during slavery, Africans started to play instruments that mimic English military drums in order to appease the white plantocracy.

⁷ See B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 153–57. In a philosophically rendered section called the ‘Irreductions’, Latour elaborates on his assumption that power/force is equivalent to knowledge/reason.

⁸ It is important that the term ‘institution’ and the process of ‘institutionalisation’ not be taken to refer only to the social institutions of anthropologists and sociologist or the negative inference of the ossification of practice. It is to be understood in the positive sense in which the sciences give actors a more durable and sustainable substance. See B. Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 307.

⁹ J.M. Murphy, Santería: An African Religion in America (New York, Original Publications, 1988), p. 93.

¹⁰ B.W. Higman, ‘The Development of Historical Disciplines in the Caribbean’, in General History of the Caribbean: Methodology and Historiography of the Caribbean, Vol. VI, B.W. Higman (ed.), (London, UNESCO Publishing/Macmillan Education Ltd, 1999), pp. 17–18.

¹¹ R. Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 216–21; K.A. Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London, Methuen, 1992), pp. 172–220.

¹² See S.W. Mintz, ‘Enduring Substance, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikoumene’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 2 (June 1996), pp. 289–311. This preoccupation with the Caribbean as a crucible of hybridity is also prevalent in the work of intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Wilson Harris, and Sylvia Wynter, discussed in P. Henry, Caliban's Reason (New York, Routledge, 2000).

¹³ B. Sankeralli, ‘Pan-African Discourse and the Post-Creole: The Case of Trinidad's Yoruba’ (Unpublished paper, University of the West Indies, 2001). Kamau Brathwaite first elaborated on the notion of Caribbean hybridity as a process he called creolisation in E.K. Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Kingston, Savacou Publications, 1974). A discussion of the discourse surrounding Kamau's concept of creolisation can be read in a series of essays by several authors in V.S. Shepherd and G.L. Richards (eds), Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture (Kingston, Ian Randle Publishers, 2002).

¹⁴ Latour, Politics of Nature, pp. 32–41.

¹⁵ I. Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, Trans. D.W. Smith (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 2000), pp. 21–35.

¹⁶ Appiah, In My Father's House, p. 219.

¹⁷ G. Deason, ‘Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature’, in D. Lindberg and R. Numbers (eds), God and Nature, Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkley, CA, University of California Press, 1986), pp. 43–51.

¹⁸ J.V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 30.

¹⁹ Appiah, In My Father's House, p. 219.

²⁰ J.S. Handler and K.M. Bilby, ‘On the Early Use and Origin of the Term “Obeah” in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean’, Slavery and Abolition, 22, 2 (2001), pp. 87–100.

²¹ D. Richards, ‘The Nyama of the Blacksmith: The Metaphysical Significance of Metallurgy in Africa’, Journal of Black Studies, 12, 2 (1981), pp. 218–20.

²² See the full discussion of ANT in Latour, Pandora's Hope. Also see B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005) and Latour, Politics of Nature. For a more philosophical approach see section 2, ‘Irreductions’, in Latour, The Pasteurization of France.

²³ Latour, Reassembling the Social, pp. 37–42.

²⁵ B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 87–88.

²⁴ ‘Composed’ is used here instead of ‘construct’ to avoid the confusion between the relative realism of ANT and the idealism of ‘social constructivsm’.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ J.O. Awolalu, Yorùbá Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites (New York, Athelia Henrietta Press, Inc., 1996), p. 20. Awolalu reports that there could be more than 1,700 divinities. A personal communication from Okan Tomi (a respected Lukumi oshun priest of 20 years in November 1998 during the author's initiation into the mysteries of ochosi in Panama) explained that there is an orisha for every thing and every action.

²⁸ G. Edwards and J. Mason, Black Gods – Orisa Studies in the New World (Brooklyn, NY, Yoruba Theological Archministry, 1985), pp. 8–13.

²⁹ L. Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1954), p. 7.

³⁰ Goveia, Slave Society, p. 152.

³¹ R. Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1657), pp. 49–50.

³² Appiah, In My Father's House, p. 206.

³³ Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, pp. 7–17.

³⁴ Latour, Pandora's Hope, pp. 24–79.

³⁵ S. Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial Review (2007), pp. 257–337.

³⁶ Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, pp. 61–105.

³⁷ P. Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 28–9.

³⁸ Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, p. 77.

³⁹ P.M. Peek, ‘The Study of Divination, Present and Past’, in P.M. Peek (ed.), African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–5.

⁴⁰ The author has not been able to ascertain the meaning of this word, which is probably derived from an African language, but it is known that this work often included bits of broken glass, and metal that was subsequently found under the victim's skin, to which the word probably referred.

⁴¹ Latour, The Pasteurization of France, pp. 250–54.

⁴² E.V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (London, Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 263–310; Latour, Science in Action, pp. 250–54. The term ‘transcultural’ could also be used but ‘transorchestral’ maintains the musical metaphor and forestalls any rush to a narrow reading of culture.

⁴³ Latour, Pandora's Hope, pp. 146–68.

⁴⁴ T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970).

⁴⁵ See the numerous references to oath-taking among enslaved Africans while they plotted and executed rebellions in the Caribbean in M. Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (London, Cornell University Press, 1982).

⁴⁶ Anon., Great Newes from the Barbadoes (London, 1676).

⁴⁷ G. Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados (London, 1750), pp. 15–16. R.S. Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1923), pp. 109–10.

⁴⁸ See J.S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Oxford, Heinemann Publishers, 1969), pp. 145–61.

⁴⁹ S.W. Mintz and R. Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), p. 22.

⁵⁰ Latour, Reassembling the Social, pp. 50–52. D.A. Masolo, African Philosophy in Search of Identity (Bloomington, IN and London, Indiana University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 233–46.

⁵¹ P.A. Carstens, ‘The Cultural Defence in Criminal Law: South African Perspectives’ (Presented at the Conference of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, 2003).