Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [12]
These beliefs about what witches did, the importance of the Devil to witches’ powers, and the forensic strategies essential to discern and punish malefactors suggested a frame of reference within which Europeans could understand what they encountered in Africa and America. It is difficult to discern genuine indigenous ideas about witchcraft among non-European people in Africa and the Americas in the era of European expansion largely because our sources come from those Europeans—mostly priests—who described indigenous rituals and observed them in the context of their own clearly defined witch beliefs. These sources hinder efforts to move beyond hyperbole and to reveal what Africans and Indians were actually doing—let alone what they believed and what cultural logic lay behind their rituals. Europeans were predisposed to believe that Satan existed everywhere, that everywhere he had his followers, and that unfamiliar practices might well be diabolical. Historians can at best piece together non-Christian ideas about witchcraft. One crucial commonality, however, is that Native Americans and Africans did not tend to have an idea of Satan as a single, fixed entity, the focus of all evil in the world and forever doing battle with God. Thus one central feature of European witch beliefs—the concept of a pact between a witch with free will and the Devil—had no meaning for non-Christians. Like Europeans, however, Africans and Americans agreed that disease and misfortune might be caused by witches.
Beliefs: West and West-Central Africans
Africans who were captured and forcibly transported to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came primarily from a few key regions of Africa: West Africa (especially Senegambia [where The Gambia and Senegal are today], Sierra Leone [modern day Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, and Ivory Coast], the Gold Coast [modern day Ghana], and the Bight of Biafra [modern day Cameroon, Gabon, and southeastern Nigeria]) and West-Central Africa (especially Angola and Congo).28 What do we know about their beliefs, and how do we know it? Historians trying to understand African witch beliefs in previous centuries rely heavily on observations generated by Europeans, who found their way to West and West-Central Africa most commonly as traders. Merchants frequently recorded information on religious practices, although they were often mocking and derisive of these traditions. In some of those places, traders were accompanied by missionaries who also studied religious practices in order to enhance their ability to convert people. In the kingdom of Kongo (located in present-day western Congo and northern Angola), where the king converted to Christianity in 1491, priests played an important role in educating people about Catholicism, and they provide some of our best sources for religious beliefs there. Elsewhere, ministers and priests were banned from proselytizing.
Africans regarded sickness and death as misfortunes caused by spirits and supernatural powers who worked through human agents. Witchcraft, then, functioned as a common explanation for misfortune, just as it did for Europeans. Witchcraft was part of a collection of secret religious powers, including divining, conjuring, and healing, that could restore harmony to a community or to an individual. These rituals could also be used to punish offenders. In the kingdom of Kongo, witches—ndokis—were selfish and greedy people who used powers harnessed from the other world to achieve their goals (in European thinking, comparable to those witches who worked magic with the aid of the Devil). But the same powers could