Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [13]
European men who worked at coastal trading posts were especially fascinated by fetishes and the use of poisons. The word fetish derives from a Portuguese term, feitiço, which traders used to describe the charms and amulets they saw in West Africa. The meaning of the term expanded to include a wide range of practices, not just the material charms themselves.30 Those like the trader Willem Bosman, who observed and commented on African religious practices, noted the pervasive use of poison in such rituals (see document 13). Robert Elwes, a merchant at the Royal African Company fort in Egya in 1687, and John Carter, at Whydah in 1686, related stories of others being poisoned and, in Carter’s case, of threats of poison against him. When a sergeant at Winneba fell ill “with vomiting and strange paines” in August 1697, the trader there was sure he had been poisoned.31
As these traders’ remarks suggest, charms were part of practices that ranged from punishing enemies to ferreting out the truth behind a crime. They were employed in two aspects of African religious practice that endured (often in altered form) in the Americas and that Europeans in some jurisdictions identified as witchcraft, most notably conjuring and divination. In the kingdom of Kongo, for example, specialized practitioners called ngangas worked with amulets, minkisis. The charms had important symbolic power. A nganga who put a stone inside a charm might intend the ritual to remove a tumor, in the same way that a feather could convey the flight required for a charm to look for and identify a criminal. One Capuchin missionary readily identified these practices as “magic” in 1643 and believed that in these rituals the ngangas “speak with the devil, as if they were insane and possessed.” At the same time, Catholic priests understood the power of these ritual specialists and their amulets, and tried to appropriate it for themselves: in Kongo priests adopted the title nganga and translated minkisi as “holy.”32
Rituals varied, of course, across Africa. Among the Igbo, who lived in the Bight of Biafra, within modern-day Nigeria, and who comprised the largest single contingent of slaves bound for the colony of Virginia in the eighteenth century, diviners (called obea) performed sacrifices (real and symbolic) in order to seek help from the many invisible spirits of the Igbo world.33 In the late seventeenth century, the French slave trader Jean Barbot described the gris-gris (charms) he saw in Senegal, and said that they contained words written in Arabic. A staunch Protestant, Barbot compared the gris-gris to the “supposed saints” worshipped by “Italian and Spanish bigots.”34
If the intellectual limitations and religious prejudices of European observers make it difficult to understand indigenous African ideas about witchcraft, so, too, does the specific context within which most Africans and Europeans encountered each other: through the slave trade. The historian James Sweet has explored this puzzle for the coasts of West-Central Africa (Kongo and Angola), where evidence of malevolence increased with the slave trade. West-Central Africans, for example, believed that when Europeans took Africans away on slave vessels, never to be seen again, they did so in order to eat them. These were not simply metaphorical concerns about being eaten, but a literal belief. Witches were cannibals. They sated themselves on enslaved bodies. If remedies against witchcraft conventionally kept evil in balance, the slave trade introduced a new form of evil, one that could not be combated through customary means. In that respect, the slave trade might have created witchcraft (as Europeans understood and used the term) in Africa and among Africans who lived within its