Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (review)

In Rituals of Resistance, Jason R. Young examines the relationship between the religious beliefs and practices of precolonial Kongolese and the enslaved men and women of the Lowcountry South, two populations linked intimately by the transatlantic slave trade for nearly two centuries. In four comparative case studies, Young details the ways in which the Kongolese people and their enslaved contemporaries and descendants in the Lowcountry interpreted and modified the theology and practice of Christianity as a means of resisting the slave trade and slavery. Although more captives transported to the Americas—and particularly to South Carolina—came from West-Central Africa than from any other single region, only a handful of Americanists have paid close attention to the region. Yet, as Young shows, it is among the best documented of all African regions involved in the transatlantic slave trade, and his use of Portuguese and other non-English sources created in Africa allows him to develop a sophisticated analysis of precolonial Kongolese culture.

One of the most compelling aspects of Rituals of Resistance is Young’s approach to questions of cultural transmission and creolization. Beginning with the pioneering work of Melville Herskovits more than a half-century ago, many scholars have focused on documenting “Africanisms” or “African survivals” in the Americas. At the same time, scholars such as Sidney M. Mintz and Richard Price have criticized efforts to identify the same cultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic as simplistic or misguided. Although Young’s work bears the imprint of contemporary historians who have argued that American slaves were able to retain key aspects of their African cultures intact, such as Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Michael Gomez, and John K. Thornton, Rituals of Resistance moves beyond the effort to identify “formal cultural affinities” between African and American populations. Instead, Young argues that “the cultures of the Atlantic are linked philosophically and theoretically” (101–2). That is, ritual practices that looked very different aesthetically or formally could still be related through theoretical, cosmological, and symbolic meanings (184). For example, although conjure bags in the Lowcountry contained different objects than those found in Kongolese conjure bags, Young argues that such differences “should not be read as the inability of Lowcountry blacks to replicate West-Central African rituals in a new environment,” but instead as the creative application of a conjuring tradition that retained its cosmological essence while appropriating European and Native American objects (125). Equally important, Young’s vision of religious practice as dynamic allows him to focus not on the degree of similarity between African and African American rituals but instead on the ways in which people on both sides of the Atlantic creatively modified Christianity to serve different purposes. “Historical change,” Young contends, “both in Africa as well as in the plantation Americas,” is central to his conception of cultural process (5).

At the heart of Young’s study lies the development of a unique “African Atlantic” religious tradition that incorporated both Christian and indigenous beliefs and rituals. Central to Young’s argument is his understanding of “conversion” not as “a clear and discrete movement from a precessional realm of belief to a successional one,” but instead as a process in which the “ ‘new’ belief system is understood largely through the context of the ‘old’ ” (43). Although Young admits that many Kongolese and most Lowcountry slaves were at least nominally Christian, he argues that they both practiced a form of Christianity markedly different from the theology of European missionaries or the master class. For example, although Christianity came early to Kongo, and Catholic missionaries enjoyed widespread success, Young argues that the Kongolese elite practiced Christianity “through their own cultural lens”—and nominally Christian villagers, who were much slower to come to Christianity, continued to engage in traditional practices, such as reverence for Simbi water spirits (49–50, 52, 57). This emphasis...