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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

Jeroen Dewulf
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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 Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa.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
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 222 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

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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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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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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.

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107 Brenneker, Sambumbu, V:2196.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.