Rituals of Resistance: Kongo Religion and Slave Spirituality

Overview of Young's Argument

Jason R. Young's dissertation, Rituals of Resistance, links the religious practices and theology of the Kongo region in West Central Africa to those of slaveholding societies in the American South — particularly in the Sea Island region of Georgia and South Carolina — during the era of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This African Atlantic religious complex, shaped by the imperatives of oppressive societies and by the demands of daily survival, not only reproduced certain traditional West African religious rituals but also demonstrated remarkable flexibility and change. Young's thesis argues that many of these religious modifications were shaped and structured by the slave-trading practices of the American South.

Many of these Kongo religious rituals — passed on to and shared by relatives laboring on plantations in the American South — served as potent counter-narratives to the brutalities of daily life. While white slaveholders attacked the body, scarring, violating, and offending it in countless ways, African Atlantic religious rituals focused on divinity, dance, and song as a means of transcending that brutal existence. Ritual and rite became a way of addressing pain and oppression, and so the enslaved body became, on the one hand, a site of brutality and oppression and, on the other, an instrument of resistance.

Young goes further to show how the slaves' resistance was also an attack against modernity itself. Increasing rationalism rendered people as objects — as instruments to be used — just as slaveholders regarded their enslaved people as mere "bodies." The enslaved rebelled against that dehumanizing vision. Rather than accepting the status of bodies, they transformed their plight into spiritual acts of resistance. In this way, their actions constituted an attack not only on the institution of slavery but also on the institution of modernity.

In essence, Young's objective is to demonstrate how enslaved people used their oppressed bodies as vehicles of resistance in religious rituals that were shaped by their oppression, and how their religion both shaped and was shaped by their misfortunes — ultimately transcending those misfortunes, and transcending the practitioner in turn, by becoming an instrument of resilience.

Young's dissertation shows how enslaved people used aesthetics, narrative, and religious ritual as instruments to transform their suffering. They wove their suffering into these forms, which then served to sublimate it. An illustration of this is provided in Chapter 4, the purpose of which is to show how, through the expressive arts, the Black community both in the Kongo and in the American South used folkloric records of flight and sacred movement as a vehicle for describing their transmigration to and from the American South. The motif of flight also functions as resistance: African slaves could, in imagination, sprout wings and fly to heaven, or to Africa, or otherwise surmount their suffering through the act of flight.

Methodology and Interdisciplinary Approach

In presenting his thesis, Young relies on a wide variety of primary source material — mainly qualitative and historical records. He utilizes seventeenth and eighteenth-century reports by Italian and Portuguese missionaries, contemporary archaeological material discovered in the Kongo and the slave South, ethnographic and anthropological reports, folk literature, slave narratives, and visual art.

This dissertation is, in other words, an interdisciplinary work grounded in African primary source material that extends well beyond it, drawing on history, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, and art history. Chapter 4 uses folkloric records of flight and sacred movement as a vehicle for incorporating descriptions of transmigration to and from the American South. This theme appears most commonly — though not exclusively — in slave spirituals and folkloric myths such as those surrounding Brer Rabbit, as well as in stories about witches who brutalized slaveholders in kind. Narratives of this kind were common not only in the Kongo region but particularly along the Georgia coast. Natural creatures such as owls and buzzards also populate these narratives, serving as representations of the integration of flight with death.

The project employs several distinct methodologies. By analyzing change over time, it adopts a historically grounded approach; by investigating the material culture of enslaved people, it employs anthropological methods; and by analyzing slave autobiography and folktales, it relies on literary analysis. Subjects and methodologies thus traverse multiple realms. Far from confining himself to a single discipline, Young is interdisciplinary in approach and deploys varied methods to investigate his subject.

Major Themes in the Dissertation

Young's main arguments are threefold. First, that Africans in the Kongo regions of West Central Africa shaped a religion that served to convert their suffering into a narrative of meaning. Second, that enslaved people sublimated their brutalized bodies into vehicles of spiritual transcendence. Third, that these enslaved people refused to allow themselves and their progeny — enslaved in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina — to become reified objects. They rebelled against the rationalism of modernity by transforming their pain into spirituality and transcendence.

Several subsidiary themes inform the dissertation as well: the striking association between religious ritual and the oppression and brutality endured by enslaved people; the ways in which religious rites were modified and adapted in response to the historical dynamics of slavery and the slave trade; and the way the enslaved body was resocialized from being a passive instrument of pain into an active instrument of spiritual glory.

Young himself frames Rituals of Resistance as a study of "both cultural recuperation, as captive Africans drew on a wellspring of memory and experience of an African past" (p. 26), expressed through their religious rituals, and of "cultural generation as slaves in the New World mediated their differences into viable slave communities in the New World" (p. 26). Their religious rituals served as the instrument that united both impulses. Running throughout the thesis and uniting all its points is the strand of resistance: how African Americans were able to transform their suffering into one enduring act of defiance and transcendence.

After examining instances of aesthetics, folktales, ballads, rituals of death, and folkloric records, Rituals of Resistance concludes with Young's observation that the religious rituals practiced by the Kongo region of West Central Africa served as a unifying bond between enslaved people in Africa and those on New World plantation communities, particularly in the American South. Simultaneously, the dissertation shows how those rituals were affected and modified by circumstances encountered in the New World — for instance, by the prior exposure that some Kongo-region enslaved people had to Christianity through contact with Christian missionaries. This exposure not only altered their rituals but also shaped them into instruments of resilience.

Young (2002) shows how traditional rituals — such as the minkisi complex in the Kongo — had parallels in the American South. The brutal circumstances of enslaved life in the American South not only relied on these rituals as a form of support but also revitalized and elaborated upon them in creative and innovative ways. In this manner, enslaved people took the spiritual energy of the very practices that sought to denigrate them and injected it into traditional rituals in ways that uplifted them and offered meaning through which to transcend suffering.

The specter of death was central to the slave experience and the slave trade. Associations existed between the Kongo and the American South on ritual matters dealing with notions of the body, the spirit, and the motion of the soul from this world to the next. Importantly, the direction of influence was not one-way — from the Kongo to the American South only. Many enslaved people returned to their homeland carrying revitalized rituals back with them, so that in a reciprocal and regenerative cycle of influence, the Kongo was affected by the new African faith forged in the Americas, just as those in the American South had been influenced by the older rituals that they modified and utilized as vehicles of renewal.