By Luis Nicolau Parés, Roger Sansi
So much scholarship on sorcery and witchcraft has narrowly curious about particular instances and locations, fairly early smooth Europe and twentieth-century Africa. and lots more and plenty of that study translates sorcery as simply a remnant of premodern traditions. Boldly hard those perspectives, Sorcery within the Black Atlantic takes an extended old and broader geographical point of view, contending that sorcery is better understood as an Atlantic phenomenon that has major connections to modernity and globalization.A extraordinary staff of participants right here research sorcery in Brazil, Cuba, South Africa, Cameroon, and Angola. Their insightful essays display the best way practices and accusations of witchcraft unfold during the Atlantic international from the age of discovery as much as the current, growing an indelible hyperlink among sorcery and the increase of worldwide capitalism. laying off new mild on an issue of perennial curiosity, Sorcery within the Black Atlantic should be provocative, compelling examining for historians and anthropologists operating during this becoming box.
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Example text
According to de Barros, some people in the king’s court, inspired by the devil, conspired against Alfonso and told the king that Alfonso had become a powerful sorcerer, thanks to the Christian priests, and that he flew at night from the distant city where he lived to his father’s harem, to have sex with his father’s wives. To test if this was true, the king played a trick: he sent a feitiço, a charm, wrapped in a cloth to one of his wives, whom he suspected. The messenger who brought the feitiço told her that it was from her lover, the prince, and that he sent it to protect her from the king—since he was intending to kill all his wives.
This ambiguity between feitiço and fetish is not uncommon, as we have seen, but interestingly enough it can lead to this misreading, which is not irrelevant: by talking about fetish-men, Shaw can take for granted that the Portuguese were describing priests and not sorcerers. In more general terms, it is also clear from these texts that the Temne were familiar with slavery and used ritual means to stop their slaves from escap ing (Shaw 2002, 52). That is, I would say, a form of objectifying people that predates the Atlantic slave trade.
He explains that Africans say that when God created the world he made men white and black. He gave to the black man the op tion to choose first between two gifts: gold or “the knowledge of the arts of reading and writing” (Bosman 1705, 146). The black man chose gold. Therefore, with time he became the slave of the white man, who with his arts took the black man’s gold and even his body, in slavery. But Bosman interpreted the story as a corroboration of his idea that Africans were ig norant people led simply by greed and interest and that their fetish priests misled them to worship their fetishes.