Quote of the Week

"In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are many and they are deep."

General Toussaint L'Ouverture
Hero of the Haitian Revolution

Today in Caribbean History

Following the Bahamian election of 10 January 1967, Lynden Pindling of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) brokered a deal with Randol Fawkes' Labour Party to form a black coalition government, thus defeating the white led United Bahamian Party (UBP) and ushering in a new era of Black Majority Rule. As the nation's first black premier and, later, first prime minister, Pindling would remain in power for the next twenty-five years until his party was defeated in the 1992 elections.

Today in Church History

On June 30, 1881, Presbyterian preacher and African-American abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet is appointed minister to Liberia. The former slave shocked the abolitionist community in 1843 by calling for violent rebellion. "Rather die free-men than live to be slaves," he preached.

Today in Church History

On 30 May 1822, a slave betrayed the plans of African Methodist (and former slave) Denmark Vesey to stage a massive slave uprising on July 14. Of the 131 African Americans arrested in the plot, 35 were executed (including Vesey) and 43 were deported. Vesey's Charleston, South Carolina, church was closed until 1865.

The "Secret Garveyism"

Last week UCLA professor Robert Hill came to Nassau to speak on the topic "Secret Garveyism" at the College of the Bahamas. Unfortunately, I had a prior commitment and was unable to make it. For those like myself who missed this opportunity, a recent article in the Nassau Guardian gives the basic gist of the lecture:

The 'Secret Garveyism'

By THEA RUTHERFORD
Guardian National Correspondent
thea@nasguard.com

UCLA professor and prominent Caribbean scholar, Robert Hill, introduced an audience on Thursday to a Marcus Garvey that perhaps many of us have never known.

For decades after his death in 1940, the world has been most familiar with the military Garvey, the "Africa for the Africans" Garvey. And people of African descent have celebrated the Garvey who established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, a vehicle for pride amongst blacks living in a time when crushing racial prejudice seeped into the psyche and tortured self esteem.

Yet during his lecture given at the College of the Bahamas' Michael H. Eldon building, and jointly hosted by BACUS and the college's School of Social Sciences, Hill presented images of a multifaceted Garvey, one far too big to be stuffed into one chest of history. In Hill's presentation "Marcus Garvey's Mission," the historical and controversial figure emerged as yes, a soldier for black pride, and a gentleman but most of all a thinker, a scholar.

Hill argued that Garvey's foundation was his huge emphasis on acquiring and retaining knowledge. The "Africa for the Africans" Garvey came much later, after years of extreme self discipline in his personal quest for knowledge.

To encounter this Garvey, Hill took the audience to St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, where Garvey was born and grew up. Faced with the options of becoming a cow herder or a wharf man in a rural town, Garvey chose to read, to escape the limitations of his environment through books.

"I was born in the country town of St. Ann's Bay," Garvey recalled in a speech he gave in 1935 before embarking on his exile to England. The speech was recorded in a Jamaican newspaper. "Naturally, as a little black boy I grew up there and I saw the limitations of society. If I had elected to remain in the town with the limitations of the town I would have gravitated towards becoming a cow boy or a wharf man or a laborer. But I was saved from accepting that because my father, after dissipating what wealth he had, left us as the residue some good books, and in my tender years I went to the shelf and I read."

Arguing that so many have either wittingly or unwittingly chosen to separate Garvey's pedagogy of imbibing knowledge with an unquenchable thirst from his African pride-infused ideology, Hill called for a refocus on this intellectual foundation of Garveyism.

"That is Garveyism - the secret Garveyism - that most people never know about," said Hill. "All they know about is the man with the plumes. All they know about is this man who was preaching back to Africa ... it's a much more complex and pertinent story than this pastiche that Garvey has been reduced to."

It is this focus on attaining knowledge that will prove timeless, that can empower generations of people across racial lines. Garvey's roots in education became the springboard for his frequent discourses on pride in identity among people of African descent. Such a springboard continues to be relevant for a new generation whose identities may be lost in a sea of materialism, ultimately resulting in waves of crime.

"How many little Bahamian boys grow up here and they look at the society and the society says these are your limitations, and what do they then do do?" asked Hill. "[Do] they accept the limitations or do they challenge those limitations?"

Garvey used education to challenge his limitations, and his influence went far beyond the island of his birth, settling in The Bahamas in the 1920s. Decades later the spirit of challenging limitations lived on in Bahamians who have made the world recognize their tiny home. Hill acknowledged a few of them at the beginning of his lecture, urging their countrymen to learn more about them.

"I'm extraordinarily proud to be received by you ... I feel that I'm encountering here in The Bahamas something of the ancestors of the great Dr. W. E. B. DuBois. Part of DuBois' ancestry comes from The Bahamas," he said. Hill also noted that the mother of James Weldon Johnson, the father of the Harlem Renaissance, was from The Bahamas. He mentioned that the country was the birthplace of theater great Bert Williams, and highlighted the accomplishments of Sidney Poitier and the Golden Girls. One of Garvey's own mentors - Dr. J. Robert Love, a Grant's Town native who became the first black man to be elected to the legislative council in Jamaica - was also from The Bahamas.

Garvey's tradition has the fuel to continue, as Hill pointed out in Lesson One of a mail correspondence course that he began in 1936 called the School of African Philosophy. In 1987 Hill published the transcripts of the lessons in a volume entitled "Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons" for the centenary of Garvey's birth.

The school began with 25 lessons on varied topics of African nationalism and the UNIA. But foremost was the very first lesson on "Intelligence, Education, Universal Knowledge and How to Get it." In the lesson Garvey instructs students, among other things, to read four hours each day.

"Lesson number one is not about reclaiming Africa," said Hill. "Lesson number one is not about African colonization. Lesson number one is not about Africa for the Africans at home and abroad. It is about intelligence, education and universal knowledge and how to get it. You only get to Negro nationalism after you pass intelligence and universal knowledge. That is what we have lost touch with. That is the Garvey that we have ... almost erased. We have to find a way to get back to that process that Garvey himself followed that enabled him to emancipate his mind from mental slavery."

While fielding questions after the lecture, Hill told the audience what he would tell someone who asked about this Garvey.

"I would say, how many hours are you prepared to read?"

Understanding Haitian Vodou

Thanks to Pastor Bob Cornwall over at Ponderings on a Faith Journey for pointing out this thought provoking and informative article on Haitian Vodou. Not only does it explain some important new developments taking place in the Vodou religion, it also helps to shed light on a number of widespread misconceptions as well as some of the positive contributions that Vodou has made to Haitian society. In their book Understanding Folk Religion: A Christian Response to Beliefs and Practices, missiologists Paul Hiebert, Daniel Shaw, and Tite Tiénou stress the importance of taking the time to carefully study and understand the beliefs and worldview of others before evaluating and responding--something that far too many many pastors, missionaries, and church leaders have failed to do in their dealings with Vodou in the past. This article is a positive step in the right direction and is highly recommended for all those wishing to interact with Vodouists in a more nuanced and constructive fashion.

Sightings 5/1/08

Voodoo's Quest for Respect
--Spencer Dew

Headlines early last month, announcing the enthronement of what the New York Times called "Voodoo's Pope," drew attention to one of the world's most misunderstood and frequently maligned religions. The official title of the newly-created position is "Supreme Chief" or "Supreme Master," and the figure in question, Max Beauvoir, a houngan (priest) and longtime self-styled public relations figure for the religion both in Haiti and the United States, wasted no time in issuing statements to the press addressing the unenviable position of the religion he now represents.

"My position as Supreme Chief in Voodoo was born out of controversy," he said, casting blame on "the voice of Hollywood" for enduring caricatures of the faith and its practices. Indeed, depictions of Voodooists as sinister magicians – not to mention the issue of zombies – have done much to shape popular opinion of the religion. Yet the exceedingly problematic reception of Voodoo has more complicated roots. Voodoo is met with disrespect, suspicion, and outright fear for a confluence of reasons, and these entangled issues are what Beauvoir must somehow seek to address, and, indeed, what he claims his position was created to address.

Voodoo in Haiti, since its inception, has functioned as a politicized force, first playing a crucial role in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), associated with armed revolve and raids by maroon bands on slave plantations. Later, in the resistance to the American occupation (1915-34), Voodoo was associated again with assault and warfare. During the dictatorships of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1907-71 and 1971-86) the religion was linked with the nefarious tonton macoutes militias, and in retribution for these abuses, after Duvalier's fall, hundreds of Voodoo practitioners were killed in what Beauvoir calls "pogroms."

Haiti was the first country founded by former slaves. In America, conceptions of Voodoo have been inseparable from conceptions of race. The religion has therefore suffered from explicitly racist portrayals, and has acted as a canvas for race hatred and race-based fear. Derived in part from African tradition and practiced primarily by black-skinned peoples, Voodoo has, for hundreds of years, been victim of sensational accusations associating its practices with cannibalism and other outlandish and canned racial stereotypes.

Voodoo's secretive nature also continues to hinder its public reception. Secrecy as a theological tenet, mysterious initiations, and a priestly economy wherein houngans and mambos are paid for their services based on claims of power to manipulate invisible forces are all regarded with suspicion by contemporary, Western, secular audiences. Likewise disturbing are two central practices – the sacrifice of animals and spirit possession. The former is bloody, the latter theatrical and sometimes violent, as dancing practitioners lapse into ritual trances and are "ridden" by loas from the Voodoo pantheon.

Such acts strike many outsiders as "Satanic," an inaccurate but nonetheless damaging label with which Voodoo is frequently plastered. Compounding the problem is Voodoo's symbolism, prominently featuring the snake, which Voodooists identify with life and God but Jews and Christians identify with evil and the devil. Then there is the tricky issue of Christian saints' names, prayer formulas, and iconography appropriated by and occurring within Voodoo rites, resonating with long-standing fear within Christianity of the parody and perversion of its rites and symbols.

Finally, Voodoo suffers from a flaw built into both scholarly and popular typologies of religion, that of hierarchical thinking about religions. Beauvoir argues that Voodoo's character derives from its location as a "popular religion." But lacking a sacred text, law codes, or traditions of written commentary, Voodoo is a marginalized tradition – marked as "primitive," as if religions evolve along a given trajectory – compared to those "world religions" that come to dominate empires.

Until now, Voodoo also lacked a formal institution of authority. The establishment of a national federation of Voodooists and their election, in turn, of Beauvoir to his current post is a radical (and not uncontroversial) move. Beauvoir's hope is not only, of course, that Voodoo will receive long-due legitimization on the world stage, but that it will also play an active role in addressing Haiti's poverty and social ills, paving the way for a self-sufficient and sustainable future. It is a tall order, but Voodoo, a religion practiced since the 18th century and only officially recognized as a religion by the Haitian government in 2003, has proven its capacity to persist.

References:

Marc Lacey, "A U.S.-Trained Entrepreneur Becomes Voodoo’s Pope", New York Times, 5 April 2008.

Spencer Dew is a PhD candidate in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Junior Fellow in the Martin Marty Center.

Theological Education in the Bahamas, Part IV

This is the fourth of a five part series that previously appeared in News from Daniel and Estela Schweissing between February and August 2006. A more in-depth theological treatment of this topic can be found in the upcoming edition of the American Baptist Quarterly.

RECOVERING THE TRADITION OF BLACK RADICALISM IN BAHAMIAN RELIGION

We’ve all heard the old Chinese proverb, “Give people a fish, and they’ll eat for a day; teach people to fish, and they’ll eat for a lifetime.” For decades, missionaries and international development workers alike have used this proverb to explain community development strategies that move beyond charity to empower the poor with the skills and education needed to improve their standard of living. But increasingly, we are beginning to understand that training and education are of limited value when employment opportunities are scarce or the few jobs that are available don’t pay a living wage. At the international level, we have frequently ignored the complex social and economic structures through which wealthy nations often prosper at the expense of poor nations. But simply placing the blame on wealthy nations does not fully explain the problem of global poverty. Within poor countries themselves, growing economic disparities between the wealthy ruling class and the impoverished masses can be attributed to government corruption, misuse of international aid, illiteracy, soil erosion, overpopulation, civil war, and a myriad of other factors. Even on the local level, well-intentioned development projects are often appropriated by pastors or other community leaders, enabling them to broaden their power base at the expense of those whom a given project was originally intended to help. With these things in mind, we are now recognizing that it is not enough to simply “teach people to fish.” We also need to consider the question, “Who owns the pond?”

Western missionaries have been slow to ask this question, in part, because our theology fails to explicitly address the root causes of poverty. In contrast, the religious faith of black Bahamians and other Afro-Caribbean peoples has long played a significant role in challenging the injustices of five-hundred years of slavery and colonialism. From the earliest days of slavery, religion often inspired slave uprisings and revolts against white plantation owners. Most slave resistance, though, tended to be more subtle—stealing food, procrastination on the job, refusal to give up African beliefs and customs, individual escapes, and formation of fugitive slave communities in the mountains. By the late eighteenth century, mass conversion of Caribbean slaves and freed blacks to Protestant Christianity provided new avenues of resistance to slavery and racial discrimination. Much to the consternation of British colonial officials, non-conformist churches—especially the Baptists—often provided sanctuary for runaway slaves as well as allowing slaves and freed blacks alike to become full-members, hold church offices, and even become preachers. Eventually, Baptist led slave resistance in Jamaica became so violent that it significantly hastened the legal decision to end slavery in all of the British colonies. Following emancipation, religion continued to fuel struggles for racial equality and, later, independence from British colonial rule. This tradition of religious resistance—referred to by some scholars as black radicalism—reached its climax in the Bahamas with the achievement of black majority rule (1967) and Bahamian independence (1973).

The Bahamas’ journey to black majority rule and independence began in 1935, when the National Baptist Convention in the United States began to provide scholarships for Bahamian Baptists to prepare for the ministry at the historically black American Baptist Seminary in Nashville. Having experienced southern racism and observed the early precursors to the U.S. civil rights movement during their studies, Bahamian graduates such as H.W. Brown and R.E. Cooper, Sr. returned to the Bahamas determined to right the injustices faced by the black majority in their own country. These Baptist pastors were amongst the first supporters of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), which was formed in 1953 to challenge the political and economic power of the white Nassau merchant class known as the Bay Street Boys. Borrowing from the rhetoric and tactics of leaders in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement as well as nationalist movements against British colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean, the PLP and its Baptist allies gradually gained the support of the black Bahamian populace they claimed to represent. Using the scriptures to show how God helps the weak to triumph over the mighty, fiery Baptist preachers encouraged unity and solidarity amongst black Bahamians while the leadership of Baptist women doubled the size of the black electorate through their efforts to achieve women’s suffrage.

By late 1966, the United Bahamian Party (UBP)—representing the interests of the Bay Street Boys—caved into growing pressure from the PLP and called for new parliamentary elections to be held on January 10, 1967. They hoped that by scheduling the elections shortly after the Christmas holidays the black electorate would be too distracted with celebrations to adequately prepare. Instead, the religiously zealous PLP leadership quickly pointed out that election day coincided with the day of Passover, the “tenth day of the first month,” when Pharaoh ordered the Israelites to be released from slavery in Egypt (Ex 12:1-3, 31). Such biblical imagery coupled with the theme song from the recently released movie Exodus and the U.S. civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” enabled the PLP’s campaign to build enough momentum to achieve an election night tie with the UBP. During the night, the PLP brokered a deal with the largely black Labour Party to form a coalition government, thus ushering in a new era of black majority rule. Years later, Baptist leader and PLP stalwart Doris Johnson recalled: “Thus it was that on ‘the tenth day of the first month,’ black Bahamians emerged from the centuries-old domination of a white power group and crossed over to the promised land of ‘milk and honey,’ on which they could grow more and more able to shape their destiny. They could walk tall and proud in their own land as never before, and humble too, as their deeply religious sense attributed their Glory (sic) in victory, to the mysterious ways of their God.” Once in power, the PLP and its Baptist allies continued their struggle for the equality of black Bahamians, culminating in independence from Great Britain on July 10, 1973.

These events are but one of many instances in which black radicalism has drawn on the story of God’s deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt to inspire liberation from oppressive social conditions. As a force for social change, radical black religion has always been an important alternative to the missionary theology utilized by the white ruling class as a means of social control. During the slave era, white missionaries justified their ministries amongst black slaves by arguing that the conversion of slaves to Christianity would make them more obedient to their masters (Eph 6:5, Col 3:22) and, thus, better slaves. By focusing exclusively on saving souls, the missionaries gave slaves something to look forward to in the next life (Eph 6:7-8, Col 3:23-24) but forbid them from using their newfound freedom in Christ to seek freedom from their physical bondage here on earth. Following emancipation, such otherworldly theologies continued to insure that former slaves and their descendents remained socially and economically subordinate to the white ruling class. Today, this otherworldly theology of the slave era has largely been replaced by the this-worldly focus of prosperity theology. Having watched their country’s meteoric rise from a backwater colony to a thriving nation in just a single generation, many Bahamians have understandably exchanged admonitions to “obey your master” for alluring promises of limitless wealth. But by emphasizing that poverty is the result of one’s lack of faith in God while ignoring unjust social and economic structures, prosperity theology—like its otherworldly predecessors—still serves the purpose of upholding the privileges of the economic elite at the expense of poor.

The real reasons for Bahamian poverty are much more complicated than what proponents of prosperity theology would have us believe. Just a little over three decades after independence from British colonialism, the Bahamas now faces the economic challenges of neocolonialism. Concealed behind the glitz and glitter of the Bahamas’ multimillion dollar tourist industry, for example, is the hard reality that most profits go directly into the pockets of foreign investors, with only eight cents out of every dollar actually remaining in the country. Nearly forty-years after the achievement of black majority rule, the Bay Street Boys are no longer publicly visible in Bahamian politics. Yet the white minority they represent—just a mere 15% of the population—still controls 85% of the nation’s wealth. Boasting the third-highest per capita income in the western hemisphere, the Bahamas is home to a sizeable black middle class that lives in relative prosperity compared to its Caribbean neighbors. But beneath this veneer of wealth is an even larger black underclass that enjoys few, if any, of the benefits of the modern Bahamian economy while being displaced from unskilled jobs by a growing influx of poverty-stricken immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, and Latin America.

While the white Nassau merchant class and its foreign investment partners have been the primary beneficiaries of the Bahamas’ astounding economic growth, enough black Bahamians have dramatically increased their standard of living in the past few decades to make the fantastic promises of prosperity theology believable to the majority of the populace still living in poverty. In this environment, it is easy to see how entrepreneurial pastors and church leaders have used the teachings of prosperity theology to become wealthy at the expense of their own congregations. More importantly, it is easy to see how the voices of radical black religion that once challenged the otherworldly theologies of colonialism have remained silent against this onslaught of neocolonialism and prosperity theology. With these things in mind, one of our priorities at Atlantic College is to equip our students to recover the tradition of black radicalism in Bahamian religion. By doing so, we hope to provide them with a viable alternative to the “business as usual” doctrines of prosperity theology that fail to challenge the social and economic structures that keep many Bahamians impoverished. To that end, much of the historical, political, and theological analysis described above has formed the basis for reading assignments, lectures, and discussion in my theology classes.

Even though only a handful of my students actually voted in the historic election that brought about black majority rule, most are old enough to remember when their parents voted for it. Or if not, they at least remember their own participation in the Bahamas’ independence celebrations. Most of these same students—typically representing the new black middle class—can also recount childhood stories of growing up in conditions of poverty and attending school when British history rather than Bahamian history was the mainstay of the curriculum. A small number of younger students, though, have no significant memories of either the black radical movement of the 1960s and early 70s or the social conditions that characterized that era. So while older students readily understand the nature of black radicalism and, to a certain extent, its significance for today, younger students generally experience some initial difficulty when it comes to making those connections. And when it comes to understanding the more distant legacy of radical black religion during the slave era, nearly all of our students have trouble recognizing the continuity of that tradition with its more recent manifestations during their own lifetimes. Given that most of my students are either still in school or have only recently graduated, it remains to be seen whether or not they will ultimately make those connections. But if they do, then we hope that their future ministries will find them moving beyond “teaching people to fish” to helping them acquire their fair share of the pond.

COMING NEXT: This newsletter has examined how theological education can facilitate social change in the Bahamas by helping students to recover the tradition of radical black religion. But ultimately, we hope that black radicalism does more than just inform the present ministries of our students. We’d also like to see it inspire them to develop their own theologies. Next, the fifth and final article in this series will show how we are doing this in “Towards an Indigenous Bahamian Theology.”

PREVIOUSLY
Part I: Why is Bahamian theological education important?
Part II: Bahamianization of the Theological Curriculum
Part III: Finding Alternatives to Business as Usual in the Church