"In response to in 1760 in Jamaica, the colony’s House of Assembly passed a law naming a new crime, “obeah.” This important statute led the way in establishing obeah as a phenomenon understood by colonial authorities as a singular and dangerous problem. Investigating the Jamaica assembly’s decision within a wider Caribbean and Atlantic context and alongside the near-contemporaneous “Makandal conspiracy” in Saint Domingue, which was interpreted by French planters as a mass outbreak of poisoning, shows how similar practices came to be interpreted and constructed in different ways in different colonial cultures. The practices used by Tacky’s “obeah man” and Makandal’s followers were conceptually and practically similar, deriving from African understandings of medicine in which substances could be imbued with spiritual power. Why, then, did the French colonists emphasize poison while the British emphasized obeah (which they glossed with the term “witchcraft”)?"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Diana Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 235
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamaica
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jamaica
14 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jamaica →
Related Quotes
"Although oath-taking at the outset of Jack’s 1824 rebellion had followed the eighteenth century pattern, which was re…"
"In addition to the Baptists, Methodist missionaries commenced a concerted effort to convert Africans in Jamaica aroun…"
"Although black preachers were common in both Methodist and Native Baptist ministries, the latter would become the cen…"
"[N]ewspaper and journal articles from the mid-nineteenth century suggest that colonial authorities suppressed the pra…"
"It is an incredibly provincial and oppressive place. There are things about it like the landscape, and some of the pe…"
"when I was growing up in Jamaica it was still a colony, and the teachers I had at Saint Andrews were, for the most pa…"
"Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make some…"
"Oliver Cromwell intended Jamaica to serve as a base for plunder, much like Providence Island a few decades before—inc…"
"A 2021 decision by the Jamaica Court of Appeal, whose grounds have recently been published, discusses the interesting…"
"If we look about us we see the lengthening shadows of a thousand small corruptions creeping across the landscape of o…"