Slave culture

The institution of slavery usually tried to deny its victims their native cultural identity. Torn out of their own cultural milieus, they were expected to abandon their heritage and to adopt at least part of their enslavers’ culture. Nonetheless, studies have shown that there were aspects of slave culture that differed from the master culture. Some of these have been interpreted as a form of resistance to oppression, while other aspects were clearly survivals of a native culture in the new society. Most of what is known about this topic comes from the circum-Caribbean world, but analogous developments may have occurred wherever alien slaves were concentrated in numbers sufficient to prevent their complete absorption by the host slave-owning or slave society. Thus slave culture was probably very different on large plantations from what it was on small farms or in urban households, where slave culture (and especially Creole slave culture) could hardly have avoided being very similar to the master culture. Slave cultures grew up within the perimeters of the masters’ monopoly of power but separate from the masters’ institutions.

Religion, which performed the multiple function of explanation, prediction, control, and communion, seems to have been a particularly fruitful area for the creation of slave culture. Africans perceived all misfortunes, including enslavement, as the result of sorcery, and their religious practices and beliefs, which were often millennial, were formulated as a way of coping with it. Myalism was the first religious movement to appeal to all ethnic groups in Jamaica, Vodou in Haiti was the product of African culture slightly refashioned on that island, and syncretic Afro-Christian religions and rituals appeared nearly everywhere throughout the New World. Slave religions usually had a supreme being and a host of lesser spirits brought from Africa, borrowed from the Amerindians, and created in response to local conditions. There were no firm boundaries between the secular and the sacred, which infused all things and activities. At least initially African slaves universally believed that posthumously they would return to their lands and rejoin their friends.

Black slaves preserved some of their culture in the New World. African medicine was practiced in America by slaves. The poisoning of masters and other hated individuals was a particularly African method of coping with evil. Throughout the circum-Caribbean world slaves and free Blacks had electoral procedures, adapted from West African customs, to choose governors, sheriffs, and judges to maintain order among themselves. Objects of material culture, such as rugs, mats, baskets, thatched roofs, and walking canes, were modeled on African examples. Nevertheless, relatively few African social practices or plastic arts survived in the New World. On the other hand, Afro-American music and dance are known to have many African roots, and they differed dramatically from the practices of the European master culture; the use of drum and banjo were especially significant. Songs and spirituals borrowed their strong call-and-response patterns from the West African style. Furthermore, slaves created tales to amuse themselves, and the African element is most evident in animal tales; the tar-baby story is among the best known of the genre. Afro-American stories and songs often featured the devil, who was a demon and a trickster, terrifying, a friend in need, and a source of mirth.

Slave culture also developed beliefs and customs that were at odds with those of the master culture. One such belief was that what the masters called theft was something else; thus stealing from the master was not theft at all but merely a process of channeling his property from one use to another, as in taking his corn and feeding it to his pigs. Polygamous domestic arrangements were a further aspect of slave culture brought from Africa. Yet another aspect of slave culture, especially prevalent in the Caribbean, involved the market. Slaves there were often required to provide their own food, which they raised on provision grounds. If they had any surplus, they were permitted by their owners to sell it in the market. As a result, slaves developed an autonomy and an individualism that contrasted starkly with the rigid control of the work gang system and the putative stifling control of slave law.