How Was Christianity Effective Spiritually to African Slaves When They Were Forced Into Slavery - Essay Example

How Was Christianity Effective Spiritually to African Slaves When They Were Forced Into Slavery? When Christopher Columbus claimed the lands now called North America for Spain in 1472, he also brought with him sugar cane. “Within a few years, the monstrous demand for this crop would call for the blood, bones and sweat of millions of slaves to keep it fed. In order to supply cheap labor to tend these fields, slave traders came to our African villages, stole us from our homes, put is in shackles.” (Gray, 2001) . The rest is, as it is said, history, the long story of the Afro influence in the American society we know today. The centuries of slavery being the darkest and most excruciating as they must have been too the period that drew the best abilities and most noble of traits among the race, a look into their spirituality during those periods must be a whole enlightening exercise that should provide truly relevant references for our present situations. This paper shall be specific to the Christian Spirituality of the African slaves during the Atlantic Slave Trade era between the 16th and the 19th century. The Atlantic Slave Trade and Christianity Christianity was first introduced in West Africa by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. I have no source to indicate the extent of Christian conversions in the western coasts of Africa by the 1700’s . But that side of Africa having had trade relations with Europeans already at those times, notably with the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Dutch, there must have been some extent of evangelization going on by those times. In the book From Slavery to Freedom, author John Hope Franklyn mentions resistance of the native Africans to the Christian Faith as the bearers of the teachings were associated with the institutions of the slave trade to the New World. "It was a strange religion, this Christianity," he wrote, "which taught equality and brotherhood and at the same time introduced on a large scale the practice of tearing people from their homes and transporting them to a distant land to become slaves." Compounding this local resistance is the deliberate and methodic eradication of the Africans’ identity in the slave trade. Folk religions, as were the African traditional beliefs and cultures, even their languages, were being systematically suppressed to deter organized resistance. “Slaves in the eighteenth century came from various African societies, cultures and nations, such as the Ibo, Ashanti and Yoruba on the West African Coast. Consequently, slaves from differing ethnic groups displayed little commonalities. Africans were black, but did not experience a homogenous existence they shared little of their traditional cultures and religions. Slaveholders and whites feared individual and group consciousness.” (Wikipedia, Christianity and Slavery) Ironically, upon arrival in the Americas, as the Africans were forced into slavery, so were they, this time, forced into Christianity as well. “It was the practice of ‘Divide and Rule’. Ibo, Yoruba, and Ashanti religions did not survive the Middle Passage. The Institution of slavery, and the influx of forced Christian conversions, eliminated traditional African religions in the United States. No Ibo, Ashanti, or Yoruba traditional culture and religion survived.” (Wikipedia, Christianity and Slavery). The Christian faith has become a tool in the effort to erase their African roots or any commonality the Blacks may identify themselves with. From the slaves’ perspective, this Christian faith must have been viewed only as strange, inconsistent, even conspiratorial at the onset. Christianity and the Slaves in the New World The 1700’s was also a time of heightened religious fervor in Great Britain, and so it was in their North American Colonies, the New England. Christian denominations in England, some of them with disagreements among themselves, saw it natural to evangelize the colonies altogether as well. Among these missionaries were the Quakers. “The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, was founded in England in the 17th century as a Christian religious denomination by people who were dissatisfied with the existing denominations and sects of Christianity.”(Mekeel, p 293) In her article African Americans, Barbara C. Bigelow writes on African American Religion, “In the New World, missionaries continued their efforts to convert Africans to Christianity. As far back as 1700, the Quakers sponsored monthly Friends meetings for blacks.” Particularly meeting with blacks and slaves, they must have found some level of agreeability from them in that the Quakers too have their own disagreements with other Christian denominations. On top of these is their disagreement on slavery itself. “As early as 1688, congregations of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) actively protested slavery.”(Wikipedia, Christianity and Slavery). This and the realization that Christianity is a diversely expressed faith too must have softened the blacks’ and slaves’ impression of the faith and opened them to the nobler values and the redeeming doctrines of Christianity that they eventually could not help but find solace and consolation in during the period that would be known to them as their “holocaust”. The Judeo-Christian Old and New Testaments of the Bible are most relatable to the African slaves on parallelisms of the Judeo-slaveries in the Old Testament. Redemption in Jesus the Christ in the New Testament is a doctrine of faith a suffering people can not put away. Christianization and the Black Slave: Phillis Wheatley The conversion of the previously folk-religious or the evangelization of those unknowing changed the destiny of the foreign black race who found themselves transplanted in the New World albeit against their conscious will. As the stories of destinies changing would count to as many as the millions uprooted from their birth-land Africa to the America, this paper spots the particular case of the 7-year old Senegali girl kidnapped and taken to America in 1761 on board the slave ship “Phillis”. In Boston, the girl was sold as a slave and bought by a wealthy merchant named John Wheatley. As the case of slaves being Christianized, the girl took her master family name and the ship’s name on which she sailed from Africa, her first. Thus, Phillis Wheatman she was to be known for the rest of her rather short life. One of the few fortunate ones to have been bought by kindly masters, Phillis was favored by fate to have been owned by the affluent, educated and kind family of the Wheatleys who actually both instructed and encouraged her education. “Phillis Wheatley was tutored by the Wheatley’s son, Nathaniel, in English, Latin, history, geography, religion, and the Bible. Wheatley was baptized at Old South Meeting House.”(Reuben. Paul P., PAL) . Phillis Wheatley went on to become a poet and a literati acclaimed not only in America but also in England and was ultimately freed from slavery on October 18, 1773, at the age of 20. Despite being credited as the first African-American to publish a book of imaginative writing and as having started the African-American literary tradition, Phillis died a pauper in December 1784. She was only 31. In her lifetime, Wheatley’s poetry overwhelmingly revolves around Christian themes, with many poems dedicated to famous personalities, notably Christian preachers and personalities in power and great influence including one to the King of England. While reflective of her Christian training and scholastic background, her works reveal as noticeably her awe at the power and influence of individuals, and possibly even her desire to gain favor from those she wrote poetic adulations for. Her literary skill, however, being black and being slave, overwhelms thoughts for her motives as the wonder on her spell with words dominates her readers. The poetic tribute “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield” written in 1770 received widespread acclaim as did those she wrote for other personalities of influence at that time. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” Rarely writing about her own circumstances or directly expressing personal sentiments in her poems, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is one of the very few with reference to her slave experience. In mere four sentences, Wheatley revealed a redeeming view of the slave trade that most of the then uprooted and enslaved would not have at all even as merely imagined. What to most every slave was cruelty, the act of snapping them from birth-land Africa for slavery in America, Phillis Wheatley calls “mercy”. This reveals a profundity of faith expressing gratitude for the grace of having revealed to about the salvation in Jesus the Christ, the ignorance of which she has acquired dread for. In the same breathe she has displayed the extent of her theology in her distinction between “…a God….and a Savior …”. In the next two sentences, she manages to express her thoughts on the disparagement of their race by the color of their skin and addresses the white men as “Christians”. Starting her last sentence with the somewhat imperative “Remember, …”, the poetry discloses a level of dignity acquired by the poet, a slave girl who has realized the value of her being – to others and for her Creator’s Glory. Conclusion Introduced in adverse circumstances in Africa where from they were snatched and uprooted, then forced to be adopted in America where they were sold in indignity and slavery, Christianity could have well been assumed like some scourge for the African slaves in America. The redemption that Christian faith tells of and brings to the life of the faithful, however, is an unchangeable reality not subject to political nor historical misdemeanors of the human kind. The proselytazion of the African slaves in America to Christianity has purveyed a spiritual impetuosity that transformed what could have been a bitter breed of uprooted and displaced Africans to the trend-setting, even inspiring African Americans that America is proud and fortunate to have replanted and bread on its soil. Works cited: 1. Gray, Dorothy R., “A Drum & A Dream The Suppression of African Spirituality during Slavery in the US”, 2001) 2. Wikipedia, Christianilty & Slavery, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_slavery#Slavery_in_the_Americas 3. Franklin, John Hope and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, McGraw-Hill 2000 4. Arthur J. Mekeel , Reviewed work(s): The History of Quakerism by Elbert Russell, The American Historical Review, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jan., 1943), pp. 293-294 ,  American Historical Association 5. Bigelow, Barbara C., African Americans http://www.everyculture.com/multi/A-Br/African-Americans.html 6. Reuben, Paul P., PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide - An Ongoing Project, Chapter 2: Phillis Wheatley(1753-1784), http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap2/wheatley.html Read More