Saint Lucians living in Lalaland got a rude awakening Tuesday night, that sent shivers up spines and set many hearts a-throbbing, thanks to unexpected revelations of an aspect of living Caribbean life that ensnarled the entire nation into forcible accepting the existence and presence of something forever denied: occultism.
Call it what the English call ‘Black Magic’, ‘Obeah’, ‘Voodoo’, ‘Witchcraft’ or ‘Sorcery’, or what the French Creoles call ‘Gens Gajay’, ‘Maji Noir’, ‘Bolom’ ‘Soocooyant’ or ‘La Diablesse’, they all describe unseen and unknown sciences of mysterious African spiritual origin — and all Caribbean people know someone who believes in and engages with either or all.
Caribbean territories where kidnapped and enslaved Africans landed with their religious beliefs and practices all have evidence of inheritance of these religious beliefs and customs — and like with all practices of their kind, practitioners will use or abuse their knowledge ‘For Good’ or ‘For Bad’.
Same with today’s Caribbean descendants of Indian immigrant labourers, who’ve also kept alive similar belief practices that skirt, circle and reflect their beliefs in spiritual powers generated by ancient arts and sciences of mysterious origin.
Take Obeah and Voodoo, both of which are of African origins.
Western definitions (like from my precious 16th Edition of Brewers Dictionary of Phrase & Fable revised by Adrian Room) include words like ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’, before also indicating that Obeah is: ‘A native word that signifies something put into the ground to bring about sickness, death or other diseases.’
And it describes Voodoo or Voodooism as: ‘A mixture of superstition, magic, witchcraft, serpent worship and the like, derived from African rites and some Christian beliefs’ and ‘survives among some Negro groups in Haiti and other parts of the West Indies and the Americas.’
Brewers continues: ‘The name (Voodoo) is said to have been first given to it by missionaries, from French Vaudous, a Waldensian, as these were accused of sorcery, but Sir Richard Burton derived it from Vodum, a dialect form of Ashanti obosum, a fetish or tutelary spirit.’
But while European interpretations differ, all agree that Voodoo and Obeah both originated in Africa — and also include ‘some Christian beliefs.’
All this came into almost invisible focus in Saint Lucia this week, following the airing of an online recording that sparked lively and sustained debate.
Described invariably as ‘a full confession’ by a spiritually-obsessed lady, the lengthy and detailed, almost breathes account evoked discussion on everything from ‘exorcism’ to ‘deaths by spiritual invocation and execution’ and associations with ‘evil spirits within’.
It’s the stuff movies are made of: A known woman confessing her alleged responsibility for deaths of many named persons in a rural community known for its resilient retention of African religious and spiritual beliefs.
The Babonneau region is home to the ‘Kele’ religion, originating in Nigeria and kept alive on the island for over a century by the ‘Neg Guinea’ (literally ‘Blacks from Guinea’).
The Yoruba speakers among the Africans who landed in Saint Lucia after Emancipation (1838) also practiced ‘Akeshew’ — an indigenous version of a Yoruba religion, with gods like ‘Ogun’, ‘Shango’ and ‘Esu’, all connected to the Ogun Festival in Nigeria.
The word Kele comes from the word ‘ikele’, referring to white beads worn by Yoruba and Shagno devotees and the religion was introduced around 1867, to strong opposition from the Christian and French Creole minorities dominating the society.
The Christian majority berated their beliefs as being un-Godly and virtually painted them as devils living in black skins.
But the Kele held on to their religion and moved inland, away from the European-dominated coasts, building small and independent communities around the La Saucier (The Sorcerer) mountain region, their superiors versed in spirits of nature, magic and African ‘bush medicine’.
The Kele turned their imposed bad reputation on its head and preyed on the fears the Europeans had instilled in the minds of the island’s Christians, by building that feared reputation as ‘Obeah Men’ operating at the base of La Soucier, a mountain named after a mythical sorcerer.
They used the fear among the Christians to protect themselves and their villages from outside interference by the hostile Europeans and French Creoles.
In the 1950s, Kele was forced underground in Saint Lucia by the Roman Catholic Church, but they weren’t the first to strategically withdraw to the deep interior to live their cultures and practice their religions.
The first were the so-called Caribs (called ‘Mabouya’), followed by the Maroons (‘Neg Mawon’ or ‘Runaway Slaves’) towards the end of the 18th century, by the Europeans and Christians.
Third were the Guinean (‘Neg Jinay’) extracted from Africa after Emancipation.
Kele is a combination of Shango and Ogun, but unlike the other African religions, there’s no Christian influence in its ceremonies.
There were three groups of ‘Neg Jinay’, but the Assaus were the first, led by two brothers, Joseph and Dulaire, who were among the first landed here.
The Assaus bought 50 acres of land and divided them into Morne Assau and Fond Assau, reflecting their respective hilly and valleyed topographical features, both still existing by the same names in Babonneau today.
The fourth and most-recent Caribbean religion to face urban and Christian rejection and forced to tactically withdraw to the interior were the Rastafarians, who professed a Black God in Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie in the 1960s, as ‘the only living Son of God.
Saint Lucia’s earliest Rastafarians took to the hills in the 1980s, only to be followed and punished — by law, with police guns and through parliamentary criminalization of the use of marijuana as a healing sacrament — to suppress their general beliefs about reconnecting with God and Nature.
The pursued ‘Rastas’ were captured by a specially-created and US-armed Special Service Unit (SSU) police squad in 1984, their experiences including several deaths by police bullets, judicially deemed ‘Death by Misadventure’ by courts of law, leaving repeat culprits free to continue repeating their officially-cleared offenses.
Naturally, public attention has focused on the unbelievable accounts from the mouth of someone who claims to have taken lives and having ‘changed brains’, her actions controlled by demons also confronting sacred Christian spirits within and without.
Most are more interested in whether the woman was engaging in some sort of voluntary self-exorcism, why she went to a mortal being to save her from immortal spirits confronting the excruciating pain of being shredded by those impatiently awaiting her in Hell.
But there’s much more to this than appears on the surface, airwaves or the internet.
For starters, this recording is of an individual who obviously might not have been aware she was being recorded, as she named names known to the entire community, claimed responsibility for the deaths of known persons she also named, identified others involved in the related activities she claims to have seen and been part of, even naming a popular priest and a popular broadcaster — all-along claiming she didn’t want to name more names and confess more mortal sins, lest she add on and lengthen her penalties for crimes of commission.
She simply wanted to be made to ‘go’, to expire immediately and peacefully.
But the blessed Christian saviour she turned to didn’t (or wasn’t able to) send her along a peaceful path in the proverbial (Biblical) Valley of the Shadow of Death, where she would Fear No Evil.
The experience also again highlights the lax application of laws and regulations to (even belatedly) ensure more responsible use of the internet, as this explosive audio tape — still online — has already started to have potentially disastrous and deadly consequences for some of the people and families named.
Should anyone affected wish to legally pull the tape down (even too-late), those who recorded and uploaded it will have to be identified and approached – by the law.
As per usual, while the nation continues to marvel at and revel in the immediacy of this latest bit of local online sauciness, not many are paying attention to the fact that not everything should be carelessly posted on the internet — just for fun, or because it’s seen as nothing wrong, far-less possibly violating others’ fundamental rights, including privacy and reputation.
(Real) photographs of known Caribbean personalities are being freely posted legally online today, alongside accounts of claims and allegations that sound interesting, but are all devoid of evidential substance, viewers only interested in allegations.
But those clearly posting information that could only have come from the communities themselves, including sometimes incriminating photographs, obviously care more about ‘likes’ than lives.
There have been a few cases almost everywhere where the law has emphasized that the internet isn’t or shouldn’t be a free-speeding highway where anything goes with no limits.
Today, however, the prevailing view is still one where most people with IT devices feel they have sacred and unrestricted — even protected — rights, to post anything online anytime and without care or fear.
But the world is also learning this shouldn’t be, as IT and AI are also being used to elevate and further complicate crime and violence and more vice than virtue universally, in ways that have forced governments in nations big and small to begin enforcing regulations governing use and abuse of access and discouraging use of the internet more as a weapon than a tool.
In Brazil, this week, the Supreme Court intervened to impose such regulations to govern the use of the internet and to protect hundreds of millions from being innocent victims of criminal and other enterprises that use the internet for far-more devious reasons, ever-uploading and forwarding information calculated to mislead or influence negative responses that can threaten societal stability.
It’s the same with the uploading of this brutally and horrifically-frank and revealing — yet nonetheless admittedly interesting – ball-by-ball terror-tale of the endless ramblings of a deranged and entangled mind pursuing an impossible quest of finding internal peace and spiritual salvation for a soul torn from within and without.
This latest Saint Lucia episode is understandably being milked for its virtual and viral sauciness.
But any closer, in-depth and realistic look behind and between the lives will reveal the other aspects that have to do with the revealed depth and width, strength and perseverance of the outlawed African religions that still remain taboo today, even as Caribbean governments seek Reparations from Europe for Slavery and Native Genocide – and to erase the Mental Slavery that still has the majority of Saint Lucians and Caribbean people’s minds fully-loaded against Voodoo, which still remains outlawed by the laws inherited and maintained from colonialism.
In Cuba, folklore has it that the local African-based ‘Santeria’ phenomenon was kept underground until a white dove landed on one of Fidel Castro’s shoulders while addressing the nation and announcing the triumph of the 1959 revolution.
Santeria’s faithful are largely among the Cubans of African origin and its ban was lifted under Fidel’s watch, now practiced freely — and with equal respect as all other religions practiced on the island.
Jamaica was one of the first Caribbean nations to signal its intent to lift the colonial ban on Voodoo, but, like everywhere else, there’s strong backlash from the Christian-dominated societies in a region with nations with populations — like Saint Lucia, where, up to the 1980s, 90% of Christians were Roman Catholic.
Voodoo is now respected globally as a major secret religious practice utilizing various Africa-based sciences of spirituality — many of which can be viewed online today, reflecting images previously considered impossible, based on various mixes of cultural and religious expressions and beliefs – and long before AI or Chat GPT enhanced communication of images.
It’s indeed the national religion in Benin, tracing back to the empires Africa built before Slavery, with their own religious beliefs.
Same in Haiti, considered the Western hemisphere’s headquarters of Voodoo, where the belief is even deeper than evident in Saint Lucia.
The usual suspects will always ask silly questions like ‘If Voodoo is so-powerful, why hasn’t it been used to change Haiti and the world for better…’ – such Doubting Thomases preferring to yield their human brains to robots, than to cleansing their spirits from the added effects of accumulated eons of Mental Slavery.
Such aberrations will always exist, but such experiences should instead be used to trace their specific historical origins, which are always worth seeking, finding and sharing, in this world where almost everything we want to learn or know about is at our fingertips — whether through dictionaries, or online search engines.