The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 43
the slaves accomplish their daily labor and care for nothing else" (Medina,
1889:12,0). Ostensibly, this sorcery could not only kill and
maim people but also destroy the fruits of the earth—a claim still
heard in connection with alleged devil pacts made by plantation laborers
in the southern Cauca Valley. The pact will increase their
productivity and their wage, but renders the canefield barren. Yet, the
same laborers, working as peasants on their own or their neighbors'
plots around the plantations or as independent subsistence dwellers
in the jungles of the Pacific coast, reputedly spurn such pacts. Zaragoza,
the mining area referred to, was the scene of one of Colombia's
greatest slave revolts, which, according to observers, attempted to exterminate
the whites and destroy the mines, as well (Vazquez de Espinosa,
1948 :34i).
The spasmodic moment that bridged the lash and the cry of renunciation
of the master's God epitomizes the slaves' devil. He can become
a figure of solace and power in that war of attrition against the
African's culture and humanity itself. In their devil worship, the
slaves appropriated their enemy's enemy. Ironically, through its very
attempts at suppression, the Church indirectly validated devil worship
and invested it with power. By acknowledging fear of the slaves'
spiritual powers, the credulous Spanish inadvertently delivered a
powerful instrument to their bondsmen. The Spaniards believed that
the devil had spawned the heathen African and that the slaves were
part of his ministry. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were,
after all, the most intense years of the witch cult in Western Europe,
the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition—an epoch in which
the whole of Christendom trembled before the threat of the diabolic
and the magician's manipulation of nature.
Ambiguously but persistently, Europeans equated slave folklore
and religion, African identity, with the devil (cf., Genovese, 1974:
159-284). But for the African slave the devil was not necessarily the
vengeful spirit of evil. He was also a figure of mirth and a powerful
trickster. As Melville J. Herskovits pointed out, West Africans understood
the European devil as their divine trickster, and their moral philosophy
resisted the sharp dichotomy of good and evil espoused by
the missionaries (195 8:2 5 3). Today, along the virtually isolated rivers
of the Colombian Pacific coast, where blacks were largely left to fend
for themselves after emancipation, they have, not one, but several
devils, who tempt rather than threaten. The idea of hell among the
blacks of the Raposo River only vaguely corresponds to the Christian
idea; some people place it in the sky (Pavy, 1967:2,34). Finding their
spirits defined as devils or one in particular defined as the devil, the