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

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 45
Christianized slaves as more rebellious and as poorer workers than
those not indoctrinated and would pay less for them (Sandoval,
1956:198; cf., Bowser, 1974:79; King, 1939:16-17). Whites were not
only disinclined to buy Christianized slaves but tried to prevent their
conversion, at times telling them that baptism was bad. According to
Jose Toribio Medina, slave owners, reluctant to pay the costs of
lengthy inquiries and penalties, encouraged their slaves to disappear
if they were on the Inquisition's wanted list (1889). As a result, an underground
African or quasi-African religion seems to have flourished,
at least during the early years, syncretized with ardent faith in the
miracle powers of Christ and the saints—powerful spirits who could
be appealed to for earthly succor.
In 1771 the Bishop of Popayan, capital of the Cauca region of southwest
Colombia, complained bitterly that his attempts to catechize
the slaves and prevent their being worked on Sundays and feast
days encountered the firm opposition of the slave owners. He believed
that clerical mine speculators were identifying too closely
with the exploiters of their slave flocks (King, 1939:217). The right of
the slaves to rest on feast days, of which there was at least one a week
in addition to Sundays, was hotly disputed by the Cauca mine owners
during the eighteenth century. Yet, in a study of the health of slaves in
New Granada, David Lee Chandler concludes that for many slaves
the Church's insistence on rest days "must have . . . prolonged their
lives" (1972:238). On these days they could also earn the wherewithal
to buy their freedom, but many Cauca slave owners responded
by reducing the food and clothing ration of the slaves. In these circumstances
the feast days may have inclined the slaves favorably toward
the Church and added a religious rationale to their opposition to
their masters.
Priests were in short supply, and few gave much attention to Christianizing
slaves. "As a result," writes Norman Meiklejohn, "many of
Colombia's Negroes were blithely ignorant of Christianity's true
meaning and of its moral precepts" (1968:287,- cf., Pons, 1806, i: 160).
Yet surely this "ignorance" cannot be explained only by the shortage
of priests. Black popular religion could hardly endorse slavery and all
it implied, nor could the slaves remain content with equality in God's
eyes but not in their own. But only with the breakdown of the colonial
hegemony and the power of the Church could a radical interpretation
of Christianity surface fully, as it did in the chiliastic doctrine
espoused by the radical liberals from the 18403 onward.
In the opinion of Ramon Mercado, native of Cali and Liberal party
governor of the Cauca region between 1850 and 1852, it was pre-