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

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 65
circulated in Cali in 1847, which cited Paul's famous epistle to the
Ephesians (Jaramillo Uribe, 1968:264).
The blacks feared reenslavement, and the Catholicism of the
Church was the religion of reenslavement. Yet they had their own
religious tradition, too: of folk belief, rural rites, and magic. As it
had in the palenques of early colonial times, their leadership included
sorcerers, such as Jose Cenecio Mina, their guerrilla commander
during the War of One Thousand Days (1899-1902) who
later so ably led the blacks' resistance to the Arboledas' usurpation
of their lands. The peasants thought that he could transform himself
into an animal or plant when pursued and that he was impervious to
bullets. In doting on his memory they exult in the power of their
folk heroes, as well as in their cultural autonomy from the larger society,
the upper class, and the state.
The blacks of Colombia did not develop clearly defined syncretistic
cults like voodoo, santeria, or candomble. Yet Thomas Price,
who studied black folk religion in Colombia in the early 19505,
wrote: "There developed an integrated complex of Spanish Catholics
and African usage, believed by the people themselves to be completely
Catholic and therefore particularly immune to the efforts of
priests who desire to banish the 'pagan' elements. This complex is a
fundamental, functional aspect of their total way of life, and the adjustment
they have made to their spiritual and practical needs is
an adjustment unshakable by Catholic and Protestant missionaries
alike" (1955:7).
This "little tradition" of the black peasantry related to the "great
tradition" of the city and literati primarily through the doctrine of
radical Catholicism assiduously expounded by radical Liberals like
Ramon Mercado, one-time governor of the province.
For Mercado, the ideological currents of the European Enlightenment
and the social changes effected by the Latin American Wars of
Independence formed an explosive threat to the old institutions,
which lingered on nowhere more tenaciously than in Cauca. Like
Sergio Arboleda, he saw the root of social turmoil in a moral crisis.
But for him this crisis resulted from the comprehension of the lower
classes that the evolving essence of man was being negated. In the
new social conditions, the toilers would no longer suffer their exploitation
for the sake of the aristocracy, the army, or the clergy. In
essence, he argued that Christianity had both a revolutionary and a
reactionary potential. The revolutionary—and true—Christianity
had originated before the Middle Ages as the religion of equality and
fraternity. The reactionary form of the doctrine derived from the
Middle Ages and feudalism, in which the Church had allied itself