60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

234 Flight to Freedom
Mandinga-Amapa Maroons, who also made a treaty with the Spanish government
in Mexico, dedicated the town and the new church to the Dark
Virgin of Guadalupe, in honour of the victory of Fernando Manuel over his
fellow Maroons who had opposed the treaty (Carroll 1977, 498–99; Pereira
1994, 102–3).
Louis, referred to above, testified to the colonial authorities in French
Guiana about his community’s deep commitment to Catholicism, or the
Maroon version of it. He (1979, 313–14) declared that Couacou baptized the
people with holy water and recited prayers daily, and that prayers were recited
every morning and evening in the Maroon captain’s compound as they were
on well-managed plantations; those who were ill recited prayers in their
homes. The Maroons were able to determine what feast or holy day was
being celebrated in the town of Cayenne by the cannon shots that they could
hear from afar. During the feast of Corpus Christi, at the first cannon shot
indicating that the Holy Sacrament had been conveyed outside of the church,
they fell on their knees and formed a procession around their houses, singing
hymns, the women bearing crosses. In 1848 the Todos Tenemos palenque in
Cuba had a church in the centre, inside of which there was an altar and a
wooden figure representing Jesus Christ (La Rosa Corzo 2003, 181). Much
earlier, in Mexico in 1523, the first Black insurgents in the colony erected
crosses to celebrate their freedom and to declare that they were Christians
(Davidson 1979, 89).
The existence of Afro-Christian religions in a number of present-day
new-world societies might readily be explained in terms of syncretism in the
post-slavery period. But how do we explain it during the slavery period, especially
among Maroons One view is that several enslaved persons, particularly
in the Catholic countries, had received some degree of religious
conversion or acculturation before fleeing from their overlords, as the testimony
of Louis indicates. But there was also a growing number of enslaved
persons who were taught Protestant Christianity in the British, Dutch and
Danish colonies, especially in the nineteenth century. This was so even in
the Deep South of the United States, where the slavery system remained
entrenched until the 1860s. Religious conversion was more widespread
among Creole than African-born enslaved persons. Another idea is that
Africans, whose religious world view was polytheistic, readily incorporated
previously unknown gods into their pantheons, and assimilated Christ and
the saints to their own corpus of deities. McFarlane (1986, 144) suggests that