Throughout the Americas, from Boston in New England to Montevideo in the Viceroyalty of La Plata, in every place where African women, men and children were enslaved, there emerged cultural and religious forms reflecting the particular complexities, terrors and exigencies of each situation. Finding themselves sometimes among Protestants, sometimes among Catholics; in gold mining towns in central Brazil; on sugar cane plantations in Jamaica and Cuba; in the coffee-producing hills of Venezuela; on cotton and indigo estates in the southern regions of the USA; and in homes, streets, rivers, fields and even small factories everywhere in between, Africans and their descendants, in generations of bondage, encountered and helped create the New World.

As they settled in the new places – towns and cities often built with their labor, canals dug up out of muck and swamp by the sacrifice of their lives, and whole national economies depending mightily on their unremunerated work – the enslaved people took stock of where they were and who they were now expected to be. By and large, they were expected to be property, a permanent servant class working under duress, with few, if any, legal rights, and at constant risk of losing bodily and family integrity. This expectation, violently enforced, was in unremitting tension with the Africans’ own sense of who they actually were. Historian of religions, Charles H. Long, suggests that the meaning of Black religion across the Americas, emerges from this tension and from the process of “wrestling” with the question of how to stay human in a fundamentally inhumane situation: blackness as an essentially religious task.

Long defines religion as “orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”⁵ For people of African descent in the Americas, both during slavery and in its long aftermath, religion thus becomes the means by which one remembers and cultivates an alternative understanding of one’s humanity, in the face of constant affronts and denials. Not limited to the institutional church, rather spread across the breadth of culture, family, community, and language, this meaning of religion feeds an-other experience of reality that nurtures connection to the divine and sustains a truly human identity.

a. Spirituals, Praise Houses and Ring Shouts