interning the serpent: witchcraft, religion and the law on...

History and Anthropology,Vol. 16, No. 2, June 2005, pp. 00–00

ISSN 0275–7206 print/ISSN 1477–2612 online/05/020000–23 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group LtdDOI: 10.1080/02757200500116139

Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft, Religion and the Law on Montserrat in the 20th Century

Jonathan Skinner

Taylor and Francis LtdGHAN111596.sgm10.1080/02757200500116139History and Anthropology0275-7206 (print)/1477-2612 (online)Original Article2005Taylor & Francis Ltd162000000June 2005JonathanSkinnerSchool of Anthropological StudiesThe Queen’s University BelfastBelfastBT7 1NNUK02890 [email protected]

This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft(the worship of the serpent/obeah) on the British colony of Montserrat in the easternCaribbean. It looks at obeah in the 20th century as practised by colonial British subjects andprohibited by British law imposed by British expatriates. Colonial governance is examinedfirst through correspondence at the start of the 20th century, and then through newspaperarchives and fieldwork reports and experiences throughout the century. The continued useof anti-obeah laws by the British is shown to be an irrational but effective colonial technol-ogy of control.

Keywords: Obeah; Witchcraft; Colonial Governance; Montserrat

Laura Nader’s (1969/1999: 289) call to “study up”, to investigate “the colonisers ratherthan the colonised, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless” andto thereby influence the governing bureaucracies, was a rallying cry to anthropologiststhat came at the end of the 1960s. It was a call to politically-correct arms that resultedin a swathe of colonial criticism which cut through the 1970s before turning into adialogics of colonialism – to notions of the co-creation of European metropole andcolony – and the colonial consciousness, in the 1980s. This rethinking and revisionist“games-playing”, to invoke Leach (1982: v), subsequently morphed into a phase ofcolonial and postcolonial textual studies in the 1990s (Stoler, 2000; cf. Asad, 1973; Said,1978/1991; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983/1992; Comaroff, 1985, 1992; Taussig, 1987;Ashcroft Tiffin, 1989; Williams & Chrisman, 1993). What Nader failed to observe wasthat British colonial anthropology already had its historical roots in investigating,

Correspondence to: School of Anthropological Studies, The Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK.Email: [email protected]

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contesting and critiquing colonial practices (Kuper, 1991). For example, delving intothe official correspondence written by research directors of the Rhodes LivingstoneInstitute in Zambia (formerly British Rhodesia), Schumaker draws our attention toMax Gluckman’s correspondence to the British Chief Secretary of Northern Rhodesia.This extract shows that Gluckman’s view of Zulu research very firmly includedAfricans, anthropologists and administrators:

It is not pleasant to be made an object of study, and I can only urge District Officers toappreciate that when they say they are more interested in, and do more for, the welfare ofthe people than the chiefs they must allow themselves to be studied in their role as a mostimportant part of the modern political administration. (Schumaker, 2000: 341)

In exploring the shared spaces and practices of anthropologists and administrators –the touring and surveying, the language, the clothes and the expressions (“bushed” isthe bureaucratic version of “to go native”) – Schumaker points out Gluckman’s inclu-sion of the colonial administrator in his field as the critical difference between anthro-pologist and administrator in Africa. This small but significant inclusion demonstratesthe long-term existence of what Stoler (2000: 321) refers to as the growth of an “anthro-pology of colonialism”, a sub-discipline which, for her, is premised on the idea that“[c]olonial cultures were never direct translations of European society planted in thecolonies, but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which Europeanfood, dress, housing, and morality were given new political meanings in the particularsocial order of colonial rule.” It distinguishes the anthropological perspective from theadministrative perspective.

As an anthropologist working on one of the remaining British colonies in the 1990s(Skinner 1997, 2004), my time on the island of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbeanwas spent characteristically engaging with Montserratians singing calypsos andorganising social protests, but it was also spent socialising with the expatriate elite ofdevelopment workers and administrators, as well as the local poets who were writingfor Montserrat’s independence. My participant observation necessitated shifts betweensocial and racial groups, led to my guided tours of the National Museum, my sortingof calypso archives in the local radio station, and my “liming” on the streets ofMontserrat, hanging out and watching social life. In my work I became a “racial zebra”(Skinner, 2004: 33) moving between racial groups, Bruner’s (1993: 7) “Arab Jew”ethnographer, and in my subject matter, my work reflected the evolution of colonialand postcolonial academic interests over the last 30 years.

During my research visit to Montserrat, 1994–1995, I found an island still dividedalong colonial racial lines. The twin colonial concerns of land and labour continued todetermine the social and settlement patterns of the 10,000 “Mons’ratian” African slavedescendants and 300 “snowbird” European and North American residential tourists,expatriate managers and Foreign and Commonwealth appointees. Typical of the blackconsciousness movement which diffused down to the West Indies from the northAmerican civil and human rights concerns of the 1970s, many of the islanders reflecteda burgeoning pan-Africanism, a postcolonial identity in formation: Christian nameswere being “Africanised”, traditional African clothes were becoming the preferred

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evening wear after a day in the office in a suit, and the island’s educational establish-ment taught “national” history to the “brothers” and “sisters” as part of a policy ofconsciousness-raising.

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To give a more detailed example, while the majority of theislanders are devout Methodists, Catholics and Pentecostalists, in June 1991, theisland’s sports officials held a Jumbie Dance to appease the ancestral spirits and breaka losing streak “hex” which they had endured for several years. This spectacle cleft a riftdown Montserratian society, revealing and reviving native practices for the tourists andthe members of Montserrat’s new generations, but deeply offending many Christianson the island who preferred a night of prayer and condemned the return to suchAfrican savagery (Anon, 1991). It echoes the recent contentious decision of theRalaushai Commission in South Africa to revise and reinvigorate beliefs in witchcraftas a marker of primordial African identity (Niehaus, 2001), and it is reminiscent ofDessalines’s historical change to the Haitain constitution in 1805 to permit “the free-dom of cults” (Dayan, 1995: 85) as a marker of independence after years of Spanish andFrench Catholic rule.

Imbued by what Pietz (2000) refers to as the colonial “fetish of civilisation” – a thesisderived from his exploration of turn-of-the-19th-century British colonial adventuresin Benin, West Africa, the colonial association of African fetishism with sacrifice andslavery, the polar opposites of the “fetish” of colonial civilisation – and emboldened bythe convictions of their religion, Montserrat’s British subjects betray the ambivalentidentity that “sly civility” (Bhabha, 1994) affords them. Politically and psycho-dynam-ically, Montserrat is a British island where Britain is the maternal guiding force, to berevered and detested, to be courted and to be resisted – though many politicians sinceadult suffrage in the 1950s have criticised the British colonial governance of

their

island,none have stood for independence in local elections. Pietz (2000) goes on to point outthat the idea of African fetishism was constructed by colonial law, and that traditionalinstitutions and practices were tolerated by British sovereignty and commercial enter-prises, so long as they were not a threat to production or civil order and “civil” society.In other words, fetishism was criminalised in colonial territories such as Ghana andNigeria because, as a practice, it could not be reconciled with the white man’s civilising–

née

colonial – mission. These legal processes and procedures are, surprisingly, stillenforced on some colonial territories, one of which is Montserrat where the colonial –Christian/civilising – approach has been part-instilled in the population.

Pietz concludes his ethnohistorical investigations by discussing the imposition ofBritish law in British colonial Africa: fetishism was distinguished from witchcraft, theformer a “customary procedure for ordering civil society” to be adjudicated tradition-ally, the latter a criminal offence for the colonial court. Significantly, since the 1736repeal of the Witchcraft Act in Britain (fully repealed in all respects in 1951), thecriminal in the case was generally the witchcraft accuser rather than the accused. AsPietz explains:

In British law, the injury done by witchcraft derived from the accusation, not the practice,and was comparable to the injury done by acts of slander; the criminal aspect of such accu-sations, that is, the infraction falling under the police power of the state, was the threat ofcivil disturbance that might be caused by witchcraft accusations. Pietz (2000: 77)


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Pietz’s interpretation of the law is substantiated by the work of many anthropologistsof anthropology’s colonial era who have shown witchcraft accusations in many Africanterritories to be akin to a sentence of death for the reviled witch (Evans-Pritchard, 1937;Marwick, 1964; Gluckman, 1966; see also Niehaus, 2001). Witchcraft was secret,hidden and unknown, and frequently you did not know if you or your neighbour werewitches. These legal and socio-cultural distinctions are not echoed in the West Indies.As De Alva (1995) and others have successfully argued, colonialism varies across timeand space: 16th-century Latin America, 18th-century Caribbean, 19th-century Indiaand 20th-century Africa are distinctly dissimilar from each other; it is also possible todistinguish Old Empire from New Empire in terms of the shifts in consumptionpatterns in about the 1760s from colonial products (sugar, spices, slaves) to industrialservicing which facilitated the growth of a local free class.

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Moreover, anthropologistsof colonialism Pels and Salemink situate their edited volume

Colonial Subjects

, a collec-tion on the colonial management of cultural difference, with the following perceptiveand pertinent statement:

Legal, economic, and police relationships developed at different moments in a colony’shistory, shaped by the different subaltern agencies in the field to which they apply, by thehistorical context of the colonizer’s initiative, and by the way in which the establishmentof one sector of a colony’s administration precedes the establishment of another. (Pels &Salemink, 2000: 27)

Plantation economy societies in the West Indies such as those of Montserrat, Antigua,Guadeloupe, St Kitts, Nevis and Haiti thrived upon the spells, charms, potions, hexesand curses developed by witch doctors. There, among the imported slaves, were theimported witch doctors who had their uses amongst the slave workers. The

obeah

(serpent worship) that they practised was open and public; they were feared but alsorevered by slave, planter and administrator alike.

Colonial Resistance Archived

Sir,

I have the honour to make the following report upon the

Obeah

cases which I have tried inMontserrat since the beginning of 1900, thinking it may be useful to those who have to aidin its suppression in the Leeward Islands.

Sent from the Commissioner’s Office,

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Montserrat, to the Honourable The ColonialSecretary on 1 February 1905, Commissioner F. H. Watkins’s letter gives a report intonot just the cases of witchcraft which came to trial on the island over the first five yearsof his rule, but also documents the workings of colonial governance and the machina-tions of the colonial mind (see Figure 1). The letter is held in a colonial file in theAntigua and Barbuda National Museum, four typed pages with an Appendix list ofcases and sentences, as well as a series of five photo-fit sheets of sentenced

obeah

prac-titioners on other islands (see Figure 3).

Figure 1

First Page of Letter from Commissioner Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)

In the letter, a carefully archived colonial report, each paragraph is a numericalpoint – there are 13 in total – the first of which covers working colonial and legal

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Figure 1 First Page of Letter from Commissioner Watkins to the Honourable TheColonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)


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understandings and definitions of obeah. Point two notes that there have been 20 casesduring Watkins’s rule, implicating the 41 people listed in the “accompanying return”on page five. Point three details the legal working understanding of obeah. The letterthen goes on to divide and detail the different types of obeah in points four to ten. Theremaining points (11–13) relate to recommendations for policing. Point three reads asfollows:

3. Obeah, or the worship of the serpent, is prevalent in all the West Indian Islands, and hasbeen handed down from generations of slaves deported from Africa. The expression“Obeah” as defined by the Obeah Act of the Leeward Islands means “Obeah as ordinarilyunderstood and practised, and includes witchcraft and making or pretending to work byspells or by professed occult or supernatural power”. Though perfectly well understood byevery inhabitant, obeah is difficult to define, and it is therefore best to leave it as “Obeah”as ordinarily understood and practised. (Watkins 1905: 1, original emphasis)

From these legal, if obtuse, definitions, the letter goes on to divide obeah into threekinds: Maleficent, Benevolent, and Precautionary (point four). Points five, six andseven are examples of Maleficent Obeah, “by far the worst kind … using as it doesvegatable [

sic

] and other poisons and trading on the worst passions of revenge”(Watkins, 1905: 1). Point five continues with comments about the threatening ofwitnesses and the use of poison on shards of broken bottles and plates. Watkins alsonotes the African knowledge of poisons which has been imperfectly passed down to thepresent generation. Point six develops the Maleficent Obeah description by detailingthe practice of desecrating corpses and graveyards:

It is the practice for each person consulting the “Doctor man” to bring a separate skull. Inone case before me two skulls, a tibia, an ulna and other human bones were produced inevidence. A year after, the same obeah man was arrested, and a third skull, decorated witha band of silver in front with a cross marked in chalk, was discovered in his possession.Human skulls, when scraped, are supposed to be a deadly poison, which is generallyadministered in rum or other spirituous liquors. (Watkins, 1905: 2)

Watkins concludes that Maleficent Obeah is thus the worst form of obeah, one which,according to point seven, can even involve the sacrifice of fowls or goats, andsometimes the sacrifice of larger animals, babies, children and adults. Examples of this“atrocious” “voodooism” come from a spate of killings in British St Lucia, as well asother “disappearances”: “Certain mysterious disappearances of children and adults inthese islands may, with a certain amount of truth, be traceable to the results of obeah”(Watkins, 1905: 3).

Benevolent Obeah contrasts with Maleficent Obeah in that it is about healing, curingand laying to rest the spirits of deceased persons. Often the practice of this form ofobeah “arises from a desire of parents and others to heal their relations of diseases forthe most time pronounced incurable by the local Medical Officers”. In point eight,Watkins goes on to recount one such healing case:

In one case, the principal “doctor man” was found rubbing a woman with cassava root whowas suffering from cancer, while an assistant danced round having in each hand a platecontaining bones and parched corn mixed with earth, and the rest of those present sanglullabies and incantations. (Watkins, 1905: 3)

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Perhaps it is of note, here, that Watkins refers to the obeah “doctor man” in invertedcommas, presumably distinguishing the witch doctor from the real doctor. This examplemoves on to “a more innocent kind”, namely, to “lay the spirits of deceased persons”.In point nine, Watkins (1905: 3) explains this activity as follows: “Widows, when anxiousto enter into fresh matrimonial or other complications, are anxious to lay the spirit oftheir departed spouses so as not to be troubled by their apparitions.” Finally, in the tenthpoint, Watkins concludes his description of the three forms of obeah by consideringPrecautionary Obeah. Watkins (1905: 3) chides the followers of obeah for their igno-rance in this point when he writes: “Precautionary obeah is used by those who shouldknow better to keep off marauders from their crops.” He continues: “Miniature coffinsand bottles containing lizards and other objects of obeah are placed on trees with the ideaof frightening away the superstitious, and it often succeeds in gaining the desired end.”

Watkins’s final point about the practice of obeah betrays the colonial desire toeradicate the practice, and points to the reasons for its slow decline.

11. Although the spread of civilizing influences is beginning to make the more respectableand sensible of the labouring class regard obeah with ridicule, there is still considerabledifficulty in obtaining direct evidence in open Court with regard to obeah cases. Very manyof the witnesses will deny in court what they have stated to the police. (Watkins, 1905: 3)

From here Watkins goes on to comment upon the court cases he has heard asCommissioner on Montserrat. He has heard 20 cases which involved some 41 people.As Watkins (1905: 4) states: “[T]he police are questioned by Counsel and defendantshow they know that such and such an object is an instrument of obeah.” Watkinsdeems it useful, then, “to summarise the objects produced in evidence” in his cases (seeFigure 2).

Figure 2

Extract from p. 4 of Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)

These consist of the following: packs of cards (5); small oval looking glasses (8); tuftsof hair in small cloth parcels (4); coins, chains and rosaries (9); bottles containing asso-foetida, rum and quicksilver, garlic, turpentine, castor oil or some other nauseous liquid(15); powder of bones (4); human remains, skulls, etc. (9); food – Jumby suppers (3);churchyard earth (5); dead rat (1); goat’s hoof (1); piece of chalk (4); and small coffin– hung over obeah man’s house (1). The report then ends with reference to this beingan interim report, with a full report to follow into the working of the Obeah Act of 1904in August, “in accordance with the Secretary of State’s directions” (Watkins, 1905: 4).

I have,&c.

( sd ) F.H.Watkins.

Commissioner.

Containing the Serpent in the Indies

The litigious, lying native became a central object of nineteenth-century colonial, legalregulation. Each winter an Indian magistrate was dispatched to the Caribbean to adjudi-cate over the incalculable indentured Indian coolies. That the process of colonial interven-tion, its institutionalization and normalization, may itself be an

Enstellung

, a

displacement

,is the symbolic reality that must be disavowed. It is this ambivalence that ensues within


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paranoia as a play between eternal vigilance and blindness, and estranges the image ofauthority in its strategy of justification. (Bhabha, 1994: 100, original emphasis)

Though concentrating upon witchcraft accusations contained in the editings of MaryDouglas (1970), Stewart and Strathern (2004) rightly describe the accounts and rulingsconcerning witchcraft and sorcery in Africa and India as a colonial discourse onmodernity. And yet, because of their colonial treatments, they are at the same time alsoa postmodern undermining of modernity’s civilising grand narrative. British colonialpunishments and imprisonment in India (cf. Dirks, 2000) or Spanish categorisationand subsequent brutality towards Amerindians are grotesque examples of this (cf.Taussig, 1987). A further irony is the fact that early modern European nation states hada history of acting in an inquisitional fashion towards witchcraft claims and cases, justas many African tribes have a “persecutorial” view of misfortune (Niehaus, 2001: 63),blaming it upon witchcraft; perhaps it is no small coincidence, too, that anthropologists

Figure 2 Extract from p. 4 of Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secre-tary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)



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frame their witchcraft inquiries largely as “cases” heard and presented. Levack (2002a,2002b) contends that the state machines in 16th- and 17th- century Europe used thewitchcraft trials to promote judicial and administrative centralisation, to attack local-ism and particularism – including superstitions – and to promote obedience to Godand King. The great witch-hunts ended once the bureaucracy was more settled andfeudal upheavals in the old social order had come to an end. At the same time, theintellectual revolutions of Cartesian and neo-Platonic thought – that extraordinary(paranormal) phenomena have natural causes – began to hold sway. This theme of trialas a system for maintaining public order is one which was developed and extended inthe crown colonies despite Britain’s amendment to the 1604 witchcraft statues in 1736to stress the “pretence” of witchcraft rather than witchcraft

per se

.There are similarities between the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica (1865) and the

Indian Mutiny of 1857, which Stewart and Strathern (2004) and Bhabha (1994) holdas emblematic of the power of rumour and superstition in fostering anti-colonial strug-gle. The consequences of rebellion in the interstitial spaces of Empire were terriblesuppression through disciplinary and regulatory practices, specifically, what Comaroff(1998: 323) refers to as “colonial governmentality” with its “rational administration”(a means of control over the development of the native population through the classicWeberian mechanisms of bureaucratisation, documentation, rationalisation and regis-tration). These dispossessing and dislocating practices found their form in the obeahlaws of the West Indies. Through these laws against voodoo and obeah, such nomadicthought could be curtailed and ordered society enforced by attacks upon the personalbody in the form of the lash, pecuniary charges, physical labour and physical confine-ment – the characteristic penalties of a capitalist colonial machine.

In his now classic

Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft

, JosephWilliams (1933) chronicles and explains the evolution and suppression of suchpractices. According to Williams, obeah could be a derived practice of ophiolatry,serpent-worship, which spread from Egypt to West Africa and then via the slave tradeto the West Indies. Originally, in Egypt, the snake goddess was worshipped in a cultwhich grew from the practice of keeping non-poisonous snakes in granaries to protectthe contents from vermin.

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According to Mannington (1925: 267), obeah is “adegraded form of religion”, what the abolitionist William Wilberforce (1823: 22) hadonce downplayed as “fascinating mischief”, and what the armchair anthropologist SirJames Frazer (1993) subsumes under the label “sympathetic magic”. This obeah on theEnglish colonies is voodoo on the Spanish and French territories.

The “professors of Obi” (Williams, 1933: 110) are African slaves with their own folk-lore, an indigenous knowledge of plants, herbs and spells. They can cure and they cancurse. They can protect and they can destroy. The 1760 Jamaican Anti-Witchcraft lawdetails the farrago of their obeah materials for the first time:

Any Negro or other Slave who shall pretend to any Supernatural Power, and be detected inmaking use of any Blood, Feathers, Parrots’ Beaks, Dogs’ Teeth, Alligators’ Teeth, brokenBottles, Grave Dirt, Rum, Egg-shells, or any other materials relative to the Practice ofObeah or Witchcraft … upon Conviction … [shall] suffer Death or Transportation. (Act24, Section 10, 1760, quoted in Brathwaite, 1971: 162)


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This law came about following the 1760 insurrection of the Koromantin Gold Coastnegroes in St Mary’s, Jamaica, and was reintroduced in 1938. The plantocracy saw howdangerous the slaves’ use of fetishes and oaths to render them invulnerable could be.Prior to this anti-colonial and anti-slavery rebellion, citing a British government colo-nial report (Anon, 1789), Williams (1933: 113) notes that many of the planters haddisregarded the “tricks of Obi”:

Hanging up feathers, bottles, eggshells, &c. &c. in order to intimidate Negroes of a thievishdisposition from plundering huts, hog-styes, or provision grounds, these were laughed atby the white inhabitants as harmless stratagems, contrived by the more sagacious for deter-ring the more simple and superstitious Blacks, and serving for much the same purpose asthe scarecrows which are in general use among our English farmers and gardeners.

The anti-obeah laws are a direct result, then, of rebellion and struggle, more so than aChristian struggle to save souls and to fight evil forces. The laws are for the suppressionand punishment of obeah practitioners, threats to the tense and fragile

status quo

.Another anti-obeah force was the 19th-century Myalism revival, a priestly “antidote”(Rampini, 1873: 131) to obeah deriving from Ashanti tribal religion. The expectationamongst the more lackadaisical planters was that with the end of the slave trade (1807)and post-slave emancipation (1834), these beliefs and practices would eventually alldie out.

Assimilation, to quote Mullin (1992: 212), resulted in new generations of Christianswith “impregnated archaic knowledge”. For some, however, their “African-based reli-giosity” (Lazarus-Black, 1994: 45) was retained. Mullin (1992) continues with the pointthat these obeahmen – with their African science – maintained an unofficial power overlife and death. They had the respect, awe and fear of other slaves in the Caribbean, aswell as the planters. Whether anyone disputed the obeahmen’s claims, the conse-quences of their work were frighteningly real. They didn’t just protect property,uncover secrets, predict the future, charm overseers in order to prevent punishment,attract men to women or make themselves useful to planters by putting a hex on blackjockeys. They prevented crops from growing and also led slave insurrections bymentally, physically and spiritually poisoning their opposition. Their authority camefrom their illegitimate status as alienated leaders on the margins of society. Toconclude, Lazarus-Black (1994: 46), in her assessment of law and illegality in Antiguansociety, makes the critical point that obeah is more than magic and witchcraft, religionand resistance – it was and still is a potent form of traditional judicial practice, onewhich is capable of uniting and empowering, “part of a system of illegalities whoseconceptual opposition is not Christianity per se but an entire system of legalities.”

Colonial Assessments of the Contorting Serpent

Frederick Henry Watkins (1859–1928) served as Commissioner for Montserrat, a posi-tion upgraded from Administrator in 1888, but one not to advance to full governorshipuntil 1971. This meant that, as a deputy stationed on Montserrat, Watkins was subor-dinate to the Governor of the Leeward Islands. At the time of the letter, Watkins had



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been in post for five years: he was writing his letter to the Colonial Secretary in London,knowing that he would soon face rotation to another colonial position. He was writingto Alfred Lyttleton, a member of Balfour’s Conservative government – a governmentwhich, ten months later, was to resign and be replaced by Sir Henry Campbell-Banner-man’s liberal Cabinet.

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The Liberal Unionist Lyttleton, a renowned wicket-keeper andtennis player, and member of a family of colonial governors, had succeeded JosephChamberlain to the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies and served fromOctober 1903 to December 1905.

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The letter, then, is a diplomatic record, a textualfragment of colonialism held in a postcolonial national museum, referenced as “Copy.No. 53/40” (Watkins, 1905, p 1; see Figure 1). In terms of Comaroff’s (1992) historicalethnography of mission in colonial South Africa, this letter is a shard which should beanchored in the processes of its production, namely, that of British colonialism creat-ing a colonial consciousness among the planters and former slaves of Montserrat. Heldwhere it is, for posterity, the letter is part of a colonial archive, one of the primary sitesof state monumentality, a place which, according to Dirks (2000: 175), “reflects theforms and formations of colonial epistemology”. To continue, it is where “[h]istorywas written by the state to educate and justify political policies and practices, and it wasproduced and preserved by the state for future reference in the archive” (Dirks, 2000:174). Quite why the letter and archive are in postcolonial Antigua is an irony which Icannot explain other than to note that most records on Montserrat seem to have beenalmost routinely destroyed in the natural disasters which routinely befall the island –fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake and volcano.

The fixity of history naturally favours the coloniser. Though laws change and werechanging at the time of writing, Watkins accounts for the colonisers’/his practicalworking knowledge of them. The obeah laws and their context, however opaque theyare acknowledged to be (“Obeah as ordinarily understood and practised”), are outlinedin his letter to a reader who is not expected to have a background knowledge of them.Watkins’s rationalisation for the laws is equally clearly laid out at the start and the endof the letter: it is to aid in the suppression of obeah in the Leeward Islands administeredby the British,

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to promote “civilising influences” and to enforce them through clearerpolice recognition of obeah artefacts. Further explanations for imposing British valuesand practices upon a population of formerly African tribesmen and tribeswomen aretaken for granted and are not deemed necessary. It would appear that the burdens andcomplicities of colonialism, the consciousness of the coloniser, are shared between thewriter and the reader, even if the local inhabitants’ working knowledge of obeah is not.

Typical of the coloniser’s desire for knowledge and order and hence control, Watkinspresents a typology of obeah: the bad (maleficent sacrifice and murder by “vegatablepoisons” and “the setting of jumbeys on persons”; Watkins, 1905: 2), the good (benev-olent healing strategies which conflict with and undermine the colonial medicalofficers, such as “massage with turpentine or cassava roots accompanied at times byincantations”; Watkins, 1905: 3) and the preventative (using obeah to prevent trespass-ers). The preventative example reiterates the research on obeah in Jamaica by BessiePullen-Burry (1903: 140), an historical and colonial contemporary of Watkins, whenshe writes:


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Some planters adopt Obi to ensure themselves against thieving. They take a large blackbottle, fill it with some phosphorescent liquid, and place within it the feather of a buzzard,the quill sticking uppermost. This they fasten to a tree on the outskirts of the coffee-patchor banana-field, where it can be well observed by all who pass near. The dusky population,firmly believing it to be the work of the Obeah man, refrain their thieving propensitiesaccordingly.

It is the light-hearted and humorous attitude to obeah that Watkins dislikes anddisapproves of so much. It can lead to slippage in the colonising mission and mandate,and it can hold up the courts and the “natural” flow of evidence. The ordering andorderings of obeah continue in point 13 with the list of items outlined above andextracted in Figure 2. Out of the 20 cases, there were 69 objects cited as “instrumentsof obeah” (Watkins, 1905: 4). These objects were all taken, interpreted and framed asevidence in the court of law. It is surprising that “Food” could be classified as “Jumbeysuppers”, and that “castor oil”, “coins” and “rosaries”, and “Churchyard earth” wereaccepted as legal evidence. In India, in the same colonial period, colonial officers weredeveloping anthropometric fingerprinting technologies for caste groups (cf. Dirks2000), whereas in the British West Indies, with its particular and peculiar planterhistory of grotesque and lascivious misrule – rivalled only by the terrors and atrocitiesof the Columbian and Belgian mines and plantations (cf. Taussig, 1987) – both theplanters and the public were still in fear of the rumours and superstitions of old:poisons on shards of glass, “medicine-laying” for the intended victim; graveyard dirtthrown at a man to kill him; and small coffins in the trees to keep the shadows caughtby the obeahman. On Montserrat and throughout the British West Indies, the onlyfurther development of the “colonization of subjectivity” (Tagg, 1988) was throughthe photo-fit (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

Sample from a Series of ‘Photo-fits’ Filed with the Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)

Watkins’s letter shows us that the indigenous obeah ideology was being sustaineddespite the introduction of the colonisers’ religion and legal practice. Watkins isconcerned by the number of obeah cases he has heard so far over the period of hisoffice on Montserrat. The intimation, in Watkins’s letter, is that the numbers are nottailing off with the end of the slave trade and slavery and that a rigorous and consis-tent crack-down on the obeah practitioners is necessary. Watkins then closes his letterwith the note that this is but an interim report and that in August 1905 a moresubstantial report will be sent to the Colonial Secretary, as requested and neededfollowing the introduction of an island Obeah Act in the previous year. His Appendix(1905: 5) is a “List of persons convicted of Obeah under Section 45 of Act No.11 of1891 from 1900 to 1903” (see Figure 4). Listing 41 people, and covering the timeperiod featured in the letter, we can reason that this list features the 41 people referredto in point 12 of the letter. The names, furthermore, all appear to be Montserratianfamily names still recognisable during my fieldwork on the island approximately 90years later.

Figure 4

Appendix to Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)

The sentences range in severity from “dismissal” (one case) and “To come up forjudgement if called upon” (seven cases) to the average sentence of “6 months hardlabour” (22 cases), and the extreme sentence for Charles Dolly on 18 August 1904 of“12 months hard labour and a flogging of 24 strokes”. The number of cases range from



13

three (1901) to 11 (1902) in a year and average seven. Hard labour and flogging werepunishments imposed by the coloniser, an echo of those used by the planter to controltheir slaves several decades earlier. The gender ratio is interesting in that 35 of the“convicts” were male, six female, and five of the female obeah practitioners were

Figure 3 Sample from a Series of ‘Photo-fits’ Filed with the Letter from Watkins to theHonourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National MuseumArchive)


14

J. Skinner

sentenced at the start of 1905, a worrying year with so many cases at the start (eight innumber). The gender-neutral idea of fixity can therefore be developed to apply notonly to the process of historicism, but also to the colonial ideological construction ofthe obeah practitioner, to Bhabha’s (1994) notion of otherness and difference, not leastthe physical restrictions placed upon the prisoner to work.

8

Figure 4 Appendix to Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary,1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive)

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15

A Century of the Serpent Law on Montserrat

One of the white man’s often quoted proverbs is: “Never quarrel with your cook”; themeaning of which is that the cook can put something in your food in retaliation if youmaltreat him. (Nassau, 1904: 263)

In the middle of my first period of fieldwork on Montserrat, I heard the followingtrue story from some expatriate residential tourists who lived on the island duringthe winter months back in Canada and had employed a cook/cleaner who they werenot happy with. One day, they had had enough of her and so they decided to sackher when they returned home from a round of golf. When they came in, they foundher in the kitchen preparing her usual Irish stew. The expatriate couple were earlierthan usual and so, when they came in, they happened upon the ingredients of thestew sitting on the chopping board. The cook had brought a little something fromherself to add to the stew in the hope that her employees would eat it and so, bycontagious magic, the employers and employee would be forever linked together andher job saved. Alas, it was not to be! Her dried faeces were thrown out into thegarden and she was thrown out onto the street. Had the cook been successful increating her stew, then the outcome might have been very different – assuming thatthis was only the first time that she had attempted to add a little

je-ne-sais-quoi

tothe dish.

The current

Revised Laws of Montserrat 1962

(Lewis, 1965) with their sediment ofpast and future amendments put obeah under the coloniser’s lens, but also give thereader great insight into the workings of the colonial mind. Though it was not possibleto access the 1891 Obeah Act records, the definition held and in use in 1962 hadchanged little from Watkins’s summary and was the result of amendments in 1932,1949, 1956 and 1961 to the 2 August 1904 benchmark law enforced on Montserrat byWatkins (the 1891 Act refers to the collective Obeah Act of the Leeward Islands asopposed to a law for each island). The current Act also makes mention of “the instru-ment of obeah” in establishing the Act:

1. This Act may be cited as the Obeah Act

2. In this Act –

“instrument of obeah” means anything ordinarily used in the practice of obeah orintended to be so used in such practice, and anything used or intended to be used by aperson and pretended by such person to be possessed of any occult or supernatural power;

“obeah” means obeah as ordinarily understood and practised, and includes witchcraft andworking or pretending to work by spells or by professed occult or supernatural power.(Lewis, 1965: 527)

The Act goes on to legislate on the maximum sentence (“not exceeding five years withor without hard labour”; Point 4, Lewis, 1965: 527), to allow police to enter, search andseize items from properties, and “to arrest without warrant any person practisingobeah, or reasonably suspected to be practising obeah” (Point 10, Lewis, 1965: 528).The sentences range from a maximum of six months (fortune-telling or healing, orpublishing and promoting obeah) to 12 months (practising obeah, sponsoring obeah,


16

J. Skinner

in possession of obeah instruments or hindering the authorities in their investigations),and fines not exceeding $240.

Newspaper records show that the Obeah Act has been invoked throughout the 20thcentury, largely as a means for deporting obeahmen and -women who visit the islandand tour the villages plying their trade. This suggests a shift in its target from the 20Montserratians sentenced at the turn of the century under the 1891 Act. In terms ofthe development of that Christian civilised society mentioned by Watkins, the colo-nisers have been successful. And yet, out in the field, the obeah potions continue toswing freely from the trees and gates to ward off trespassers, my neighbour keeps acock’s foot hanging from his back door to deter thieves – and visitors and some localsregularly put their t-shirts on the wrong way around so that the jumbeys cannot creepup on them. While it is unlikely that minor instances of obeah such as these warrantsentences in excess of public disapproval and condemnation (a bank teller’s namefound in a colleague’s shoe at work is another contemporary example), a Haitianvisiting the island and going from village to village is likely to be apprehended,detained and deported. This happened in March 1992 when Joseph Antis wasconvicted on a charge of practising obeah and was fined $1,000 and deported (Anon,1992a). Follow-up reports noted that he still left the island with over EC$10,000 andthat he continued to practise from Antigua, the neighbouring island, whereMonserratians visited him (Anon, 1992b). Apparently, he had toured door to dooroffering the following services:

His promises were simple and to the point: “Exorcise the Jumbie (evil spirits) in your body,home or ground.”

“Bring good luck, promotion on the job, money and marriage.”

“Hurt those who were using evil forces against you”.

In fact he will cure all ailments and ills including your personal economic recession.(Anon, 1992b: 20)

In the same article, there is the supplementary note that Montserrat “has had arecord for serious Obeah Men who could swell you foot or you belly” (Anon,1992b: 20). One obeahman was so powerful he used to “sun his money and defyanyone to touch it”. While other Caribbean lands such as postcolonial Guyana aremaking obeah legal as a recognised folk religion, British colonial islands such asMontserrat – and the British Virgin Islands – continue to oppress the vernacularbelief system.

9

The only difference in the application of the Obeah Act in the 1990s compared withthe turn of the century was that in the 1990s it targeted off-islanders. Earlier newspaperrecords, for example, regularly noted obeah cases, such as the case of Harry Fenton ofMolyneaux village who was simultaneously sentenced for indecent language and obeahin 1961:

Indecent Language:

Harry Fenton of Molyneaux $12.00 or 1 month H.L.

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17

Obeah:

Harry Fenton of Molyneaux was sentenced to 2 months H.L. after pleading guilty to havinginstruments for practising obeah in his possession. (Anon, 1961: 3)

It would appear that for some offences, a period of hard labour is equivalent, finan-cially, to $12 dollars. This is not the case for obeah offences which are considered tobe more serious and so cannot be excused through payment. Nevertheless, similarsentences do give some comparative indication as to how obeah cases wereperceived. For example, in the same week, Daniel Daley, Peter Howson and St ClairTaylor all received similar sentences to Harry Fenton, but for very differentoffences:

Wounding:

Daniel Daley of Wapping and Peter Howson were each fined $10.00 or 2 months H.L. forwounding each other with knives.

Larceny

:St. Clair Taylor of Lees was fined $10.00 or 2 months H.L. for stealing a brown maredonkey. (Anon, 1961: 3)

Perhaps the shift to sentencing those from overseas reveals the success of colonialpolicy on Montserrat, an island which, despite UN decolonisation initiatives (Skinner,2002), has continued to opt for dependency status. In other words, the enforcement ofthe Obeah Act has eroded subscription to the islanders’ folk religion such that all thatremains are off-island visits and tourist/cultural displays.

In the mid-1990s, the obeah and jumbee activities had been almost laid to rest.However, when the Roman Catholic priest and anthropologist Jay Dobbin (1986)visited the island during the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, he did find the dyingremnants of the local folk religion, African-derived with a strong folk Catholic orProtestant influence. Though denied by the many Pentecostals, Methodists, Anglicans,Roman Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists on the island, particularly middle- andhigh-income Montserratians, upon investigation during his stays on Montserrat,Dobbin (1986) found a number of examples and instances of obeah and jumbeeoccurrences:

Nurses and matrons from the hospital told me of terminally ill patients being carried outinto the bush where dances were performed around them. A man asked me for magicalbooks. People came to the presbytery asking for blessed medals and candles; many werenot Catholic. They insisted the articles be blessed, on the spot. Questioning revealed thatthe articles were being used for purposes patently magical. I was embarrassed to findmyself reluctantly trafficking in magical appurtenances. A man was lost in the hills, andplatters of food were set out for the spirits of the jombees in order to persuade them tobring him back. I saw the lavish display of food and drink set up before the midnight Mass“for the jombees to come and eat.” (Dobbin, 1986: 15)

Dobbin clarifies our understanding of jombees and the contemporary obeah beliefs onMontserrat. According to him, jombees are “dee dead”, beneficent or maleficent spiritswho can be controlled by the obeahman, and can even be seen, heard, felt and touched.If the jombee is beneficent and helpful then, more than likely, the jombee is an ancestral

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J. Skinner

spirit, often identifiable as recently deceased kin, “dee loving dead”. However, if thejombee is a nuisance, evil or unidentifiable, then the jombee is a spirit of “a dead” fromanother island, perhaps brought to Montserrat by a local or visiting obeahman(Dobbin, 1986: 24, 46). Dobbin (1986) concentrated his research upon the jumbeedance of Montserrat that was merely acted out by the 1990s. Traditionally, a jumbeedance is a trance ritual for divining, curing sickness and solving personal problems,described by one of its critics as “neargamancie” (black magic), “part of the sub-sub-culture of Montserrat” the “Old Serpent” Devil’s work (Montserratian 1991: 9, 11). Itbegins like a local drum dance held for a spree, but is held for ritual healing at which adancer, usually female, will become so spirited that she is described as “turning”.“

Turning

is the local term for the ecstatic dancing when the jombees are said to possessthe dancers” (Dobbin, 1986: 49, original emphasis). Over a period of several years’research, Dobbin saw several jombee dances, one of which was staged for public audi-ence at the University Centre on the island. I never saw a jombee dance, but I heard ofpeople talking about the jombees they had met, and the jombee table they prepared onChristmas Eve for the jombee spirits, usually the deceased ancestors of the household– a folk tradition the American tourists equated with the food and drink placed at thebottom of the chimney for Father Christmas.

Significantly, towards the end of

The Jombee Dance of Montserrat

, Dobbin writes thatthe dance ritual has a strong political dimension to it:

It is a creativity born of opposition, resistance, and perhaps even rebellion. Certainly, theMontserratian folk religion is another case negating that difficult-to-kill myth of passivityin the face of slavery and colonialism. Where Montserratian police and court records showdances and obeah to be punished by raids, floggings, imprisonment, fine, and even anarrest as late as 1961, the jombee religion persisted. Denied political voice and social statusin the past, the Blacks of Montserrat expressed their resistance in the domain of religion.The jombee religion expressed and still expresses the creativity of the suppressed andexploited. (Dobbin, 1986: 153)

Here, Dobbin expresses obeah’s creative, religious and functional uses, the matrix ofideological beliefs and practices mentioned by Lazarus-Black (1994). He articulatesthe reason for the legal suppression of obeah. Obeah has always been a threat toofficial bureaucratic institutions and practices with its subversive and unregulatedpractice.

Come the emancipation of slavery and the demise of the plantocracy, obeah survivedas one of the remaining traditional resistance strategies to slave acculturation and colo-nialism, a tacit informal form of opposition taking place in an “invisible” religiousdimension (Mullin, 1992: 175). As Watkins suggests in his letter to the ColonialSecretary, obeah

per se

is an ineffectual practice but with real and worryingconsequences. This is the position probably taken by the officers, such as Commis-sioner Watkins, who administer the Government of Montserrat on behalf of the Britishgovernment. For them, despite the emancipation of slavery, obeah remains an unreg-ulated force of influence. Although, according to the law-makers and law-enforcers,obeah is just a ridiculous practice associated with African superstitious beliefs, it needsto be suppressed so that it cannot be used to motivate resistance to the official forces

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19

and institutions on Montserrat. One such legitimate institution is the Christian church;Dobbin estimated in the 1980s there to be one church for every 300–400 people onMontserrat. In this case, in a strongly Christian community such as Montserrat, theChristian religion is increasingly used as one of the social bases for this colonial world.That Christianity acts as Peter Berger’s (1967: 30) “nomos” at the centre of the society.It is one of the social institutions giving out ontological status and working as a univer-sal frame of reference. The cosmic frame of reference claimed by the obeahman is indirect conflict with that Christian and colonial cosmic frame of reference; it threatensand undermines the social (superstitions), economic (payments), political (rebellions),judicial (informal control over people) and religious (folklores) institutions onMontserrat and other islands in the Caribbean. This conclusion allows me to accountfor the continued use of the Obeah Act across the 20th century – in the 1960s, inDobbin’s experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, in the paternalistic use of the Act in the1990s, and in the local government’s recent institutionalisation of a National Day ofPrayer on Montserrat in response to public religious canvassing against cultural eventssuch as the cricketers’ jumbie dance and natural events such as the 1995 ongoingeruption of Mount Chance.

Colonial Chimera

Grottanelli (1976) suggests that the witchcraft complex, in which we can include thecolonials’ serpent, is an allegory of social and moral subversion. Obeah is certainly seenby Watkins and others as a threat to the establishment as well as to the establishedChristian denominations on Montserrat. The development and continued use of theObeah Act on Montserrat in the 20th century shows,

contra

Bhabha (1994), that anymimicry in terms of colonial discourse is one with agency and difference to it, that, toparaphrase and invert the colonial officer Sir Edward Just in his 1839 address to theColonial Office, “[not] every colony of the British Empire [is] a mimic representationof the British Constitution.” As a colonial creature, an anachronism of law and history,the colonial island with the serpent laws reflects the Burkean political approach ofcontextualising law and maintaining different laws and latitudes in the colonies. It isthis anachronism that the diplomat and author Sir Hesketh Bell (1936, see also 1889)was pointing to in his letter to

The Times

in 1936 following a debate about thebicentennial anniversary of the British Parliament passing the 1736 law abolishingprosecution for the crime of witchcraft:

It will probably be an additional surprise to many people to learn that while the law in thiscountry has declined for 200 years to recognise the existence of witchcraft, the legislaturesof some of our oldest and most civilised colonies, to wit, the British West Indies, have notonly recognised the existence and effects of sorcery but, in quite recent years, have madelaws for the repression of witchcraft which, for their severity, savour almost Tudor andJacobean times. (Bell, 1936: 8)

Almost 275 years after the abolition of such laws and witchcraft prosecutions, theObeah Act continues to be invoked and revered, the practice of obeah feared andforbidden. Ironically, this transpires in the colonial laboratory of the tropics.

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J. Skinner

Explaining the evolution of the horse (Anon, 1972: 8), one common jumbie story onMontserrat concludes with the judicious comment from one jumbie caught off guardin the middle of the night by strange noises: “Well my done! Horse eye bright tonighteh?” On Montserrat, Britain and British law has played a key part in co-creating andsustaining a modern-day colonial chimera.

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from the assistance of staff and curators at the Antigua andBarbuda National Museum, the incumbent His Excellency The Governor of Montser-rat Frank Savage and Royal Montserrat Police Commissioner David Crowther, as wellas the generosity of comments from audiences at the University of St Andrews, theUniversity of Abertay Dundee and The Queen’s University Belfast. I am grateful to theCarnegie Foundation for their part-funding of my fieldwork on Montserrat in 1994–1995, and to the generous hosting of Ms Cherrie Taylor and her sister Laine who notonly welcomed me to the island but also introduced me to the range of orthodox(Christian) and unorthodox (obeah) religious beliefs and practices currently andformerly practiced there.

Notes

1

[1] The University of the West Indies Extra Mural Department on the island, the island’s maincultural centre, had these terms of reference on the bathroom doors.

2

[2] Mullin (1992) refers to the period 1768–1805 as an era of slave resistance, war and revolutionin the British Caribbean and the American South. The St Patrick’s Day rebellion in 1768 onMontserrat and the American Civil War can be linked with the change in imperial tradingpractices.

3

[3] The Commissioner acted as the officer who administered the government of Montserrat onbehalf of the British government. The person was a deputy to the Governor of the LeewardIslands. In 1889 the title was Commissioner. The title changed to Administrator in 1956 andeventually the status of the post advanced to governorship in 1971 (Fergus, 1994).

4

[4] Etymologically, obeah, obiah or obia refers to those who worship Ob(i), the Egyptian forserpent (Williams, 1933).

5

[5] The new Colonial Secretary would be Victor Alexander Bruce, ninth Earl of Elgin, ColonialSecretary 1905–1908, former Viceroy of India (1894–1899), a position held by his father(1862–1863 deceased) who had previously been Governor of Jamaica (1842–1846) andGovernor-General of Canada (1847–1854).

6

[6] Lyttleton lost his Warwick Borough political position to the Liberal T. Berridge in the 1906general election. He was a descendent of Sir Charles Lyttleton, Deputy Governor of Jamaica(Governor Windsor left the island to Lyttleton after 10 weeks in post in 1662, a contemporaryto pirate Sir Henry Morgan who became Lieutenant-Governor in 1673) and William HenryLyttleton, Governor of Jamaica (1762–1767), and inspired Charles John Lyttleton, futureGovernor-General of New Zealand (1957–1962) and Vice-Captain of the English cricketteam.

7

[7] The Leeward Islands were ruled by the British as a federation between 1871 and 1956. In 1905,that federation consisted of Antigua with Barbuda, Montserrat, St Kitts with Nevis andAnguilla, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica.



21

8

[8] This is an example of the colonisation and disciplining of the human body – as well as time;the forced construction of a work force, one which, if needs be, will break the human subject,“whipping them into line” quite literally (cf. Foucault, 1977; Cooper, 1992).

9

[9] On 5 February 2004, the British Virgin Islands customs and police detained and charged anarrival with obeah offences for importing a miniature coffin with a doll in it (Anon, 2004).

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Author Query SheetManuscript Information

JournalAcronym

GHAN

Volume andissue

Author name Skinner

ManuscriptNo. (ifapplicable)

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Ashcroft & Tiffin as per citation or Ashcroft et al as per ref in ref list?

Please provide full details for the ref list.

De Alva as per citation or Klor De Alva as per ref in ref list?

Emphasis?

This sentence not understood – please clarify.

Please check this sentence – the speech marks in the original did not tally up (more opening thanclosing quotes)

Previously also jumbey (in Watkins, also in general text), jumby (Jumby Suppers) and jumbie (JumbieDance). OK to use jumbee also?

Jombees OK?

Previously Jumbie Dance…

Sentence reworded for clarity. Please check.

Please give citation and ref details.

Any other ref details available for this one?

Please give date accessed

This ref is not cited in the text. Please either cite or remove from the ref list.

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