Our Own Liberty
Afro-Catholicism and the Making of the Black Atlantic
Collaborating with Euroepan missionaries, seventeenth-century Kongolese developed a unique new type of Catholicism--Atlantic Afro-Catholicism--which invoked and expressed traditoinal African antecedetns. Thought diaspora, Atlatnic Afro-CAtholics brought this philosophy from Kongo to sites throughout the Black Atlatic, and thus to broad areas of Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.
Atlantic Afro-Catholicism concisted of a unique approach to diasporic life. It was a system of Catholic religoius belief, worship, and ritual which was used to structure social life and festivity, but it was also a philsophy and a political theory. Developing in conjunction with the circumstances in which diaspor Africans found themselves, Atlatnic Afro-Catholicism produced justifications for individual liberty, unprecedented arguments against the enslavement of Black Africans, and policies of resistance and asylum which redounded to African advantage in diasporic settings.
Kongo and the Making of Atlantic Afrocatholicism
A Monograph Project
Crosses and Crowns
Glass-bead rosaries and crucifixes anchored a vast symbolic and spiritual economy in Kongo. Kongolese appropriated rosary-crucifixes in distinctive ways. In this painting by Albert Ekhout of Kongo's King Garcia II, Garcia deploys a combination of white beaded rosary and copious layered beads to signal both Catholic devotion and nobility.
New World Afrocatholics would treat rosaries differently, placing them at the center of Black confraternal devotion and linking them with Marian worship.
Black confraternities would structure belonging, identity, and public presence. At times they served as conventicles of resistance and rebellion.
Fugitivity as Policy
Capuchins accepted and in some circumstances championed African fugitivity from bondage, counseling Africans in Havana to depart the conditions of their enslavement and seek freedom. Black people throughout the Americas sought freedom regardless of whether missionaries or colonial authorities encouraged them to do so, but there is evidence that missionary support for fugitivity amplified such actions in the area of Spanish Florida.