Obeah, Orisa & Religious Identity in Trinidad. Volume 1, Obeah: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination by Tracey E. Hucks (review)

Reviewed by: Obeah, Orisa & Religious Identity in Trinidad. Volume 1, Obeah: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination by Tracey E. Hucks Patrick T. Barker Obeah, Orisa & Religious Identity in Trinidad. Volume 1, Obeah: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination. By tracey e. hucks. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. 262 pp. 26. 95 (paperback). This important study is one of two volumes (the other, authored by Dianne M. Stewart) exploring African religious cultures on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Here, Hucks foregrounds colonial imaginaries and repressions of Obeah in the slavery and post-emancipation eras. While offering readers an introduction to the island's history under both Spanish and British rule, the focus is principally on the years after British conquest in 1797 through to the 1880s. As noted in the volume's preface, Hucks approached archival research with the intent of exploring "Obeah as an assemblage of Africana sacred practices and cosmologies" (p. xi). However, two problems confronted the author. First, colonial records contained few discussions of Africana religions in Trinidad. Second, the correspondence, legal texts, and print material that did include mentions of Obeah heavily privileged colonial perspectives over those of its alleged practitioners. Hucks skillfully draws on such records to nonetheless make a compelling argument about lived religion in the context of nineteenth century Trinidad. Namely, that a "colonial cult of obeah fixation" which itself operated as a "lived religion" emerged among the colony's ruling class (p. xi). This colonial cult's binding agent was its members' devotion to the repression of Obeah, "an Africana nomenclature whose complexity as an umbrella term for African spirituality and thought systems remains eclipsed in the colonial record" (p. 2). Indeed, colonial Trinidad, as chapter one neatly conveys, was a multireligious, multinational, and multiracial society, first developed as a plantation colony under Catholic Spanish rule in the late eighteenth century. Intra-Caribbean migration, the Atlantic slave trade, and the settlement of African captives liberated in the illegal slave trade-era produced an African population that was diverse in terms of culture, language, and religious heritage. It would be these diverse peoples, as Hucks argues, who "would have their religious heritages held captive in colonial imaginations of obeah" in both the slavery and post-emancipation eras (p. 51). In the remainder of the volume, Hucks explores the ways Trinidad's ruling class imagined and repressed Obeah during the nineteenth century. In the slavery era, colonial elites understood Obeah as End Page 335 efficacious and oppositional to the interests of the island's planter class. Article XI of Trinidad's first British slave code, issued only three years after the island's conquest, criminalized Obeah, and implied its practitioners possessed the power to kill through their mastery of poisons. When a spate of unexplained deaths occurred on plantations in 1801, colonial elites believed poisonings linked to Obeah to be the cause. Under the ruthless rule of Thomas Picton, Trinidad's first British governor, colonial authorities set about condemning enslaved people for sorcery, divination, and poisoning, sentencing numerous convicts to brutal punishments, including public mutilation, and in some cases, terrifying executions. The final two chapters turn to the post-emancipation era. Chapter three focuses on mid-nineteenth century literature and includes an analysis of Obeah's portrayal in Dublin-born Marcella Fanny Noy Wilkins' The Slave Son (1854). Chapter four, arguably the book's finest, analyzes and deeply contextualizes two legal cases involving liberated Africans prosecuted under the terms of the 1868 Obeah Prohibition Ordinance. Hucks argues that the first of these cases, which occurred in the 1870s, was "symbolic of a shift in the social perception of obeah. " While in the slavery era, Obeah was portrayed as a threat to colonial order through its alleged links to poison and "potential slave insurrection, " in the post-emancipation era, "obeah legislation was largely redefined as monetary deception, baseless superstition, 'a medium for extortion, ' and medical quackery" (p. 142). Though colonial portrayal and persecution are core themes in the volume, Hucks never loses sight of the fact that African-derived sacred and healing practices endured on the island. The volume thus constitutes far more than a study of colonial constructs of Obeah. It also deftly conveys. . .