How Did Religion And Culture Influence West African American Culture

During the start of the transatlantic slave trade, African religious beliefs and practices were varied and large in number. A great portion of the continent had, for centuries, fallen under Islamic influence. Regardless of this diversity, there were some common threads across different cultural groups. For example, West African societies shared a belief in an omnipotent creator, a chief immortal among less powerful gods, to whom they prayed and made sacrifices. Through laws and customs honoring the gods, the ancestors of people, and the elderly, West Africans looked for a harmonious balance between the natural and spiritual worlds. More though, they made music and dance key components of their worship practices. Enslaved men and women kept the rights, rituals, and cosmologies of Africa alive in America through
Some slaves, therefore, brought Christian beliefs with them when they were pushed into slavery. During the seventeenth century blacks in Spanish Florida baptized their children and were married by the church in order to be freed. Partially, the participation of baptisms in the ruling European religion, reflected and helped to bring about, an age old society where Africans were more greatly integrated and appreciated greater rights than did later generations of slaves. However, African slaves also saw the transformation to Christianity as a path to freedom. In the early years of arrival and settlement in the New World, for instance, refugee slaves from South Carolina, ran for Florida, where the Spanish promised them freedom as a reward for their conversion to the highly regarded religion, Christianity. Slaveholders in some of the American colonies became incredibly fearful that the Christianization of slaves would lead to demands for