Summary Of Two Women By Karen Bell

Two women, Karen Bell and Patricia M. Samford, studied the religious practices of the enslaved in the eighteenth century during the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Bell focuses on the enslaved Africans who arrived in Georgia, while Samford looks at those who came to Virginia, specifically to Williamsburg and the surrounding plantations. The transatlantic slave trade stole men and women away from their families, communities, and way of life. It forced them through a brutal passage across an ocean to a new world where they were forced to work in horrendous conditions. Bell and Samford study how the enslaved men and women held onto their spiritual practices and embraced new faith to form their own communities. Karen Bell’s “Rice, Resistance, and Forced Transatlantic Communities: (Re)Envisioning the African Diaspora in Low Country Georgia 1750-1800” argues, “Enslaved Africans perceived themselves as part of a cultural community that had distinct ethnic and geographical roots.” Bell goes into detail about how the locations from which Africans came from affected the new Georgian communities. Religion played a part in this, as Muslims in North Africa often sold the POWs from Waalo and Kajor to slave traders. Some Georgian colonists asked for slaves that had experience in rice cultivation, which led to the
Samford emphasizes that each person’s identity is linked to the community, which makes the deceased play a role in the life of the community, giving blessings or wrath to them, since they are forever linked to it. Shrines are “critical as visible and tangible places upon which to place a gift made to an invisible and intangible deity.” The Igbo used pebbles, chalk, wood, and pottery as sacred objects for shrines. To Samford, if this importance of ancestors survived the journey across the Atlantic, there must be some