Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians

Jeroen Dewulf's previous work on Afro-Catholic history revised how scholars interpret the processional cultures of Afro-diasporic communities across the Atlantic. Both The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and From the Kingdom of Kongo to Kongo Square (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2017) convincingly argue for a shared Lusophonic influence, rooted in the sangamento rituals of Kongolese monarchs, on Afro-Christian holidays like Mardi Gras. Afro-Atlantic Catholics culminates his work on Afro-Catholic religion as a persuasive reassessment of how Catholicism influenced modern Black Christianity.Afro-Atlantic Catholics takes readers through a comparative geographical study of Afro-Catholic social life in Iberian, Dutch, French, and English societies from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. The first three chapters detail the terms by which Africans living in Portugal, Portuguese-contacted regions of West Africa, and the Americas integrated elements of Iberian worship into their spiritual practices. The final chapter, “The Catholic Roots of African American Christianity,” highlights similarities between the Christian practices of Africans in British North America and Catholics in the charter generations of New World arrivals.The text seeks “to correct an Anglo-Saxon bias in the dominant narrative on the development of African American religious history” that overstates modern Black Christianity as a derivative of Protestant liberalism (p. 9). Such a narrative fabricates that its development was culturally deracinated from Africa. Instead, Dewulf encourages readers to recognize that there were Africans who arrived in the Americas with their own distinct Christian traditions before their evangelization by Protestants. He joins scholars like Cécile Fromont, Linda Heywood, John Thornton, and Herman Bennett in arguing that a distinct Afro-Catholic tradition germinated in parts of Europe and Africa before arriving to the Americas through enslaved and free Africans alike. Afro-Atlantic Catholics convincingly reinforces the perspective that Catholicism is an authentic African religion akin to Islam.Dewulf's primary objects are Afro-Catholic practices with striking Portuguese influences. These include confraternal brotherhood associations with Black members like Livro de Rosario de Nossa Senhora, mutual aid and burial societies, the sangamento processions, and the linguistic remnants of Afro-Lusophone spirituality from the charter generations in places like Curaçao, Dutch-occupied Brazil, and New York. He focuses on these territories because they were exchanged between empires. Although scholars like Margaret Creel Washington and Jason R. Young have detailed the Kongolese and Angolan influences on Black Christian culture in the US South, Dewulf's contribution does a similar task for communities in the US North.Kongolese Catholicism is the standard tradition by which Dewulf judges other Afro-Atlantic Catholics. He argues that there are “remarkable similarities in the way [Afro-Atlantic Catholics] organized themselves in confraternities, buried their dead, prayed for the souls of their ancestors, made vows to saints, used rosaries as protection, and paraded with music and dance in processions” (p. 87). Dewulf privileges the Kongo because of its extensive archival records; other Afro-Catholic communities are not as well-documented. He admits that he must speculate at times (even about the Kongo) because there is a paucity of reliable ethnographic records to draw from. Many of the accounts written by European spectators are derogatory because they assume Afro-Catholicism is a corrupted version of their own practices. This is ironic, he notes, because some Afro-Catholic practices are nearly identical to medieval practices that the Portuguese brought with them upon contact with Africa in the fifteenth century. Portuguese contact with Africa precedes the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Tridentine reforms discouraged many of the grassroot medieval Christian practices that the Portuguese introduced to Africa. Some of these practices include birthing rituals, funerary practices extending over the week following death, and the use of saints’ statues in intercessionary prayer.Why, and how, did Africans accept Catholicism? Like Fromont, Dewulf acknowledges the draw of Portuguese hegemony in Africa yet hesitates to reduce Christianity's appeal to political strategy or fearful acquiescence. Kongolese monarchs requested Christian baptisms long before the loss of Kongolese sovereignty during Africa's colonization in the nineteenth century. Additionally, Dewulf's focus on the role of the lay catechist invigorates this question. A lack of priests meant that Africans—enslaved and free—were responsible for the religious education of their peers. They were the mediators of cultural transmission, often responsible for the maintenance of Lusophone and Romantic retentions in liturgy. Dewulf's pre-Tridentine analysis of Afro-Catholicism may appeal especially to folklorists, historians, anthropologists of Africana religion, and Catholic Church historians. The chapters on Europe and Africa comprehensively detail these folk practices and the reactions they solicited from haughty European spectators, offering a captivating glimpse into both Afro-Catholic and medieval European Christian history.The final chapter is the work's most ambitious. It mostly succeeds in demonstrating significant continuities between Afro-Iberian and African American Christianity in spite of a few key omissions. Like Craig Steven Wilder, Dewulf hopes to find an antecedent African practice that explains the proliferation of Black mutual aid societies in the nineteenth century. The chapter outlines an impressive history of Black Catholics in the early United States with an original thesis linking Black Catholicism to Black Protestantism. In terms of primary evidence, it is surprising that the Free African Union Society (founded in 1780) and God's Little Acres cemetery in Newport, Rhode Island, do not receive more attention. Dewulf's book inspires this reader to consider what Afro-Iberian influences appear in early America, including at the first Pan-African mutual aid society in the United States and the largest, well-preserved colonial African cemetery.One shortcoming is that Afro-Atlantic Catholics lacks a distilled analysis of race. For example, several African Methodist Episcopal denominations and Prince Hall freemasonry formed because European social organizations barred Africans on the basis of race. Similarities between Catholic brotherhoods and mutual aid societies in the United States, such as maintenance of burial land, can be explained by noting similarities in how racist slave societies oppressed free Africans. Yet Dewulf does not engage this explanation thoroughly. Some resonances between Afro-Iberians and Afro-Protestants seem enlarged to support his claims. Correlated practices among Christians do not always imply that they are caused by, or rooted in, a Catholic antecedent. Some commentary on James Sidbury's Becoming African in America (Oxford University Press, 2007) would have addressed these omissions had it been discussed.Afro-Atlantic Catholics is a comprehensive, well-written work that specialists and non-specialists alike may enjoy. It anticipates exciting new research into Catholicism among African-descendant people, Afro-Catholicism in the United States, and the connections between Afro-Catholicism and Afro-Protestantism.