Shouter Baptists

On March 30th, Trinidad and Tobago celebrates Shouter Baptist Day, and we look at the history of this religious group, drawing on information of Rt. Rev. Eudora Thomas book "A History of the Shouter Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago", published by Calaloux Productions, Ithaca, New York, 1987.

The Spiritual Baptists, called "Shouters" in Trinidad and Tobago, had been suppressed by both the colonial and the independent governments for many decades. Nevertheless, the group prevailed and, in spite of being a relatively small minority, has inspired a national holiday since the 1990s.

Like Santeria in Cuba and Brazil, Voudoun in Haiti, and Shango in the British Isles: the Spiritual Baptists are a syncretic African-Christian faith that goes back at least two centuries, to the days of slavery. Being a philosophical belief system, it did not come into being at a specific moment, but evolved over a long period of time. Due to this, and due to the fact that it evolved often "undercover" in the undocumented  slave population makes the exact roots of the Spiritual Baptist shrouded in the mists of history.

The Africans who settled in the Americas and in the Caribbean came from various parts of West and Central Africa, as the map shows. Up to today, we do not describe their origins with their "nationalities" (the present-day borders were drawn by the European colonisers at random, disregarding traditional tribal borders), but with their tribal ethnicity: Yoruba, Ibo, Dahomey, Mandingo, Congo, Rada, to name but a few.

The Yoruba were the largest group to come to the West Indies. It is to them that, according to Thomas, the forms of worship of the Spiritual Baptists are mostly attributed. In the slave society, where the Yoruba mixed with people of other tribal origins, Christian concepts of the dominant European culture were mixed with pan-African customs to create the syncretic forms of religious expression. Thus, the bell-ringing was borrowed from the Europeans, and the chanting from the Africans. Anointing can be found in both the Catholic and African religions.

"Handclapping and chanting, which are manifestations of the Shouters, are a substitute for the drums and shac-shacs of African custom," writes Thomas.

In the West Indies, the Spiritual Baptists were soon ousted by the Europeans. They aren't called Shouters for nothing: were simply too loud! All this chanting, shouting, bell-ringing and hand-clapping infringed on the more delicate European sense of propriety. It definitely smacked of some barbaric African cults. Laws were passed against those disturbances. The Catholic and Protestant churches too were worried about that their efforts to Christianise the African population would be undermined by the Shouters. Way into the 20th century, it was often the leaders of the established churches who opposed the revocation of the ordinances that forbid the Spiritual Baptists in the British West Indies, and not the colonial government.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the "Ordinance to Render Illegal, Indulgence in the Practice of the Body known as the Shouters", was passed on 27 November, 1917. The Anglican church was then between leaders, Bishop John Francis Welch served up to 1916, and Bishop Dr. Arthur Henry Anstey was consecrated in 1918. The Roman Catholic church was headed by Archbishop John Pius Dowling. The governor was Lieut. Col. Sir John Chancellor, after whose wife Lady Chancellor a street was named.

The bill was introduced by the attorney general, Sir Henry Gollam. He acted in accordance with the government's practices in St. Vincent, where the "Shakers" had been banned from worshipping in 1913.

"According to his statement, the Shouters' form of worship, which was introduced to the island from the neighbouring island of St. Vincent, was an 'unmitigated nuisance'," writes Thomas. "A Shouter meeting would make the neighbourhood where it took place unfit for residential occupation." She continues to give names of several leaders of the Shouters who had to suffer for their faith after 1917: Teacher Patrick of Sangre Grande served a three month prison term for conducting baptisms in a river; Leader Roach earned himself the name "Braveboy" for preaching at street corners in spite of rotten eggs being pelted at him; Leader Harold Lackeye was put into prison for six months for preaching but put on bond; Leader Smith of Roxborough was beaten and arrested for conducting a baptism; and Pastor Guiton of Tunapuna was raided several times and had to pay high fines.

On March 30th, 1951, the Ordinance that banned the Shouters was repealed. Pastors Griffith and Balfour were depicted on the front page of the local newspapers. Two months later, on May 22, the ban was also lifted in St. Vincent by the colonial administration. The spokesman in the Legislative Council for them there was Vincentian George McIntosh, whom Thomas quotes:

"In view of the fact that the poorer classes of this Colony are in deplorable, poverty-stricken condition because Government is unable to remedy conditions and ... religion being the only means whereby these depressed people can find comfort in their misery and as the Superintendent of Police and His Honour the Administrator have colluded to deprave these people of their right to religious freedom in the Colony."

During the years of slavery in the Caribbean, African slaves had a need to maintain their spiritual health in order to cope with the terrible conditions they lived in. In the new environment, Europeans tried to Christianise them; many of the Africans also brought their own, powerful belief structure into the equation.

"The religious propagation, with the stunning magical power of the African medicine man, so strongly influenced the African inhabitants that they started to borrow from their own myths and religious practices until they had established a variant form of the faith," writes Thomas.

If the importation of those myths and practices was very strong, they superseded the Christian forms, i.e. in Voudoun or Shango. But the same syncretic borrowing took place in the religious practice that eventually became the Shouters, or Shakers as they were called in St. Vincent, or Tie Heads as they were called in Barbados.

But why did the slaves not accept Christianity? Was it merely a manifestation of their inner opposition against the slave master, in spite of the outward adaptation to the system?

Thomas writes that Christianity was never really fully adopted by certain African tribes because of its monotheism (which, as anthropologists would tell you, was also the problem in ancient and middle-age Europe, hence the translation of various pre-Christian religious concepts and personalities into God's son, Mother of God, patron saints etc.). To those tribes, both Christianity and Islam would have forbidden a part of their world view in that was based on nature and ancestor worship. What happened in the case of the Spiritual Baptists was that they adopted the concept of baptism and the Holy Ghost from the Christian missionaries. Thomas adds: "mourning, talking in tongues, healing preaching, and teaching of the gospel according to the diverse gifts manifested by the Holy Ghost."

From their African ancestors, the Shouters inherited other practices, e.g. the incantation of traditional Christian hymns in a pattern that leads to shouting, or the hand-clapping and "shaking", which imply African participatory patterns. In comparison, physical manifestations during worship are very reduced in European Christian churches. The Vincentian Shakers were banned after an incident where the shaking and vibrations of a group had frightened the governor's horse so much that he fell off!

In Trinidad, the first recorded leaders of a syncretic African-Christian religious cult was Papa Nanee, who has been described earlier in the Digest as the founder of the Rada community in Belmont. He was also a healer, a role which is part and parcel of Black syncretic movements in the New World. The Shouters give their spiritual leaders the title "Teacher" or "Elder". Teacher Farnum was a leader in the late 19th century, who spread the Shouter Baptist faith from her little shack off the Tunapuna road. Other significant leaders were, according to Thomas, Pastor Bowman in Arouca, Pastor William Cox, his wife Irma and his son Douglas, who established a mission in 1904 in Tunapuna, and Pastor Theophilus Ottley, who was believed to have started a church in Laventille.

In 1987, Rev. Thomas wrote:

"The Shouter Baptists celebrate their Day of Emancipation for religious observances, and efforts should be made to commemorate this day during their lifetime."

This year, it will be the 50th anniversary of their Day of Emancipation, and Eudora Thomas' wish has been granted on a national basis.

Today, in world where car engines and blaring television sets seem to be the soundtrack of our lives, it seems strange that the Shouter Baptists had been banned for 34 years on grounds of the noise level they create during worship. When we put up our feet on Friday coming, let us think a minute about the reasons for their coming into existence as a church with distinct religious practices, and let us give acquiescence to the fact that their movement is, in fact, one that finds parallels everywhere in the New World.

French Immigrants

 Grenada had become a French possession in 1674. For some 20 years the Caribs had held out, boldly meeting their foe, matching weapons of wood and stone against cold steel and gunpowder. They had fought the French on the beaches and in the steep inland valleys amongst the towering trees of the islands interior. The ancient volcano belching fire and sulfuric flames, forming a hideous backdrop to this their doomsday scenario, which finally came with a mass suicide when the last remnants, hounded by the invader, leaped to their deaths in a mad forecast of the things to come some three hundred years earlier.

The island was cultivated and an African slave society was introduced. The plantocracy comprised in the main of the French provincial gentry with money to sustain their endeavor until profits could be realized. The other French islands in the Caribbean, apart from Haiti, comprised of Dominica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Professor Gordon Rohlehr observes "The island of Grenada was captured by the British in 1759 and ceded to Britain in 1763. The British sought to accommodate the French residents whom they included in the limited assembly of the time." The British were aware of the necessity to maintain a united European front against the free blacks who outnumbered them. These arrangements in the main did not last as the French were more than a little sympathetic with the rebellious American colonists who were seeking to over throw British rule on the North American continent.

The French government did all in its power to undermine the British imperial expansion. In response Britain attempted a few years later to capture Haiti from both the French and the Black Jacobins who had risen in revolt. As the winds of the European wars surged back and forth in the Western oceans, Grenada was captured by the French in 1779 at the height of the American War of Independence. However it was returned to the British under the Treaty of Versailles. It was against this background of being fearful of British recrimination, for the discrimination which the French had perpetrated against the British over the previous four years, made the planters glad to take advantage of what was being offered to them under the Cedula of population of 1783. This accommodation by the Spanish crown to fellow Catholics in the Caribbean, that was increasingly torn apart by war, was in fact a defining element in the history of Trinidad.  The inability to recognise the bicentennial of this event in 1983 by the government of the day in Trinidad was a testimony of our social and political immaturity. Significant anniversaries  are important landmarks which give us the opportunity to re-examine these special events. The French entry into Trinidad was very significant. French researcher F. P. Renault wrote:

"The French inhabitants of the islands considered themselves as brothers, jointly responsible to each other and hardly coming to care for a nationality which they would probably never employ for long. Also, they were more attached to the islands where they had established themselves, to the islands in which they were united in memories and interest, than to a mother country which they had left with no thought of returning. It was because of this that the all powerful tradition of kinship developed and became central to the French Creole character.

The original colonists were known as the new colonists to distinguish them from the old Spanish settlers ... Many had left the land of their fathers several generations before, and had helped to colonise French possessions in other parts of the New World. Some families began their colonial experience in Acadia, in what is now Canada, in the 17th century, others in Louisiana and New Orleans.

In their migrations, subject as they were to changes political, economic and climatic, they found themselves at times completely uprooted; their circumstances substantially altered, often having to start afresh; and because of the fortunes of war, families would find themselves distributed among several islands whose ownership would change hands from one year to the next, while in reality they would continue to share identical interests and a way of life that had evolved as a result of living in the tropics, on cocoa and sugar plantations operated by slave labour for, in some cases several generations. All the while they maintained the language and traditions of the land of their origins. All these factors contributed to the fostering of a West Indian spirit, a West Indian French Creole way of life, as well as to produce a community of opinion between the colonists of various islands, in spite of the strict application of the various colonial laws."

Other French elements made their way to Trinidad, as Professor Bridget Brereton wrote in 'Book of Trinidad':

"Right from the start of the French Revolution, in 1789, privileged Frenchmen, and especially members of the noblesse, fled from their native land to the comparative safety of exile. This exodus stepped up during the first half of the 1790s, when the revolutionary regime  was at its most extreme. Although the emigrés included thousands of clergymen and members of the Third Estate (commoners), it was the noble exiles who gave the emigrés as a group their main characteristics: royalist, fiercely Catholic, and bitterly opposed to the revolution and all its works.

Since many of the noble emigrés had been military officers (the army being one of the few acceptable careers for young noblemen), it was natural that they would want to serve the great counter-revolutionary military alliance spearheaded by Britain, Austria and Prussia. And of these, large numbers did enlist in the armed forces of these three powers as officers, to such an extent that special French units were organised in each army. The British military authorities allowed many emigrés to raise regiments for regular service with the army, such as the 'Chasseurs Brittaniques', only one of many. Royalist emigrés often bought commissions in regular British companies or regiments.

Many of these emigrés serving as officers with the British armed forces fought in the Caribbean campaigns of the 1790s. As early as 1792, before Britain was at war with revolutionary France, plans were being hatched among emigrés in Britain with property in Ste. Domingue (Haiti) to ship an army of emigrés to the Caribbean, presumably to crush the revolution in the French colonies. This came to nothing, but many French emigrés from the Antilles received commissions in the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th West India Regiments, which were raised in Guadeloupe and Martinique and were taken into the British Establishment (i.e. as regular British troops) in 1798. White French Creole officers serving with British-raised black troops in Ste. Domingue during the British occupation (1794-1798) often remained in the British service after the occupation was over. Many emigrés without Caribbean connections, who had received commissions in regular British troops, took part in the West Indian campaigns of 1793-1797, in one of which Trinidad was conquered. Several of them stayed on in Trinidad."

Apart from the military men, there were other French royalists from Haiti who offered their services to the British forces during their ultimately abortive campaign to undermine the Haitian revolution and wrest Haiti from both the blacks and the French republicans. Rejected by the British in Jamaica because the assembly there feared that their Haitian slaves might have absorbed the dangerous doctrine of republicanism, Haitian planters and their slaves were re-settled in Trinidad. The impact of the Haitians, both planters and slaves, was felt in Trinidad. The Haitians tended to settle in the south of the island, and, whether true or false, the planters found themselves stigmatized as being licentious and accused by the other French colons of indulging in outrageous orgies. Their slaves introduced the syncretic African religion, 'voudoun', and with it the pathological fear of poisoning and the creation of the 'zombi', or the living dead, a cult that was unknown in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles. Mistrust, financial insecurity, an atmosphere bordering on hysteria, all this helped to determine the spirit of the first years of British rule in Trinidad. The British did not trust the loyalty of the French, whether freshly arrived royalists or seasoned Creoles in their second or third generation. They trusted the free coloureds and free black people even less, fully aware that the Grenadian revolution of 1795 was led by Fedon and other free coloured republicans. This revolution had cost the lives of some 7,000 persons on that island. Dr. James Millette in "Genesis of Crown Colony Government" tells us of the great care that was taken by the region's military governments with regard to slaves from Haiti. In the case of Trinidad, taking all but 39 of 300 Haitian negroes refused at Martinique, there were plots or rumours of plots to wipe out the entire European population. This was dealt with by Governor Thomas Picton very harshly. Notwithstanding poisoning did take place on several estates. One case, a serious one, occurred at Coblentz in St. Anns.

The year 1803 proved to be very fatal for the Coblentz estate, as the owner, Baron de Montalambert, lost 70 out of 150 slaves in a period of nine months. Governor Colonel Hislop commissioned St. Hilaire Begorrat, a member of the Council of Government, and Louis François Sergeant, a French notary from Martinique, to inquire into the circumstances of this tragedy. Eventually the principal driver, the hospital orderly and three slaves of the estate were convicted of poisoning and executed. During the inquiry, it became known that amongst the slaves on the estate were some who had been brought by Monsieur de Mallevault, the previous owner of Coblentz, from his estates in Martinique, where in 1793 a similar excessive mortality had occurred, where as well the use of poison had been suspected. Was one of the Africans he brought Trinidad's first (and thank God so far only) mass murderer, hitting his victims both in Martinique and here?

As the report of the Commissioners states:

"Every experienced planter knows that the negro doctors, obeahmen, are nothing but poisoners who profit by the ignorance and credulity of their comrades. They sell them some insignificant powders to which they attribute miraculous virtues, and after carrying on with this trade for some time to acquire reputation, always finish by selling poisons extracted from plants with which they are well acquainted and can always find. The police can never be too vigilant of these sort of doctors, as they are dangerous from their principles and from the consequences they produce."

The Baron de Montalambert was near total ruin by the loss of almost half of his slaves. In 1806, he sold his town house property on Frederick Street between Woodford Square and Park Street, and in 1808 he put up large sections of his St. Anns estate for sale. That same year, the planter died as well.

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