“Most considered those who profited at the expense of others to be what Balanta called befera . . . translated as ‘witches’ or ‘cannibals’ - people who consumed others’ health, souls, or bodies and undermined community coherence. Kidnappers who seized kin or neighbors in the night and sold them fell into this category, as did European and Eurafrican (mixed race) slavers and their middleman agents.” - Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830
To understand the Balanta view of colorless (white) people and “Christians” one must first see the world through Balanta ontology and the 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors. Only then will the following passage from Hawthorne’s book make sense:
“Across the [Guinea Bissau] coast, loyalty to and selfless hard work for family and community were virtues, deserving of praise. However, disloyalty, disobedience, and greed were ‘sins’ deserving of punishment. . . . .
Perhaps the most serious of transgressions in coastal areas was witchcraft. What witchcraft was and how it was dealt with in the Guinea-Bissau area was detailed by Philip Beaver, who launched a failed attempt to establish an English colony on the island of Bolama in the later eighteenth century. In his diary, he expressed shock at the degree to which people in the area believed in ‘witches,’ or people who attained unnatural wealth or fortune by entering into a contract with a spirit. The spirit aided the supplicant but demanded human souls in return. One evening, Beaver said, two or three of the colony’s African workers, who were known as grumetes (literally, ‘cabinboy’ but on the coast the word was applied to blacks laboring in any capacity for an employer), visited him to report that one of their colleagues named Francisco ‘was not a good man.’ Francisco, they said, ‘wanted to eat one of them (John Basse) who had been very ill.’
By ‘eating,’ the grumetes meant consuming the health, soul, or body of another, which resulted in the victim becoming sick, dying, or disappearing. The term has been used for centuries to describe witches’ actions; witches were thought to sacrifice others clandestinely at night, consuming them as part of their spirit contract. Some witches had the power to shift shapes, assuming the form of an animal and then devouring their prey. When people disappeared in the night - the victims of kidnappers who enslaved and sold them - they had been, in the coastal conception of things, ‘eaten’ by witches. That is, they had been consumed by someone who benefited from their demise..
For Europeans like Beaver, the notion of witches consuming others was ridiculous. Beaver, indeed, was struck by what he saw as the improbability of a man ‘eating’ another, so he sought explanation from a grumete. named Johnson, who was fluent in English. Johnson ‘said that the man accused of eating the other was a witch, and that he was the cause of John Basse’s illness, by sucking his blood with his infernal witchcraft.’ Although Beaver insisted, ‘that there is no such thing as a witch,’ Johnson had do doubt that there was, saying that Francisco ‘is well known to be a witch; that he has killed many people with his infernal art, and that this is the cause of his leaving his own country.’ Should he return to his people, Johnson said, Francisco ‘would be sold as a slave.’ Johnson also told Beaver of another witch among the grumetes named Corasmo. He ‘could turn himself into an alligator’ and ‘had killed many people by his witchcraft.’ Corasmo had also fled his country so as to avoid being sold to Atlantic merchants. Witchcraft, Johnson insisted again to Beaver, ‘was never forgiven, and its professors never suffered to remain in their own country when once found out’ because ‘they would either be killed or sold.’
Johnson’s statement is strikingly similar to others recorded on the Upper Guinea coast over a period of several hundred years. . . .Although there were (and are) differences in how various coastal societies viewed witches, Beaver’s account makes clear, as do many studies, that in the Guinea Bissau area, selfish and self-serving behavior was evidence of witchcraft. Witches gained fortune and elevated themselves above their peers by harming those around them, and in societies that sought to equalize the distribution of wealth and power within gender and age groupings, this was unacceptable and dangerous. People of the Cacheu River region of Guinea Bissau, Eve Crowley writes, believe that witches focus ‘excessively on personal achievement and advancement even at the expense of others.’ Witches, then, defy sanctions against ‘immoderate greed,’ becoming ‘ruthless and dangerous and willing to sacrifice the lives of their kinspeople.’ Similarly, Eric Gable argues in a study of the Manjaco of the same region, ‘Excessive prosperity is evidence of a heinous crime’ - a pact with a spirit that could only be forged at the expense of others in the community. In small-scale, egalitarian communities, he argues, ‘wealth is evil,’ and the rich are thought to be ‘morally reprehensible’ witches.
Balanta, a group with whom I have spent many years, believe that to become wealthy and powerful requires striking a deal with a spirit. Such contracts are forged with the sacrifice of human lives, which is the price that spirits demand. For this, when people fall ill or die it is widely suspected that someone in a community must have acted nefariously. . . . An elder Baga put this in clear terms in an interview. ‘This is an egalitarian society,’ he said. ‘We all keep our heads at the same level; if someone wants to raise their head above the rest of us, they will have it chopped off.’
The frequency of raiding after the mid-eighteenth century offered some people increased access to wealth and introduced the possibility of widening social differentiation within egalitarian communities. Of Esulalu, Baum notes that slave raiders and their extended families managed to acquire more cattle and rice fields and took control of important religious shrines. However, because cattle holdings could be wiped out from disease, a rich man could quickly become poor. Further, slavers did not control all shrines, so they were forced to share some of their fortune with other shrine keepers. Similarly, those who reaped gains from slaving ‘had to be careful how they displayed their wealth or how they wielded power, let they be accused of using nefarious means to achieve their preeminence.’ Esulalu were, then able to limit the influence of those who realized gains from slave raiding and trading and to ‘preserve a structure of diffuse power.’ Here, as elsewhere on the coast, witchcraft trials served to maintain the status quo - to prevent some from rising too far above others. . . . Most communities remained free from rule by state’s elite. . . . Witchcraft and witchcraft trials were a means of perpetuating political and economic decentralization. Witchcraft accusations reflected tensions in society, but they did not necessarily intensify class distinctions. In Guinea Bissau, such accusations eradicated these distinctions. Witchcraft trials were the means through which common folk resisted the emergence of a political elite. . . .Those who failed to make connections within their communities - to foster friendships by acting generously rather than selfishly - were necessarily witches. No one came to their aid. Following a trial, community members, Alvares continued, ‘attack the household of the forsaken wretch and confiscate all his goods.’ In this way, wealth that should have been the community’s was distributed to the population at the moment of a witch’s elimination.
Although direct evidence is lacking, we might speculate that as the number of ships arriving in Bissau and Cacheu increased and as coastal groups stepped up the production of slaves to garner imports after 1750, the frequency of witchcraft accusations and trials increased as well. . . . Those who got too close to Europeans or, more likely, Eurafricans, who lived on the coast and served as intermediaries in trade relations, risked disrupting group cohesion by shirking their responsibilities in fields and by elevating themselves above their peers as they accumulated excessive wealth.
Thos who engaged too much with Europeans and Eurafricans risked becoming like them - risked becoming witches. And this is precisely how coastal people viewed whites and those associated with them - as witches. Beaver noted this when he wrote that ‘all white man witch’ is an article of general belief among these people.’ A few years earlier in Sierra Leone, John Matthews wrote something similar; Africans thought ‘the white man’ carried out the actions of witches with each slave he purchased, using the slave as ‘a sacrifice to his God, or to devour him as food.’ On the Upper Guinea coast from as early as the sixteenth century and through to today, many Africans called Christians (or people who professed Christian - or European-based identities) ‘white’ . . . .Given this, ‘white man’ - as in ‘all white man witch’ - likely applied to a broad spectrum of people associated with Atlantic commerce and Christianity, be they light skinned or not.
Whatever the case, it was clear to all that ‘whites’ often took possession of humans and robbed them of their strength by chaining them, marching them to ports, underfeeding them, and holding them in filthy barracoons where they awaited embarkation on ships. Moreover, ‘whites’ were motivated by selfishness and greed. They controlled great wealth, they sought ever more riches, and excessive personal affluence was evil. Europeans and Eurafricans turned people into profit - slaves into tobacco, alcohol, cloth, and other things - which was witchcraft par excellence.
Slaving and witchcraft, then, went hand in hand. . . . In the case of the Balanta, men who left their communities to meet with foreign merchants could be given the penalty of death. “
This passage from Hawthorne helps explain this further passage discussing the Balanta ancient ancestors from Credo Mutwa’s book, Indaba, My Children,
“The Ba-Ntu, or the Ba-Tu, were the founders of our culture and our religion. And being a solid, uniform nation they were at peace for thousands of years. They were not ruled by chiefs, but by a High Council of the Mothers of the People – that is, all the Witches and Sybils over the age of forty. At this time the Strange Ones, the Phoenicians, or Ma-Iti, who came some five to six hundred BC, and the slave-raiding Arabs were things of the distant future.
The Ba-Tu were at peace among themselves and because a High Curse was laid upon any person who stole as much as a single grain of corn from his neighbor, crime was totally unknown. There were warriors-elect who stationed themselves along trading routes at regular intervals, to protect travelers and traders against attack, not by human beings, but by wild animals. Man, in Africa at least, had not yet thought of offending a fellow man, physically or otherwise.
The ruling Council of the Mothers of the People used magic and naked intimidation to exercise control over all the people. These people had no fear of death; they knew it as something inevitable which had to come sooner or later, and capital punishment had no meaning whatsoever. The Mothers of the People also knew that corporal punishment infuriates, challenges and hardens the average criminally inclined human being and encourages him to become more cunning. Thus, they kept war and crime away from their land with the one medium that impresses the average human being – witchcraft.
Tribal historians today still sigh for those days when there was only one race of man and the Spirit of Peace walked the land – when every man woman and child, yea, every beast felt the soothing protection of the soft-eyed, infinitely wise Mothers of the People.
This was the first and last instance in the whole record of the Black People of Africa when pure witchcraft and black magic were used, not to terrorize people, but to keep peace in the land. For hundreds of years peace reigned in the land of the Ba-Ntu and in this atmosphere of peace the Great Belief was born. When eventually this nation broke up into the various tribes the Great Belief had taken such a strong hold on the souls and minds of people that they were completely lost without it.”
