Transatlantic Ritual Combat

The minds and bodies of enslaved Africans carried understandings and practices of ritual combat through the harrowing Middle Passage to the Americas. Indeed, Captain Emmanuel’s battle field demonstration of adroit shield work mentioned previously took place after he had been enslaved, sent to the Caribbean and Europe, and then returned to his home country with his martial skills still intact.

Some Africans were taken to the Americas specifically as soldiers. Antonio Perez, another African cavalryman from the northern side of western Sudan, rose to the rank of captain in the conquests, as did Juan Valiente, who received an encomienda (grant of land and labourers) for his military participation in the conquest of Guatemala, Peru and Chile. Far from outliers, such armed soldiers of African descent were a widespread, if rarely acknowledged part of the conquest era, as Matthew Restall has shown.^{^[889]} African leather shields, which had been adopted by Iberian cavalry centuries earlier, were much prized by both white and black conquistadors. Later some Africans and their descendants would serve in colonial black militias, while others turned their skills against their enslavers.

Armed resistance to slavery included direct revolts as well as the establishment and defence of armed maroon communities by those who escaped bondage. A significant number of the enslaved were soldiers and their families taken in the raids and wars that were the primary means by which people were enslaved in western Africa. Rather than dispersing African peoples as once suggested by anthologists, historians have shown in recent decades that the slave trade actually funnelled Africans from conflict areas in Africa to certain areas in the Americas where they often arrived in significantly sized groups, as can be seen in the martial resistance of the enslaved.^{^[890]} During an early slave revolt in Hispaniola that began on the plantation of Diego Columbus in 1522, the rebels were identified as Jolof speakers from around the Mali Empire's coastal region.

They showed their former military training when they ‘with a great shout, formed a squadron, awaiting the cavalry'. A decade later rebel Africans on Hispaniola had managed to acquire a cavalry of their own, exhibiting great horse-riding skill, dexterity with the azagaya spear, and even the knowledge of making hide armour from their experience in the equestrian culture of the West African savannah.^{^[891]} Rea Kea, who studied the military history of the Gold Coast, has shown that many of the leaders of the 1733 slave revolt of St Jan in the Dutch West Indies were military officers in the Gold Coast state of Akwamu before it was overrun by a rival state in 1730, presumably when they were enslaved.^{^[892]} Joao Jose Reis has shown the relevance of the Hausa in the large urban slave rebellion of 1835 in Brazil.^{^[893]} And John Thornton has shown that understanding the military background of the enslaved Kongolese soldiers is crucial in fully understanding the motivations and tactics of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in North America and the Haitian Revolution.^{^[894]}

African experts in close combat were thus able to infuse local black cultures with martial arts, games and embodied ritual understandings of power that were passed down to American-born generations. Colonists in South Carolina preferred Africans from the former coasts of Mali for their equestrian and pastoral skills. They were consequently worth higher prices, since the colonies' cattle-raising was done by enslaved Africans, who were the first cowboys and who likely passed on the African practice of competitions in equestrian skills to North America.^{^[895]} Former soldiers from the savannah were likely among the Africans who introduced close-combat skills with the azagaya into the first maroon communities on Hispanola. This practice was continued by maroons all over the Americas, and later institutionalised and documented in the fighting manuals of the Afro-Colombian martial-arts styles.^{^[896]}

Enslaved Africans from Angola also had an impact on cultural practices relating to close combat throughout the Americas.

The maroons of Surinam danced a sanga in which machete-wielding men performed their combative virtuosity in order to rid the village of antisocial forces. Similarly, enslaved Angolans performed a sanga war dance at the start of the Stono rebellion and passed on a sanga war dance to later generations. Sangamento-like ritual combat performances, at times merged with Iberian Christian Moor play traditions, became an important element of the annual coronations of ‘kings of Kongo' in Brazil and throughout the Americas starting in the seventeenth century. Enslaved peoples in almost every colony of the Americas formed sodalities that elected annual kings who often ruled over an informal government of enslaved people over their communities.^{^[897]}

In the Americas, martial contests also became a common element in the performance culture of enslaved communities. The maroons of Suriname passed on forms of wrestling, boxing and even leopard boxing with bladed bracelets as had been practised among the Hausa. In South Carolina, enslaved Africans and their descendants developed sanguar-like combat skills through a foot-fighting style called knocking and kicking. Enslaved Kongolese people in Saint-Domingue passed on a six-person stick combat dance named after the Kongolese subgroup Nsundi.^{^[898]} In Cuba, the danced boxing ritual known as mani (presumably after the Kongolese term mani, a term for a king or governor) was a contest in which a fighter stood in the centre of a circle of rivals and punched one of the contenders forming the circle, who if they were knocked down were eliminated. If not, then they took the centre place and continued eliminating rivals until there was only one left. Women sang the songs that accompanied the playing of Angolan yuka drums, and at times participated in the danced combat. The most famous example of Angolan ritual combat in the Americas was the foot-fighting system of the pastoral highlands that evolved in Brazil as the game of capoeira.

Finally, the most widespread form of close combat among bondsmen was stick fighting, which had been widespread in many areas of western Africa but was most associated with Kongolese people in the diaspora. In the Americas stick fighting was a ubiquitous ritual practised from New England to Brazil. It has been best documented in the Circum-Caribbean where danced stick fighting was practised on all the islands of the Caribbean, most widely under the term kalenda on the French- and Spanish-speaking islands. Kalenda was a ritual combat danced to drums in which two contestants tried to strike each other's heads with their fighting sticks; the first to draw blood was usually considered the winner. It was one of numerous combat rituals performed in community drum circles by bondsmen, and in the Francophone Caribbean also played a role in wake rituals that aided the deceased to spiritually make the return journey to Africa to join their ancestors. Yet stick fighting also continued to serve as training for war, as sticks and machetes were often the first weapons used in launching slave rebellions in the Americas.

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Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

Transatlantic Ritual Combat

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