African Knowledge in the Atlantic

James Sweet explores the way African ideas helped shape the Atlantic world in his work detailing the experiences of Domingo Alvarez, a West African vodun healer sold into slavery. Allegedly because of the threat their increasing power and wealth posed to the King of Dahomey, members of the Sakpata priesthood were sold to Portuguese slave traders and brought to Brazil. Here Domingo was baptized after receiving an abbreviated form of the catechism. Sweet speculates how he might have received the new faith, and argues how he must have recognized it having similar traits to his own. We learn of creole languages and cures practiced for headaches.  Episodes of syncretism are contrasted with accounts of resistance including the use of violence. Domingo appears to have used his reputation as a 'fetisher' to inspire fear in his masters. "Since Africans possessed knowledge of plants and other substances that were often unknown to European pharmacists, let alone slave masters, they could easily conceal poisons among plant and animal objects that might be used for benign, everyday purposes," says Sweet. (69) In this way, the story of Domingo opens up questions concerning African systems of knowledge and how they were able to define their interaction in the Atlantic world. This is the key purpose of the work, for Sweet says that all to often, "Africans are almost seamlessly woven into the narrative of Western democratic triumphalism, their political challenges framed as crucial to our understandings of liberty, equality, and freedom," instead of understood through their own culture. (6) As a microhistory this work offers a possible portal into viewing the impact of African culture and ideas upon the European imagination.