Black Christians were the subject a talk by David
Killingray (School of Advanced Study, University of London) at the Annual Conference of the British
Society for 18th Studies in Oxford 3-4 January, as part of the two
panels I organised on Black ‘Georgians’.
David’s paper provides a wider picture of the
lives of black people who were active Christians in an Atlantic world dominated
by the violence of the slave trade and slavery during the late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-centuries. Current scholarly
emphasis has been on a small number of well-known black figures who were
literate and wrote books, or had contemporary books written about them. Largely ignored are the many other black men
and women, often also literate, who left a record of their lives, who were
committed Christians active in teaching, preaching, and evangelising in
churches, chapels, and in the open air, throughout Britain and more broadly
serving with missionary societies in the three continents of the Atlantic
world.
Being literate and articulate men and women, well
known some of the black Christians are well known, for example, Philip Quaque,
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis
Wheatley, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, the Quaker Paul Cuffe, and Samuel
Barber.
There are a good number of lesser known black
figures in Britain who were believers who can be retrieved from the
condescension of obscurity, and also many more possibly beyond retrieval , for
example the many who are in parish
records as being baptised, and
individuals such as William Luboys, Frances
Coker, Sophia Campbell, Mary Allay, Nestor, John Ishmael Augustus James, James
Filly, John Sharp. There were many who were priests such as Bryan Mackay, John Jea,
David Margrett, George Liele and Rev. George Cousens.
Others visited Britain
such as Nathaniel Paul and Richard
Preston.
Transformative
David argues that Christianity was transformative,
it had revolutionary implications for peoples’ lives and ideas, something of
which slave owners in the West Indies and the USA were all too aware, thus the
ban on slaves being taught to read and write, and the hostility towards the
presence and activities of Christian clergy/missionaries who sought to
evangelise black people including slaves.
Providentalism
Central to this throughout a large part of black
Atlantic diasporic Christian thinking was providentialism: the responsibility
of people in the diaspora to share the Christian gospel with fellow Africans.
Generally researchers on black British history
have ignored the Christian constituency, although this is less the case for the
late 18th and early 19th centuries where black Christians
are so prominent, and their voices so clear, that their ideas and beliefs
cannot lightly be marginalised. Understanding
such beliefs and aspirations requires a different prism of enquiry which engages
with theology, historical theology at that, and I am not sure that this has
always appealed to or informed the considerable scholarship that has been
produced by literary critics and historians.
So, we need to encourage a more balanced research agenda in the period
that we are now discussing, which in turn may help to promote a similar and
better directed interest in the very many black Christians in the Black
Atlantic world post 1840.
Note: David is working up his paper into an article for
publication.
The other papers and talks in the two panels were
Kathy Chater on the poor law treatment of black people, Arthur Torrington on
the musician and composer Joseph Emidy, and me on the geographic spread of
black people across Britain. I will working this up into an extended piece for
publication.
