Dear Editor,

As a historian who has spent several years researching the history of prosecutions for obeah in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, I welcome Senators Lambert Brown and Tavares-Finson’s plan to propose the decriminalisation of obeah in the Senate.

The 1898 Obeah Act is, as Senator Tavares-Finson states, part of the legacy of colonial rule. It succeeded several other laws against obeah passed after the end of slavery. Its supporters claimed it would eradicate the Jamaican population’s connection to Africa — part of a wider project of allegedly reforming and modernising what was then a colony.

I was surprised, however, that your reporter describes obeah as ‘a Jamaican form of voodoo’. Vodou (as the word is more appropriately spelled) is a religion that developed in Haiti, drawing on Dahomean and Kongolese beliefs and practices as well as Catholicism.

Obeah developed separately, in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, with connections to the religions of many parts of West Africa, as well as to European, Indian and North American practices. It has been a crime for so long — since 1760, when it was first criminalised in Jamaica — that its illegal status has been central to its definition.

Obeah developed separately, in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, with connections to the religions of many parts of West Africa, as well as to European, Indian and North American practices. It has been a crime for so long — since 1760, when it was first criminalised in Jamaica — that its illegal status has been central to its definition.

Because the law defined obeah as a form of witchcraft, few have used the term to describe what they do. I would also question Senator Tavares-Finson’s focus on the legal definition of ‘Myalism’ as the same as obeah. While I agree that the equation of the two is problematic, an amendment that simply removed the reference to Myalism but left the rest of the Act intact would remain, in his words, ‘a leftover from colonialism’. In practice, the Obeah Act and similar laws elsewhere, were used to prosecute people for a very wide range of activities, including some that would be recognisable to Jamaicans today as ‘obeah’ and many that we would now consider to be bush medicine, balm healing, or Revival worship.

The existence of the law was part of a broader stigmatisation of anything considered African. It made religious activities that would be legal in other countries or contexts, punishable by imprisonment and flogging. The law has hardly been used since the early 1960s, and its continued existence is anachronistic.

Several other Caribbean countries, including Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago, have rewritten their law to decriminalise obeah. Those interested can find out more about the history of obeah law and the prosecutions that it led to by visiting my website: www.obeahhistories.org.

Dr Diana Paton

Reader in Caribbean History

Newcastle University, UK