Obia

Before the sun is properly up the water in the calabash has been standing all night with leaves in it. Someone crushes them again with both hands and the smell lifts, sharp and green, nearer bruised citrus than medicine. The bath is poured out over the shoulders of a person standing on a banana leaf at the edge of the village, cold enough to knock the breath out, and while it runs off they are told to say what they want. Luck. Health. To be left alone by whatever has been following them. The water is obia. So is the leaf, so is the white chalk, so is the man who knows which leaf.

The word has had two lives and they barely recognise each other.

Along the upper rivers of Suriname and French Guiana live the descendants of Africans who fled the Dutch plantations into the rainforest and built their own nations there: the Saramaka, the Ndyuka, the Aluku. In their languages obia means medicine, remedy, healing power. It is the most ordinary word in the world. A spiritual bath is a winti wasi in Ndyuka, an obia uwii wasi or gadu uwii wasi in Saramaccan, taken in the village or at the riverbank or standing in the river itself, with rum poured out and pemba, soft white kaolin clay, and prayer spoken to the high god, to the ancestors and to the gadu. When self-treatment fails and the clinic fails, you go to the obiaman. An obia can be a bundle, a bath, a stretch of knowledge, a prohibition. In Saramaka telling it can also be a power with its own name and its own temper, which comes into a medium’s body and talks.

Fifteen hundred miles north, the same word arrives in the English record wearing handcuffs.

In Barbados between 1710 and 1712 an English army officer named Thomas Walduck wrote home to London that one enslaved man could bewitch another, “Obia as they call it”, and that people there believed an obia man could cure as readily as they believed in cunning folk back in England. He had watched one work. He described bones taken out of a man’s eyes and shells drawn out of his thighs. In 1729 the Anglican rector of Christ Church parish reported on “their Oby”. The earliest Jamaican appearance of the word sits in a slave law of 1760, passed in the wake of Tacky’s Revolt, in which obeah men were held to have had great influence, and it contains a provision for preventing the practice of obeah. That is the shape of the archive. The word enters English inside a statute.

The Jamaican act of December 1781 went further and itemised what a practitioner might be found with: parrots’ beaks, dogs’ teeth, alligators’ teeth, broken bottles, rum. Possession of the objects became the offence. Barbados passed its first anti-obeah law in 1806, lifting whole phrases from the Jamaican one, including the description of enslaved people going to practitioners to be kept from any evils that might otherwise happen. Read plainly, the law is describing insurance.

That is mostly what obeah was for. Charms against sickness. Guards set on a provision ground so that whoever robbed it would sicken. Protection against a neighbour’s malice, against a driver, against the overseer. Counter-sorcery, which is to say the undoing of somebody else’s work. The colonial statutes were not interested in any of that.

What the statutes were interested in was the other thing obia could do, which was make a man believe he could not be killed. Vincent Brown put it flatly: as long as white authority half believed in obeah too, black men and women could wield it against them. In Jamaican Maroon memory the powers of Nanny, the eighteenth-century Windward war leader now a national hero, are obia powers, and they live in Kromanti Play, the ceremony where the ancestral dead come down into the dancers, drums under them, and speak an old language most of the living cannot follow.

Nobody has settled where the word came from, and the fight over the etymology is really a fight over whether obia starts out good or bad. One line derives it from Twi obayifo, a witch, or bayi, the neutral force such a witch uses, which fits the fact that obeah is commonest exactly where large numbers of Akan speakers were landed. Another points to Igbo abia and obia, which the Oxford English Dictionary glosses as knowledge or wisdom and doctor or healer, and to their cognates in Ibibio and Efik, all of them positive. A third points to Efik ubio, a thing left as a charm to cause sickness or death. Pick your root and you have chosen your conclusion in advance.

The Akan derivation won, and it did real damage. Much of the twentieth-century portrait of obeah as transplanted Ashanti witchcraft comes from one book, Joseph J. Williams’s Voodoos and Obeahs of 1932, built almost entirely on Jamaican colonial writers, chiefly Edward Long’s History of Jamaica of 1774 and Bryan Edwards’s history of 1793, and Edwards in turn leaned on Stephen Fuller’s 1789 testimony to a parliamentary committee. Each retelling kept the sinister half and shed the rest, until the healer had been edited out of his own word. Meanwhile the Dutch colonial archives for Suriname, covering the same centuries, use obia and almost never mean harmful sorcery by it.

Obia is not free-standing power, and this is its limit. It has to be carried by somebody, fed, respected, kept to its rules, and it dies when the person who knows it dies without passing it on. It can be turned: the same medium whose spirits drive a bakru out of a sufferer can, by another route, keep one. And for all that it protected other people, obia could never protect itself. Barbados only dropped obeah from its statute book in 1998, and not by argument, but because the attorney general’s staff, drafting a routine minor-offences act, looked at the old clause, decided it was a relic, and left it out. Upriver in Suriname the word had never needed rescuing. It still means the bath, the leaf, the cold water at first light.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is obia?

Obia is spiritual power in Afro-Atlantic tradition, used for healing, protection, diagnosis and the undoing of harmful magic. Among the Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana the word most often means medicine or healing power, and it can refer to a herbal bath, a charm bundle, a body of specialist knowledge, or a named spirit that possesses a medium.

Is obia the same thing as obeah?

Yes. Obia and obeah are the same word in different Afro-Atlantic communities, and the difference is one of reputation rather than substance. In the Anglophone Caribbean, where colonial law criminalised it, obeah came to mean malicious sorcery, while in Suriname and French Guiana obia kept its older meaning of protective and healing power.

Who practises obia?

A specialist called an obiaman or obiyaman, historically also written as an obia man or obeah woman. People consult them for herbal baths, protective charms, diagnosis of an affliction, and the expulsion of possessing spirits, usually after ordinary self-treatment or medical care has failed.

Why was obeah illegal?

Because colonial authorities in the British Caribbean saw it as a source of power outside their control, particularly after uprisings. Jamaica’s first anti-obeah provision came in a slave law of 1760 following Tacky’s Revolt, later acts made possession of ritual objects such as parrots’ beaks and alligators’ teeth an offence, and Barbados did not remove obeah from its statute book until 1998.

Where does the word obia come from?

No one has proved it. The most frequently repeated derivation is from Twi obayifo, meaning witch, but scholars have also traced it to Igbo abia and obia, glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as knowledge or wisdom and doctor or healer, and to Efik ubio, a charm left to cause harm. The choice of root effectively decides whether the word begins as witchcraft or as medicine.

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Soucouyant, Loogaroo, Baccoo, Douen, Zombie, Obayifo, Anansi, Asanbosam, Adze, Aziza, Eshu, Orunmila, Obatala, Shango, Ogun, Abiku