Slippery Devils and Resource Curses: Moral Panics, Obeah, and Popular Constructions of Esotericism in Colonial Trinidad

Moral panics are revealing of social anxieties, popular critiques, and tensions bubbling up from beneath the surface of a community. In this paper I trace a series of up-swells of rumors and “mob” actions connected to an esoteric boogieman in Trinidad called Gumbo Glisse. According to popular accounts, Gumbo Glisse uses devil dealings and esoteric books in order to menace and mesmerize unsuspecting victims. I argue that the initial appearances of Gumbo and the mass vigilante justice that followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest social tensions connected to anti-witchcraft laws, esoteric practice, and race as well as emerging disquiet over oil extraction in the colony. 

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, around the Greater Caribbean World, heterogeneous groups—including peoples of African, Indian, and European descent—experimented with and recombined Spiritualism, mesmerism, and the use of esoteric books such as _The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses_ with “traditional” African and Indian practices. At the same time, British colonizers used the category “obeah” (African-identified magic or the assumption of supernatural powers), to mark the racial inferiority, non-religious status, and illegality of such subaltern Caribbean healing and spirit working practices. How the practitioners who engaged in esoteric practice, often doing similar, if not identical things, were categorized and treated depended on their racial, religious, and class positioning in society. Elite (often white) spiritualist operators and mediums demonstrated mesmeric trances on stage to large crowds and held private séances in middle- and upper-class drawing rooms in Trinidad. Concurrently, purported “obeah men” and “obeah women”—poor people of color who practiced similar healing and spirit working techniques—while testifying in court often called their work mesmerism, hypnotism, and Spiritualism, but were thrown in jail for practicing obeah.

The long-term criminalization of obeah or so-called voodoo was particularly influential in helping to structure subaltern religion-making in the Caribbean, what Kate Ramsey in her 2011 _Spirits and the Law_ has called the “perversely affirmative nature of these prohibitions” (5). The power and influence of legal prohibition led to grassroots interpretations of and interventions in the law, including group led vigilante justice against purported practitioners of negatively valued enactments of esoteric practice often called obeah. The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Caribbean saw a series of moral panics during which rumors of attempts at self-enrichment, assaults, or murder by purported practitioners of obeah, loupgaro (so-called werewolves or shapeshifting sorcerers), or brujos negros, including individuals reportedly empowered by devil pacts, practicing mesmerism, or using works published by the De Laurence, Scott, and Company, led to large groups engaging in extrajudicial assault and detention, sometimes then turning the victim over the police. Like other moral panics in other contexts, the details of the events in the Caribbean provide evidence of social anxieties and concerns haunting grassroots populations.

One such figure who was marked out as a target by extra-legal group justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Trinidad was called “Gumbo Glisse.” Eruptions of panic and group violence connected to Gumbo Glisse rumors appear to show shifting anxieties connected to gender-based violence and also a creeping concern over oil extraction. His name literally means “slipper okra,” and he is said to cover himself in an oily or greasy substance in order to allude capture.  He uses devil pacts (or today “bad books,” De Laurence published esoteric books identified with obeah) in order to gain superhuman abilities to be able to pass through keyholes into locked houses. He then “mesmerizes” his victims and either steals from them, commits sexual assault, or more generally menaces them. Unlike many other examples of obeah practitioners or loupgaro who are most typically identified as Black, descriptions given by members of “mobs” during the first large Gumbo panic in the late nineteenth century tended to identify the perpetrator as white, even when the actual person being pursued as the target of group violence was a person of color. This reversed the typical racialization of obeah as “African” magic. I would argue that the early narratives of Gumbo referencing mesmerism and esoteric devilry suggest popular concerns over the ways in which white practitioners of mesmerism or esotericism were able to act publicly and escape an obeah charge, while poor people of color were arrested. Elites were able to go free and use their powers to take advantage of others without consequence. These details may also reflect a longer history of white sexual violence during the slavery period that had continued on into what was then the indenture era in the colony. 

The second major wave of Gumbo attacks occurred in the early twentieth century, coinciding with the birth of the oil industry in Trinidad. Just as commercial oil production began in earnest in 1908 in southern Trinidad, oily Gumbo Glisse was said to have begun haunting “The Brea” area of Trinidad’s major southern city San Fernando, a neighborhood where raw pitch melted and oozed up from the earth, coming up through the streets. I argue that the correlation of the obscure working of the oil industry under the earth taking off at the same time as slippery and esoteric Gumbo reared his head in a literally petroleum-soaked neighborhood suggests that we can think of Gumbo Glisse at this point as an example of what Barrett and Warden call “oil culture” in their 2014 collection of the same name. They suggest that “oil is material, mystical, historical, geological, and agential” (xvii) and we can see all these elements clearly in the conjuncture the oozing of pitch, Gumbo Glisse’s oily, menacing, and esoteric presence, and the nascent pumping of the Trinidad Oil Syndicate. We can see here a grassroots critique of an emerging petro-modernity that benefited those in power, white colonizers taking without consequence, while the colonized were left to be preyed upon.