From Hell to Hell: Central Africans and Catholic Visual Catechesis in the Early Modern Atlantic Slave Trade

Abstract

In seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias, a portcity in today's Colombia, enslaved Africans recently disembarked from the Middle Passage faced a Jesuit-designed multisensory catechesis. The process involved listening to translations of the Christian doctrine delivered by African interpreter-catechists enslaved by the Jesuits, often in conjunction with images. Hell featured prominently in this oral and visual catechesis. This essay analyses the violent confrontation between infernal imagery and survivors of the Middle Passage from regions in and around Kongo and Angola by unfolding a strategically oblique approach to the lacunar, biased records about this critical moment. It examines the vast Atlantic linguistic, spiritual, and visual ramifications of the catechesis to highlight the affective response of enslaved men and women to their captivity and displacement as subjects in history, viewers of works of art, and actors in the dramatic events of enslavement. It brings new, documented, historically situated, and culturally elucidated insights to the study of the transatlantic slave trade.