Tuesday, February 6, 2018
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
YoFresh Yogurt Café
635 Chicago Avenue, #7, Evanston, Illinois

Participants will experience:

• European Christian missionaries attempting to “civilize” and “Christianize” indigenous populations through force and coercion
• Many European nations participated in the Slave Trade – Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland all joined Spain and Portugal at different points in time – as did Brazil and the United States
• The forced migration of Africans sometimes created the conditions by which new sorts of familial ties were formed (i.e., kinship bonds created by and between persons of different tribal affiliations, languages, customs, etc., forced together during the Transatlantic Trade/Triangle Trade)
• “Kin-like” ties as a representation of the shared horror and triumph of surviving the Middle Passage
• Europeans and European missionaries trying to reconcile “slave marriages” with the Catholic Church, trying to coerce them into a different worldview than was their (African bondspersons’) traditional custom
• African indigenous religious traditions
• Many African bondspersons continued practicing their own religious traditions, even after the Slave Trade and their arrival into the Americas
• Warring religious traditions. Many African bondspersons (across the Americas) were often caught in the crossfire between Christians and Muslims, attempting to convert them
• “Africanized Christianity” (arguably that came about in result of the exchange between Christianity and Kongolese religion) was perhaps most crystalized in the leadership of Dona Beatrice Kimpa Vita (1682-1706), a prophet-priest leader of a religious movement that sought to reconstruct a Kongo reeling from war through teaching that Jesus, Mary, and the prophets were all Kongolese.