Viperine Ecologies, Obeah, Hermeneutical Insurgence: Robert Wedderburn’s Afrodiasporic Audience

Abstract

Son of the “rebellious” Rosanna, and grandson of an obeah woman, ‘Talkee Amy’, Robert Wedderburn was a formerly enslaved ultra-radical prophet, pamphleteer, and anti-abolitionist campaigner who migrated to England from Jamaica in 1778. A recent uptick in Wedderburn scholarship, in the words of Shelby Johnson, centers “Caribbean history in our approaches to Wedderburn, whose career in London looms large in critical assessments of his work.” However, even this tradition overlooks the place of Black political actors in Wedderburn’s audiences. By reading spy reports of “West Indian” attendees at Wedderburn’s debates and his frequent address of “ye Africans” in his periodical The Axe Laid to the Root, I argue there is an important difference between approaching Caribbean history as a means of explaining where Wedderburn’s political orientations came from versus regarding the Caribbean as a place where Afrodiasporic people developed critical apparatuses of their own which were themselves used to interpret Wedderburn’s work in his own time. By reapproaching Wedderburn’s archives through interpretive frameworks that may have been available to his Afro-Caribbean audiences, I argue Wedderburn curated spaces of Black political belonging through which Black political agents circulated Black political thought around the Atlantic world of his time.

1. Introduction: Dark Sousveillance, Archival Dissensus

Let us start here: three days after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester on 16 August 1819, a Jamaican-born son of an enslaved mother, the Black radical preacher, prophet, and pamphleteer, Robert Wedderburn, was arrested in London for sedition1. On 19 August, at his Hopkins Street Chapel debating house in Soho, he hosted a debate on the question “Has a Slave an inherent right to slay his Master, who refuses him HIS LIBERTY?” (Wedderburn [1819] 1991a, p. 113). As tended to be the case, government spies were in his audience that night and they did not like the debate’s conclusions. Per Sd. J. Bryant’s report, “Nearly the whole of the persons in the room held up their hands in favour of the Question” (Bryant [1819] 1991, p. 115). Enslaved Africans could rightfully kill their enslavers. After the debate, the spies reported to the Home Office. But they did so with a not-so-subtle addendum. In the opinion of Chetwode Eustace, “the real purport of the question” at hand was actually “whether it be right for the People of England to assassinate their Rulers” (Eustace [1819] 1991, p. 116).

E. P. Thompson has famously suggested that scholars critically fumigate every word of spy reports to inoculate recollections of insurgent pasts as much as possible against their strategic misrepresentation by the State (Thompson 1966, p. 493). With regard to Wedderburn’s debate, however, even the State cannot get its ducks in a row. A close reading of each spy report suggests that Bryant and Eustace do not actually agree on what they saw or heard nor what it collectively meant. Bryant, for example, frames his report as a somewhat straightforward echo of Wedderburn’s oration. Before the debate, Wedderburn had allegedly “written home to the Slaves [in Jamaica] to avoid slaying their masters until he knew” (Bryant [1819] 1991, p. 115) how London’s radicals would vote. Then, in response to a vote in favor of the question, he alleges Wedderburn told the audience “I can now write home and tell the Slaves to murder their Masters” (Bryant [1819] 1991, p. 115). Contrastingly, as indicated by his closing addendum, Eustace employs interpretative license to hedge against the feasibility that Wedderburn really was plotting insurrection with rebels in Jamaica. Instead, he locates the threat Wedderburn poses within the context of governmental rule in Blighty, advising “that prompt measures may be adopted for making examples of Wedderburn & such desperate characters who … avow their object to be nothing short of the assassination of their Rulers & the overthrow of the Government” (Eustace [1819] 1991, p. 117).

In exceeding what surveillance is able to guarantee the reality of, Wedderburn’s oratory power refuses consensus in the archives. As a hiccup in the surveillance records (what Simone Browne might call an archived instance of dark sousveillance—an archival dissensus through which the state’s ostensibly all-seeing, all-knowing eye is evaded and “where the tools of social control … were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape” (Browne 2015, p. 21), Wedderburn’s oration makes the concurrent plausibility of multiple possible histories imaginable. In one of these histories, a vote organized by a formerly enslaved man in an attic in London both authorizes and attempts to orchestrate uprising among African and Afro-Caribbean people against slavery in Jamaica. In this history, London radicals envisage themselves legitimately and affectively participating in Caribbean futures. Afro-Jamaicans reciprocally appear as real and consequential political actors geographically abroad from but kinaesthetically involved in working-class life in London.

By fostering sensitivity to London’s place in a multi-ethnic transatlantic counterpublic, Wedderburn thrust himself out of kilter with the radical zeitgeist of his time. Wedderburn was operating in a period when British radical politics was becoming increasingly ethno-nationalist in flavor; where radical leaders were encouraging white working-classes to perceive their interests as attainable only at the expense of justice for the Americas’ enslaved; and where the philanthropic nationalist’s favorite axiom, charity starts at home, was taking root in the British radical’s orientation to anti-capitalist politics. It is in this political landscape that Ryan Hanley locates the origins of working-class racism in England (Hanley 2016). “How many thousands of poor wretches have suffered death in England under laws to which they never gave their assent … a jot more than your beloved negroes … Ought you not to have begun at home!” (Cobbett 1817) asks radical pressman, William Cobbett, of abolitionist poster-boy, William Wilberforce, in 1817. While in Cobbett’s formulation, “home” functions as a straightforward synonym for England, only ten years later another radical pressman, Richard Carlile, echoed Cobbett’s sentiments with an important amendment. By asking, “Is not the saving of a white soul at home, as good as that of a black soul abroad?” (Carlile 1828) Carlile makes it clear that, by 1828, in the mainstream radical imaginary, domestic space itself was reducible to a natural racial characteristic. England, territorially, was white. Blackness belonged elsewhere. An individual’s belonging in England consequently depended on racial characteristics expressed by the surface of the skin in correspondence with a fundamental racial truth which belonged in every individual’s soul. In this formulation of domestic belonging—where “home” refers to the ethno-nationalist spatialization of the white soul, a surrounding violence of racially purified soil, air, trees, space—Blackness is always exceptional, belonging to a subordinate time, in a subordinate place, what Katherine McKittrick identifies as an uninhabitable “geographic (non)location” (McKittrick 2013, p. 6), where political exigence is rendered in a permanent state of deferral2.

In this paper, however, I want to emphasize the ways Wedderburn worked against the increasingly parochial tide of English nationalism to curate spaces of Black political belonging in the heart of the English radical movement. Recently, a well overdue turn in Wedderburn scholarship has worked to, in the words of Shelby Johnson, center “Caribbean history in our approaches to Wedderburn, whose career in London looms large in critical assessments of his work” (S. Johnson 2020, p. 365). Johnson, Katey Castellano, Helen Thomas, Sue Thomas, Joseph Albernaz, and Raphael Hoermann in particular have shown Wedderburn’s archives to be a quite remarkable expression of Black Atlanticism, one that splices together Black anti-slavery abolitionism with radical European proletarian thought. Nevertheless, even this counter-colonial tradition tends to only cursorily consider the fact that Black political actors were part of the audiences to whom Wedderburn’s oratorical and literary works were addressed. Ryan Hanley, for example, claims that Wedderburn’s “visions of revolutionary Jamaican emancipation were actually… intended for a metropolitan audience” (Hanley 2018, p. 217). And Hoermann similarly suggests that even though Wedderburn’s words were “ostensibly directed to a Jamaican audience, [he was] in fact speaking to metropolitan radicals” (Hoermann 2020, p. 302). In each instance, contrastive adjectives imply an incongruous relation between Jamaican identity and the demographics of the city. “Metropolitan” functioning semantically to emphasize the hermeneutical privilege of whiteness. This therefore reflects in the context of British radical print culture an issue that Toni Morrison’s notes as being typical of the American critical tradition: “Regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white” (Morrison 1992, p. xii).

But as Pierce Egan makes clear in his 1821 book Life in London, London’s radical underworld was anything but white; it was, rather, “motley indeed;—Lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of color, old and young… all jigging together” (Egan [1821] 1904, p. 227). In such a social sphere, political agents from around the African diaspora (a diasporic collective I will refer to as Afrodiasporic) converged and strategized with each other and with other multi-ethnic radical peers in collective production of revolutionary nuance in Britain and the greater Atlantic world. Wedderburn’s commitment to establishing Black critical perspectives as integral to the British radical scene therefore meant that an array of revolutionary meaning entered the social domain by proxy of metonymic and cosmological affinities shared specifically between himself and an Afrodiasporic audience he repeatedly invites to engage with his words. Accordingly, I argue that there is an important difference between approaching Caribbean history as a means of explaining where Wedderburn’s political orientations came from versus regarding the Caribbean as a geographically errant interpretive standpoint occupied by an Afrodiasporic collective whose critical imaginations were integral to the reception and circulation of Black political thought around the Anglophone Atlantic world of the Age of Revolutions. The former approach can be complemented by the latter.

2. Viperine Ecologies, Fugitive Reading

• Nothing has changed,
• for men still sing the song that Adam sang
• against the world he lost to vipers,

• the song to Eve
• against his own damnation;
• he sang it in the evening of the world

• with the lights coming on in the eyes
• of panthers in the peaceable kingdom
• and his death coming out of the trees,

• he sings it, frightened
• of the jealousy of God and at the price
• of his own death.
(Walcott 1986, p. 302)

A viper in Hopkins Street Chapel can help us perceive Wedderburn’s place at the heart of multiple different interpretive traditions of his contemporary Atlantic world. Two months after Wedderburn allegedly promised to write home to “the Slaves to murder their Masters”, on 10 November another government spy, Richard Dalton, watched on in Wedderburn’s audience. Participants were due to debate “which is the greater crime, for the wesleyan Missionaries to preach up passive obedience to the poor Black Slaves in the west Indies, or, to extort from them… under pretence of supporting the gospel” (Dalton [1819] 1991, p. 126). On this night, Dalton reports that,

Wedderburn came forward and addressed himself to the chairman and the two West Indian Blacks which where [sic] invited for last night by Wedderburn and that they might expose the villany of our church and State by Sending out those vipers of Church Missionaries to suck the blood of the poor innocent Blacks in the West Indies and to make them believe the great God was with them but instead of God it was the devil.

(Dalton [1819] 1991, p. 126)

The hurried pace and unpunctuated grammar of transcription only implies that these sentiments belonged to Wedderburn. Nevertheless, the report deigns to capture an accusation of the church’s heresy that a West Indian speaker apparently intended to make. Wedderburn himself was well versed in the bible but was jaded by the weaponization of Christianity as a tool for managing unrest among enslaved and colonized people. Read vis-à-vis a biblical tradition (which continued to function as an interpretive frameworks for even a somewhat secularized radical community), then, the depiction of missionaries as vipers associates them, on the one hand, with the devil’s serpentine form in the Garden of Eden, and, on the other hand, with the Pharisees who Jesus and John the Baptist call a “brood of vipers” after they refuse to acknowledge a miracle that happens before their very eyes. Blurring the line between “the villany of our church and State”, the speaker turns the theological authority of institutionalized religion on its head, implying that in securing the theological subordination of those oppressed by the religious state, church missionaries are, paradoxically, doing the devil’s work.

Reading in a biblical tradition therefore reveals a legitimate critique of a Godless Church and State bound together in the project of global racial domination. Be that as it may, it is worth pausing to consider what Derek Walcott poem, “Adam’s Song”, can teach us about reading vipers in the Caribbean: in the Caribbean context, compulsively singing “against the world… lost to vipers” comes with the price of recapitulating scenes of Black death and therein losing sensitivity to the perceptual riches of other possible worlds. Against this, Wedderburn’s invitation of two West Indian Blacks should bring us to contest the hermeneutical authority of Christianity in gauging the political atmosphere of the debate. Invitation is an act that calibrates the grammars and demographics of presence. It coordinates who speaks and who is spoken to, who hears and overhears, who shares and with who. The invited presence of “two West Indian Blacks” as both speakers and members of the collective audience specifies how individuals within the Hopkins Street Chapel audience would be able to conceive of the ethnic and geographic affinities characterizing their identity as a collective whole—a circumstance made all the more emphatic given that the West Indian speakers were apparently invited specifically to give testimony on life in the Caribbean3. In such a rhetorical scenario, the individual and collective sensitivity of West Indian participants to the ecological and epistemological memories propagated on the Caribbean terrain on which the viper-image plays out establishes the West Indian perspective as a distinct and polyvalent experiential and critical position internal to and in excess of the British radical metropole—a Black space inside, an “otherness within” (Klancher 1987, p. 12) London’s radical discourse community.

The question I ponder, then, is if reading Dalton’s spy report with attention to the appearance of vipers in different but interrelated Afrodiasporic traditions could heighten our sensitivity to the Afro-Caribbean perspectives being propagated and circulated throughout the radical London metropole of Wedderburn’s time? Provoked as such, I return to Wedderburn’s archives guided by Sara E. Johnson and other scholars of the Black Atlantic whose reading practice,

assumes the value of informed speculation as one way to the theorize the scarcity of written testimony left by what were millions of historic actors… [which requires us] to think creatively about truth claims, what we consider evidence, and the value of wondering about what remains unknowable… when considering questions of subjectivity and interior life worlds… states of mind that are communicative and self-reflexive, collective and individualized… a bundle of lived experience rather than ciphers.

(S. E. Johnson 2023, p. 8)

What I am looking speculatively for are stubbornly surviving and perturbant literary mnemonics of what Joseph Albernaz calls the “groundless community and the everyday Romanticism” of “Africans and their descendants racialized as Black who were forcibly ungrounded from ties of community and deracinated from their local ecology, excluded from the common… and cast into ‘a zone of nonbeing’” (Albernaz 2024, p. 239).

In the wake of Atlantic Slavery’s epistemological genocides, how can we allow perseverant, creolized, diasporic expressions of Black life and communality to color the way we imagine Wedderburn’s words being received and spread? As a tool for interpreting literary and political sensibilities brought to life by Wedderburn’s archives, what do we make, for example, of the persistence with which vipers appear time and time again throughout narratives of enslavement as real and perilous other-than-human features of the ecological terrain of fugitivity—of Olaudah Equiano fleeing kidnappers in the Kingdom of Benin and hearing ominous “rustlings among the leaves… pretty sure they were snakes, [expecting] every instant to be stung by them” (Equiano 2003, p. 50); of Harriet Jacobs hiding from enslavers in a thicket of bushes and being bitten by a “poisonous” reptile which she suspected was a snake (Jacobs 2001, p. 83); of Frederick Douglas and his companions being “stung by scorpions—chased by wild beasts—bitten by snakes” (Douglass 2009, p. 88); or of Solomon Northup seeking refuge in Bayou Boeuf only to find himself surrounded by “hundreds of moccasin snakes… their bite more fatal than the rattlesnake’s” (Northup 2011, p. 101). Or what do we make, comparatively, of the fact that early-nineteenth century European scientific opinion, narratives of enslavement, and the biblical tradition all agree that vipers kill through envenomation, whereas in the Jamaican Anansi monster marriage story, “Man-Snake as Bridegroom”, a snake disguises itself as a human to trick a bride into marriage after which, having shed all his wedding garments, the snake-husband “walk wid his wife into de wood … He tu’n a yellow snake an’ sit down in his wife lap an’ have his head p’int to her nose to suck her blood to kill her” (Morgan 1924, p. 103)? Is it possible that the image and connotations of a viper very specifically sucking blood from African people is traceable to an African-rooted Jamaican oral culture propagated against and in spite of the violence of a colonial world which, try as it might, could not stamp it out? (Yes). Where are the genealogical intersections between a blood-sucking Hopkins Street Chapel viper, blood-sucking snakes in Anansi folklore, and tales recorded by the first Black Jamaican ordained to the Diaconate, Reverand Thomas Banbury, in Jamaica Superstitions; or the Obeah Book (Banbury 1894), of obeah practitioners setting snakes on enemies including one tale where a man was found dead with a large yellow boa attached to his face: it had “sucked all the blood out of him, and spued it out in the road, where it arose in a froth” (Banbury 1894, p. 15)?4 If it is fair to suggest—as I am suggesting it is—that Wedderburn’s blood-sucking-viper-image can and should be regarded as metonymic protrusion of Black life in Jamaica, what diasporic configurations of political belonging does it render imaginable given that no vipers are indigenous to Jamaica but that in Ghana—home of the Akan people of the Asante Empire to whom are often traced the cultural and spiritual roots of Jamaica’s Anansi folklore, as well the obeah medicinal and spiritual belief system practiced by Wedderburn’s African born grandmother, Talkee Amy—the Western Bush Viper, the African Bush Viper, the Puff Adder, the Gaboon Viper, the Rhinoceros Viper, the Forest Night Adder, the Spotted Night Adder, the Common Night Adder, and the Ocellated Carpet Viper are all indigenous species? How do we respond to the impossibility of total (hermeneutical) authority in confrontation with the viper? How do we honor the hermeneutical legitimacy of people from Asokore and Effiduasi and other towns in the Asante region Ghana who know the folktale “Chosen Suitor: Serpent Husband” (Herskovits and Herskovits 1937, pp. 82–86)—an old Asante folktale which “Man-Snake as Bridegroom” is perhaps a surviving transatlantic derivative of?5 What other vipers await in the archives? What other images of resilient, portable, and perennially resurgent promises of a Black underworld, an ungovernable realm of meaning making that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013), remain waiting, plotting, building a world inside-out from the spatial tyranny of the plantation?

In constellation and accumulation, vipers appear to express a material and metaphysical ambivalence within the Black ecological and literary imagination of the Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean diaspora. They proffer testimony to an uprooted Black eco-cosmological aliveness surviving, adapting, replotting from new and different ecological terrains spanning from Africa to the Caribbean to Britain and beyond. Read by proxy of select Afrodiasporic folktales—wherein it is in presenting themselves as gifts that vipers prepare to steal—the viperine form of church missionaries casts them as Trojan vampires conveying an epistemologically genocidal gift of state-sanctioned Christianity through hollow fangs of prayer. Looked at in the context of the plantation, the identification of church missionaries with vipers paints the secularized undergrowth of institutionalized Christianity as an existential threat to Black being—a white supremacist mulch in which a post-slavery, anti-black, police-state is rooted, concealed, and primed to hold Black life between ongoing states of fugitivity and death. And read as a more general and polysemous image of the Atlantic’s African diaspora, the viper-image connects London to Jamaica to West Africa to North America to other places and other times of the Atlantic world as a counter-colonial metonymic surge which contests the total authority of Euro-centric epistemologies in our reading of Wedderburn’s archives specifically, and in our reading of Black British writing of the period more generally.

3. Hermeneutical Insurgencies of the Plantation

They use very few Decoctions of Herbs, no Distillations, nor Infusions, but usually take the Herbs in substance. For instance, in a Clap, they grind the Roots of Fingrigo and Lime-Tree, between two Stones, and stir them into Lime-juice till it be pretty thick, and so make the Patient take it evening and morning for some time.

(Sloane 1707, p. 54)

You fix up this medicine now, set, and boil it, fe all complain of human being. All beast also … This one good fe any complaint that you have, human being. We call this now Grandy Nanny business. This medicine now is Grandy Nanny medicine [from] our tribe—from Grandy Nanny to Grandy Sekesu, whole of dem, with dem tribe … This is our weed … this one invokes business, all like spirit and all such. Dem love de rose. So we keep all these thing, and call these think Yenkunkun weed. And this is Grandy Nanny and Grandy Sekesu [weed].

(Bernard 1978, pp. 134–35)

African-rooted ways of knowing should further contest the priority of Euro-centric epistemologies in the ways we imagine Wedderburn’s printed works being interpreted in his own time. As I have been working to make clear, Wedderburn spent much of his oratory and writerly career repeatedly emphasizing that he was in cahoots with rebels in Jamaica. In doing so he, at the very least, capitalized on the portability of print to foster the perception in his reading public that his words were being read by people in Jamaica6. This is especially true of Wedderburn’s six issue periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors, Being an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica. Part prophecy, part political theory, part sermon, part polemic, and part cautionary tale, the entire six-issue run of Axe is a prosopopoeial collage (S. Johnson 2020) of the voices and revolutionary ideals of Jamaica’s Maroons, Jamaica’s enslaved, British radicals, Irish rebels, Spenceans, and agrarians7. African and Afro-Caribbean cosmologies struggle alongside British anti-capitalist ideals, and the self-sustaining ecological practices of Jamaica’s Maroons and enslaved transform anachronistic desires for a return to the commons into a future oriented project where plantation provision grounds promise an alternative to forced alienation in waged labor (Castellano 2024). Recent work on Axe fruitfully follows Castellano in identifying the ecological practices of the plot—of the plantation’s provision grounds and of mountainous maroon communities—as Wedderburn’s “central heuristic for thinking revolution and freedom” (Castellano 2021, p. 16).

For my part, I want to consider how methodologically supplementing Caribbean-as-heuristic with a complementary orientation to the Caribbean-as-hermeneutical-flux centers the role of Wedderburn’s Afrodiasporic audience in the production and circulation of revolutionary nuance around the Atlantic world of his time. This is what I refer to as hermeneutical insurgency—interpretations of the scope and scale of Wedderburn’s revolutionary project that cannot be accounted for within the frame of British radical politics. Specifically, I argue that the orchestrated possibility of a Jamaican-based audience engaging with Wedderburn’s writing redoubles a series of addresses to “ye oppressed”, “ye Christians”, “ye Africans”, “ye planters”, and “my countrymen” from poetic apostrophes as, additionally, occasions of direct address. This is consequential because whereas Romantic apostrophe capitalizes on the absence of an addressee to invoke a metaphorized specter of their presence (a literary conjuring which inevitably also confirms the actual status of their non-presence), direct address in the radical periodical anticipates the attention of the addressed and establishes their hermeneutical lens as appropriate for imagining instantiations of its message in the world.

When presented together, Wedderburn’s addresses produce a scene of utter contradiction—he tells enslaved Africans to use no violence against their enslavers but also waxes prophetical to enslavers about their imminent demise in a coming bloody revolution that will be wrought by the Africans he has otherwise called on to be nonviolent. “Oh, ye oppressed, use no violence to your oppressors” (Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 81); “Oh, ye christians, you are convinced of the crime of stealing human beings” Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 82); “Oh, ye Africans and relatives now in bondage to the Christians … receive this the only tribute the offspring of an African can give” (Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 82); “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you” (Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 86); “But you my countrymen, can act without education; the equality of your present station in slavery, is your strength” (Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 87). Here, confronted with a tableau of contradictory address I find myself less concerned with contradiction as an exegetical problem to be resolved than I find myself startled by the literary effect of direct address in sheer accumulation. As one address begins to pile atop another in a pamphlet framed as a singular “address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica”, Wedderburn produces a rhetorical landscape wherein the anticipated reception of each and every address is haunted by the textual copresence, extra-textual reality, hermeneutical force, and anticipated responses of the plethora of other addressees who remain, nevertheless, addressed by the text as a whole.

Smoke and mirrors: Axe functions like a rumor mill shifting the colonial world towards multiple possible futures. As planters overhear Wedderburn cautiously advising the enslaved to be nonviolent, “ye Africans” also eavesdrop on a prophesy of colonial apocalypse wherein they are the harbingers of destruction.

Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you. Get ready your blood hounds, the allies which you employed against the Maroons. Recollect the fermentation will be universal. Their weapons are their bill-hooks; their store of provision is every were in abundance; you know they can live upon sugar canes, and a vast variety of herbs and fruits,—yea, even upon the buds of trees. You cannot cut off their supplies. They will be victorious in their flight … They will slay man, woman, and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slavery, whether black, white, or tawny. O ye planters, you know this has been done; the cause which produced former bloodshed still remain.

(Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 86)

As central actors within the promised future-to-come, Afrodiasporic audience members are positioned as insurgent agents inside but beyond the purview of the colonizer’s anxious imagination. Here, in paying attention to speculatively posed interpretive frameworks of those who knew and remained attuned the social and spiritual world of the Black plantation, subtle evocations of Maroon and obeah ecologies activate Afrodiasporic metonymic associations through which colonial apocalypse resonates, additionally, as immanent Black worldmaking.

Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert describe the main social function of obeah practitioners as being herbalists and bush doctors whose sensitivity to “the pharmaceutical qualities of the leaves, bark, seeds, and flowers of certain plants and herbs” (Fernández Olmos et al. 2022, p. 190) was integral to their role as medicinal and spiritual authorities. They were, as Helen Thomas has suggested, transmitters of pre-slavery epistemologies (Thomas 2000). And they frequently oversaw plantation burial ceremonies—ceremonies that Vincent Brown says, “offered people power over the most fraught and perilous feature of life in slave society: the permeable frontier between life and death” (Brown 2008, p. 147). As illustrated in this section’s epigraphs—from Hans Sloane’s (1707) natural history of the Anglophone Caribbean, and from 20th Century Moore Town Maroon herbal healer, George Bernard—by burning or making powders or balms involving specific concoctions of flora and other fetishes, obeah-practitioners could both tend to the wellbeing of their community and enter commune with an African ancestral realm. Read with sensitivity to the hermeneutical authority of obeah, then, Wedderburn’s subsequent association of his grandmother, Talkee Amy, with persecution for witchcraft reverberates backwards to connect prophecy’s botanical abundance with a history of uprisings led by rebellious obeah-women, propelling their emancipatory project into a future memory where liberation is now complete. “My heart glows with revenge and cannot forgive”, Wedderburn exclaims, “Repent ye christians, for flogging my aged grandmother before my face, when she was accused of witchcraft by a silly European. O Boswell, ought not your colour and countrymen to be visited with wrath, for flogging my mother before my face, at the time when she was far advanced in pregnancy” (Wedderburn [1817] 1991d, p. 86)8.

Inspiration, in lamentation, functions here as a hauntological form of inheritance. For Wedderburn, to be inspired by means to glory in, to desire vengeance for, to learn from, and to align himself with the affective practices, sacrificial self-determination, rebellious spirits, and sources of power embraced by his enslaved maternal ancestors9. By reading Wedderburn’s glory in matrilineage in conversation with the challenges Talky Amy posed to colonial authority and the trust the enslaved would have put in her for matters of spiritual importance, we can imagine Wedderburn’s prophecy as an attempt to enter into reciprocal relation with his maternal kin by provoking an insurgent attention of the enslaved. Members of Wedderburn’s Afrodiasporic audience would perhaps know, for example, the legend of Queen Nanny, the Ashanti obeah woman who went down in lore as the leader of the Windward Maroons, and others might be familiar too with Amy’s contemporary, Akua, “The Queen of Kingston”, a fabled nurse and healer executed for her alleged role in Tacky’s revolt10. In their hands, as part of a long durée of counter-colonial resistance nurtured and spearheaded by powerful obeah-women, “bill-hooks” reconnect with the soil, “herbs and fruits,—yea, even … the buds of trees” of Jamaica in production of a Caribbean landscape filled with Black life, an emergent counter-colonial geography founded on what Pablo F. Gómez calls “Caribbean realities [and] epistemological practices that are not contained within categories created in the worlds that followed in their wake” (Gómez 2017, p. 7). The monocultural order of the plantation is consumed by an immediate abundance of Black space.

From a foliage clearing scythe of flight of the petit-Maroon, the bill-hook returns to the plantation reappropriated as weapon for Black liberty. As a multipurpose tool of Maroon subsistence farming—a Swiss army knife to clear ground with, to harvest food with, to build shelter with, and to chop plantain and cassava root with—the bill-hook returns to the plantation and connects the ecological practices of free Maroon societies with the agricultural freedoms of the plot. In the hands of the obeah woman, it connects an Afro-Caribbean social life to an African-rooted cosmological expanse. In calling upon the hermeneutical ingenuity of a circum-Atlantic Afrodiasporic audience, Wedderburn’s prophetic addresses anticipate and imaginatively plot a future beyond what Malcolm Ferdinand calls the two principles of the plantation in the Caribbean: “‘You shall not feed upon your island’ and ‘Your island shall not feed you’” (Ferdinand 2022, p. 44)11. This is to say that in the act of prophesizing colonial apocalypse Wedderburn employs print to call upon “ye Africans” to produce an insurgent double image—a communally envisaged emergent Black world wherein partial sovereignties of the plantation provision grounds and mountains unite in production and nourishment of a Caribbean geography filled by and reciprocally nourishing of Black life. Here, then, it is perhaps possible to propose a simple image of the obeah-practitioner that it may be possible to imagine from a carefully posited interpretative standpoint of a diaspora who knew the social, agricultural, and spiritual worlds of the Black Caribbean. Perhaps an obeah-practitioner wields a bill-hook to harvest, chop, and with its flat edge crush the herbs, flowers, and fruits of the Jamaican landscape. Perhaps she makes a healing balm from some things and sets others aflame in a ritual of spiritual possession, singeing forth an African ancestral realm into the clammy Jamaican air.

4. Conclusions: Black Holes, Mnemonic Foliage

I close amidst foliage. As features of Wedderburn’s archival undergrowth, vipers, herbs, fruits, and, yea, even the buds of trees, make up what I want to call the mnemonic foliage of Wedderburn’s archives. They register as memories of African rooted spiritual, political, and ecological ways of knowing which might be activated by contact between Wedderburn’s words and an audience similarly sensitive to Black life in the Caribbean12. In this sense, Wedderburn’s ecological imagery is resonant of what J. T. Roane calls a “Black hole:“ that is as a future oriented communal memory of a Black commons “forged around the products of a unique and threatened ecology … a vision of social life, vitality, and cosmological integrity … [which] through the refusal to be seen, hiding in plain sight, or doing things beyond the reach of surveillance enslaved Black people opened critical and sometimes strategic gaps in the cartography of mastery” (Roane 2018, pp. 247–49). By fostering Black political belonging in London as well as by turning to the highly portable medium of print, Wedderburn cultivated a distinctively Black critical reading tradition and revolutionary imaginary within London’s radical circles and around the Atlantic that cannot be accounted for by Euro-centric epistemologies.

The implications of Wedderburn’s work establishing Black critical perspectives in the transatlantic radical audience of his period stretches further still when considering the consistency with which other British radicals tried to send their writings to the Caribbean. In Axe No. 6, for example, Wedderburn includes a letter supposedly written by his Jamaican-based half-Maroon, half-sister, Miss Elizabeth Campbell explaining that “The free Mulattoes are reading Cobbett’s Register, and talking about St. Domingo” (Wedderburn 1991c, p. 108). In 1817, the Jamaican Royal Gazette published and denounced a tract written by Wedderburn’s radical comrade, Thomas Evans. And, as Jospeh Albernaz has pointed out, “a colonial commission in Barbados investigating Bussa’s Rebellion (1816) cited the conjunction of Spencean and abolitionist ideas as an inciting cause” (Albernaz 2022, p. 553). In holding these material and subjunctive historical realities together, a picture of Afrodiasporic people bringing their own critical perspectives to bear on British radical writings coheres. This is an interpretive scenario future studies in British, Black, and circum-Atlantic radicalism should take into account. Wedderburn’s author-audience relations with his Afrodiasporic audience points towards a broader ongoing transatlantic Black hermeneutical insurgency—one which approaches inevitably, and which survives in contestation, as a foundation, and as the harbinger of a future beyond the coming abolition of the plantation regime. As he writes in Axe No. 4, “print is my engine of destruction” (Wedderburn [1817] 1991b, p. 96).