In 1834, the Liberia Herald, rejoiced that “the Devil Bush of the Grand Bassa people” was in a moment of spiritual transition. Thanks to Black Christian colonizers, the article enthused, “the spot near which the nameless bloody rites of Moloch have been perpetrated for centuries is soon to be the site of a mission house.”[1] The Savannah-born Black Baptist Adam W. Anderson had just accepted an appointment to live among the Vey. Five years later, Ephraim Titler, a Black missionary reported back to the Presbyterian mission office that the practice continued, adding the detail that the Devil Bush is a site for genital cutting.[2] Indeed the practice continued long past the lives of missionaries like Anderson and Titler, as missionary reports from 1893 indicate.[3]
Despite the violent imposition of capitalist settler-colonial Christianity, Vey rituals of West African womanhood proved difficult to control and many indigenous West African spiritual practices could not be extinguished. The battle over the Devil Bush in Liberia offers a revealing case study in how conflicts over capitalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy frequently played out on the terrain of women’s bodies. Charting this story exposes the violent relationships between patriarchy, religion, and empire.
[1] For an example of how these stories were reprinted for readers in the United States, see The African Repository and Colonial Journal Volume 9 (Washington: 1834), 242.
[2] Ephraim Titler to Walter Lowrie, June 6, 1839, Bablu Station, Liberia. Correspondence of the Board of Foreign Missions, 1835-1910. Presbyterian Historical Society.
[3] C. C. Pennick, “The Devil Bush of West Africa,” Fetter’s Southern Magazine 2, no 9 (April 1893), 22-532.