ON MARCH 30 we commemorate Spiritual/Shouter Baptist Liberation Day, our most important holiday.
This date in 1951 marked the repeal of the 1917 Shouter Prohibition Ordinance that outlawed the Spiritual Baptists, referred to by the colonial authorities as Shouter Baptists.
Persecuted and prosecuted in a reign of terror during colonialism, the Spiritual/Shouter Baptists symbolised colonial resistance.
Police did not need warrants to raid homes where Spiritual Baptists worshipped. Police beat them and hauled them off to court. The Spiritual/Shouter Baptists persisted and they resisted. Their resilience was remarkable. They had nowhere to turn.
The courts represented the crown and upper-class planters. Calypsonians – even Growling Tiger, our first official national calypso monarch – mocked them. Spiritual Baptist preachers could not marry people or baptise them in rivers or the ocean, which was an important symbolic act.
In his new book, Against Toleration: Britain’s Persecution of the Spiritual Baptists, Claudius K Fergus writes, “There was something poetic and triumphal about baptism by immersion in living water for African-Caribbean Baptists: living water had carried them into bondage; living water was emancipating them from psychological, intellectual and cultural enslavement.” Fergus, a former University of the West Indies lecturer in history, reminds us that “Colonialism sought to prevent self-esteem, self-realisation and economic emancipation. Africans pushed back with a spirituality rooted in their culture.”
He tells us that there is no simple or single answer to the origin of the Spiritual Baptist denomination, but early scholars attributed its rise to the Merikins, black slaves who fought for the British on the losing side of the US War of 1812, when Britain invaded the US and burned the White House.
The British settled the loyal slaves that fought for them in Nova Scotia, Canada and Trinidad. Festus says by 1823 there were 883 Merikins in Trinidad. They brought their religion, their culture and their language.
The British outlawed the Shakers in St Vincent (in 1912) and “Shouter” Baptists in TT. Colonisers manipulated facts and built their case with language, degrading the religions they outlawed by calling them Shakers and Shouter Baptists. But Baptists countered the authorities by calling themselves Spiritual Baptists.
The Spiritual Baptists represented more than colonial resistance. They showed us the importance of our creole languages. In court, they used creole and moved the crowds with it. They worshipped in creole.
Fergus says, “The African diaspora in the greater Caribbean created new languages; all interconnected; new musical genres; all interconnected; new religions; all interconnected. Each is a synthesis of many historical, cultural and cosmological elements. All were forged from resistance, to oppression and diverse struggle to humanize their environment…”
The Spiritual Baptists’ power lay in their ability to adapt. Whatever Christian rituals they took from the Merikins
