On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas

Abstract

Scholars have long taken interest in the conversion of African slaves to Christianity in the New World which have mixed, to one degree or another, African religious forms with Christianity. The process has been studied in greatest depth by sociologists, such as Roger Bastide, anthropologists like Melville Herskovitts or art historians such as Robert Farris Thompson. Although the most devoted of the scholars concerned with this have not been historians, and much of the basic research has been in current practices rather than historic origins of African and Afro-New World religions, all scholars share some vision of the historical process. In this vision African and European religions and world views meshed in a past which is far beyond the memory of modern informants and probably dates back to the early days of Afro-European contacts.