Transcending tribulations

Spectator, The, Aug 16, 2003 by Gimson, Andrew

As we walked to Kensal Rise station after the service, Roy was able to explain some of what we had seen and heard. He said the central pole was the tree of life, with a prayer-wheel around it. This sort of church, which reached its fully fledged state in Trinidad, has a tradition going back to the days of slavery. The singing, which began spontaneously as people preached, would start with a soft hum, a style dating from the time when people would sing in cotton plantations in the American South or sugar plantations in the West Indies. When they spun the young man round and round, it was to spin out an evil spirit who might have taken up abode in him: 'They're very quick to assume you've got evil spirits in you. I've seen people with a slight snuffle or cough dragged up to the front and rolled up and down in carpets or lashed gently with knotted cords.'

Roy had observed people begin at one point to use the breathing techniques that lead to a trance: 'The reason being that the church was founded in the days of slavery, when it was impossible for slaves to return to their homeland, so they got in a trance-like state and convinced themselves that their spirits were leaving their bodies and returning to Africa. You could endure being a slave if you were a member of this church, because it would give you such a rich inner life that being beaten by your master would seem of little importance. In the days of slavery, worship would have to take place in secret at night, and even under British rule this church continued for a long time to be illegal, because the British thought it was black magic. African indentured workers came to Trinidad in the late-19th century and added some of the Africanisms long after slavery was abolished in 1834.'

Not all West Indian churches are like this: many West Indians would not be seen dead in such a place, which they would call a jump-up or head-wrap church, or even dismiss as voodoo. On Sunday morning Roy and I went to a service held in a community hall in West Hampstead by the Church of God of Prophecy, which was founded in 1903 at Camp Creek in Cherokee County, North Carolina, and spread rapidly via migrant labourers returning home to the West Indies, where it competed successfully with the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. In London it has 18 churches and is attended particularly by Jamaicans and Barbadians and their descendants. To an Anglican like myself, it feels far less strange, though still extraordinarily spontaneous and loud. Much of the music is country and western, and the influence of the American South is more apparent than that of Africa. The dress is old-fashioned respectable: hats for the women, ties for the men. Children who are brought up in this church very seldom go to the bad. Like most immigrants, the West Indians, or Afro-Caribbcans as they are nowadays called, possess far more powerful traditions of spiritual and moral self-help than some outsiders realise.

Andrew Gimson is foreign editor of The Spectator.