Damma’s decision to write in her native West African language was unprecedented and it offers a unique opportunity to imagine how the adoption of Dutch Creole, like other European and Creole languages, affected Damma’s patterns of thinking and ways of knowing, as she was forcibly transported from “adga tome” to St. Thomas, and from Gbe to Dutch creole.

Damma’s shifting use of the terms “Popo” and “adga tome” in her letter to the Queen of Denmark reveals how African diasporic identities—and the meaning of “nation”—were shaped by language, geography, and the lived realities of transatlantic slavery.

Damma’s letter reveals how the West African deity Mawu—also called Mau, Bruku, and vodu—traveled with her across the Atlantic, embodying both continuity and adaptation in her understanding of God amidst slavery and conversion.

Damma’s letter exposes how the concept of “race” was reshaped across languages and empires, revealing her critique of white Christian supremacy and her call for Black religious freedom in a land where worship meant resistance.

Born in West Africa and later enslaved in St. Thomas, Damma—also known as Marotta and Madlena—navigated captivity, faith, and freedom to become a Moravian elder whose life bridged African spiritual traditions and Caribbean Christianity.

Domingo Gesoe, known as Mingo—Damma’s son—was a literate preacher, scribe, and Moravian leader whose extraordinary life bridged enslavement and influence, West Africa and Europe, and blurred the boundaries between freedom, faith, and power in the colonial Caribbean.

Damma’s life unfolded within the violent, multicultural world of the Danish West Indies, where sugar plantations, racial hierarchies, rebellion, and creole kinship shaped a colonial society built on slavery—that was constantly at risk of being overturned.

The Moravian mission to St. Thomas—sparked by an Afro-Caribbean man’s plea and sustained by the faith of Black converts like Damma and Rebecca—became a radical experiment in interracial Christianity that challenged colonial power and produced one of the earliest archives of African diasporic writing in the Americas.

Virgin Islands Dutch Creole emerged in the late seventeenth century, following the colonization and settlement of the Danish West Indies.

The Gbe language cluster, spoken across West Africa, consists of multiple lects with varying mutual intelligibility. Despite linguistic differences, historical and contemporary evidence suggests strong cross-dialect communication and interaction.