Damma’s Life: From Adga Tome to St. Thomas
Damma’s Life: From Adga Tome to St. Thomas
by Louise Sebro
When Damma first met the Moravian missionaries in 1736, she was described as an older woman. She was likely born in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Damma told the missionaries a little about her life in Africa. Her parents, she said, had taught her to bend towards the ground and pray to God every morning before breakfast and every evening before she went to sleep. Others in her country, she said, did the same. But the people who lived near the coast and interacted with the Europeans did not do this.
From this short narrative, a tale of familial and cultural practice unfolds. Damma was part of a family. That life, and that family, was in Africa: in the area then known by the Europeans as “the Slave Coast,” what is today situated in the western part of the Bight of Benin. Damma described herself as being from “Popo in Africa” and she called her homeland “adga tome” (see What is a Nation?).
Damma’s Homeland and Religious Upbringing
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region known as “the Slave Coast” and its hinterland consisted of several different kingdoms. The dominant kingdom in the last half of the seventeenth century was Allada but by 1720, the kingdom of Dahomey was ascendant. Most of the other kingdoms in the region became vassals, while Dahomey functioned as a tributary state to the Yoruba empire of Oyo. As Robin Law has shown, Dahomey is often referred to as Fon or Affong, which is today an ethnic and linguistic category. Aside from Dahomey and Allada, the kingdom of Whydah (or Fida/Ouidah) was an important polity, and the coastal town called Whydah was one of the most important slave trading ports for the transatlantic slave trade.
The term “Popo” is connected to two political entities in West Africa: Little Popo was the term the Europeans used to describe Aneho, a small city-state where some inhabitants spoke Gbe while others spoke an Akan language. Great Popo was a small kingdom to the east of Little Popo, and it was inhabited by the Hula. As such, the term Popo as used in West Africa during Damma’s lifetime referred to two well-defined political entities, but it could also be used as a broader ethnic or national term like the term Adga or Aja, which Damma also invoked. Both terms help us place Damma’s origin somewhere in the borderlands between present-day Togo and Benin.
Damma’s reference to the deity Mawu, the female part of the dual creator god within the Fon religious world (Mawu-Liisa), helps to confirm her origin (see What is God?). People of this area worshipped a pantheon of deities (vodu), interacted with ancestors, and practiced ifa, the art of divination. The religious systems were part of what we today define as the broader Fon-Yoruba culture. Deities like Legba the trickster, messenger, and protector of crossroads and homes, and Ogun, the god of iron and war, were widely worshiped in West Africa. Other deities were more local, like the rainbow serpent Dangbe, who was especially worshiped in Whydah. Many of the religious beliefs of this area were transported to the Americas and became important elements of Haïtian Vodou, Cuban Santeria, and Brazilian Candomblé.
When Damma was born, Europeans had been present in Damma’s homeland for more than a century. There were also Muslim influences from across Africa due to the region’s numerous trade routes. The historian Ray Kea has suggested that Catholic missionaries in Allada may have influenced Damma before she was sent to St. Thomas. While it is possible that she encountered Christianity before her transatlantic passage, there is no evidence that Damma herself grew up Catholic, even though another woman in St. Thomas named Magdalena was described by the mission historian C.G.A. Oldendorp as being Catholic. Instead, Damma’s West African religious heritage was fluid and included the Fon-Yoruba traditions of vodun and ifa.
The Middle Passage and Arrival in St. Thomas
We do not know how old Damma was when she was captured, separated from her family, and forced on board a slave ship. She may have been one of the 494 enslaved individuals shipped from Whydah on the ship Kurprinzess in 1699, which was owned by the Brandenburg African Company. The Brandenburg African Company operated regularly out of Whydah, the busiest slave trading port in West Africa, and the company also had an active presence in St. Thomas.
After arriving in St. Thomas, Damma was imprisoned before she was sold at auction. Contemporary sources, like the daily journals of the local administration and the historian Oldendorp, describe in detail how newly arrived enslaved people were detained in the gated yard of the Brandenburger African Company while people of African descent already living on the island approached the fences, talking to new arrivals about what they could expect in the coming days, weeks, and years.
It was most likely during this traumatic period that Damma was given the name Marotta. Enslaved people were commonly assigned new names by those who enslaved them. We can presume that “Marotta” was Damma’s “slave name” because the Dutch Creole version of her letter is signed “Marotta, now Madlena.” In the church registers, “Marotta” is listed as Damma’s name before her baptism. The fact that she signed the Gbe-language version of her letter with the name “Damma,” meanwhile, suggests that this was a name that she associated with her place of origin.
Enslaved Laborer and Mother
At some point, Damma was purchased by the plantation owner Jørgen Carstensen. When Carstensen died in 1721, a woman named Marotta was listed as an old field worker living on his plantation in Mosquito Bay, which is now known as Lindbergh Bay.
Mosquito Bay was a large plantation located just west of the main town, Charlotte Amalie, which was known as Tappus. In 1721, when Carstensen died, there were 105 enslaved people living on the estate: eight worked in the house while fifty-three men, twenty-eight women, and sixteen children labored in the fields. The average age of the enslaved workers at that time was twenty-five.
The enslaved population lived in a small village on the Mosquito Bay plantation, where they cooked, slept, loved, danced, played, and worshiped with the little free time they were granted. The workday commenced at four or five in the morning and lasted until seven in the evening, with a break at noon for one-to-two hours. Sunday was a free day, when people could work their small plots where they grew their own crops or go to the market. Life expectancy was short, diseases were widespread, and violence was common. Mentally and physically, life under slavery was harsh and suicide rates were high.
During her enslavement, Damma, then known as Marotta, gave birth to a son named Mingo (see Mingo). While there are no records documenting the date or circumstances of Mingo’s birth, we can surmise that Mingo was her child because the Moravian records refer to their relationship as mother and child; we also know that Mingo was enslaved to Carstensen’s son, Johann Lorentz Carstens.
From Enslaved to Free: Life in Tappus (Charlotte Amalie)
When Damma met the missionaries in 1736, she was no longer enslaved. She presumably did not purchase her freedom, which was an uncommon practice at the time, but was freed by her enslaver, Johann Lorentz Carstens. This would have occurred sometime between 1721, when Jørgen Carstensen died, and 1736, when the missionary Spangenberg described her as free in his diary. By the mid-1730s, Damma, still known primarily as Marotta, was free and living with her husband, Djacki, in a small house in Tappus, later known by its official name, Charlotte Amalie.
Djacki, like Damma, was listed in the church registers of the Moravian church, and both the registers and Oldendorp described him as being from the “Popo” nation. Damma and Djacki may have spoken Gbe in their home and maintained traditions and customs of their homeland. We do not know how Damma and Djacki earned their living, but the few free Afro-Caribbeans living in St. Thomas tended to work as vendors, fishermen, or craftsmen.
From Marotta to Madlena: Moravian Elder with African Roots
In September 1736, Damma met the Moravian missionary and church leader August Gottlieb Spangenberg, who was visiting the island. He was impressed by her religiosity, even though she was, according to him, not Christian. Spangenberg described not only her prayers, but also noted her relation to food, “tak[ing] some of it and burn[ing] it as a sacrifice to the Lord.” She would then “get down on her knees” and thank God “with all her heart.” She was deeply devout and put her fate in God’s hand, refusing European medicine when she was sick.
Scholars have speculated about Damma’s religious practice. Could her bending toward the ground be a sign of Muslim influence, as the historian Jon Sensbach has suggested? Alternatively, the historian Ray A. Kea has suggested that Damma may have had a Catholic upbringing in West Africa, though his initial conclusion mixed up “Madlena” with another woman in the Moravian records named “Magdalena.” Kea also argued that there are important signs of religious fluidity in Damma’s praxis. Perhaps her daily devotions signaled an intense personal connection with the Gods predominant in vodu? The fact that Damma’s 1739 letter referred to Mawu, the female part of the supreme deity in vodun, supports this interpretation, as the historian Louise Sebro has argued. Overall, Damma’s religious practice in St. Thomas shows the influence of the Fon-Yoruba religious traditions.
According to the Moravian records, Damma showed interest in Christianity when she first met the missionaries in 1736. At that time, she believed that she would need to learn Dutch and read before she could be baptized. This, they assured her, was not necessary. The following year, in December 1737, Damma was baptized alongside her husband Djacki, who was given the Christian name “Joseph.” She quickly rose to the status of elder in the congregation, the highest position she could obtain.
Even after her baptism, Damma continued sacrificing food, though only on very special occasions. The missionaries noted this and described this practice as African. The missionary Friedrich Martin presumed that her libations were meant for the Christian God, though it is possible that Damma continued to offer sacrifices to her ancestors, her personal Vodun, and possibly even for Legba, the protector of all houses in the vodu tradition. In her 1739 letter, Damma demonstrated flexibility in her understanding of Christian practice and she may have integrated the Christian god into her framework of vodun. (see What is God?)
Damma remained an elder of the Moravian congregation and a valued missionary helper until she died in 1747. Her final resting place is unknown, but as an elder, she may have been put to rest close to the church that was built in the 1740s on the missionaries’ own plantation, Posaunenberg, later renamed New Herrnhut. Other prominent Afro-Caribbean members of the church were buried in a small, secluded section of the burial ground, including her son Mingo.
Masthead image: Camille Pissaro, A Creek in St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), 1856. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
adga tome