By 1822, almost all the slaves in the plantations
surrounding Charleston had joined the revolt. The
plan was brilliantly simple. The rebels would all
station themselves at the doors of Euro-Americans;
late at night, a group of rebels would start a major
fire. When the men came out their doors, the rebels
would kill them with axes, picks, or guns. They
would then enter the houses and kill all the occu-
pants. Like Prosser’s revolt, this one almost suc-
ceeded. The rebels were betrayed early in the game,
but the cell structure prevented officials from find-
ing out the plot or identifying any of the leaders. It
was only the day before that a slave, who knew the
entire plot, betrayed Vesey. He and his co-leaders
were hung, but only one confessed. The insurrec-
tion failed, but not before it demonstrated that a
religious man, Congo Jack, played a role in inspir-
ing the people to revolution as the spiritual advisor
to Denmark Vesey. What was clear in the insurrec-
tion was that Africans, many of them recently from
the continent, were partly persuaded to join Vesey
by Congo Jack’s ritual ceremonies.
Molefi Kete AsanteSeealsoChaminuka; Seers
Further Readings
Buckley, R. N. (1997).Congo Jack:A Novel. Mt. Kisco,
NY: Pinto Press.
CONJURERS
The wordconjureris often used to describe some-
one in African religion who possesses unusual
powers of discernment based on the manipulation
of objects. Although the term is usually applied to
men, such as “the conjure man,” it can equally
apply to women who have the ability to perform
extraordinary deeds.
Often the term is used for someone with power
who practices African religion in the Americas. It
was a favorite description during the enslavement
for a particularly spiritual person who, because of
his reflection and meditations, often in the woods
or mountains, could foretell the future, heal the
sick, cause the lame to walk, and put obstacles in
the way of one’s enemies. In this regard, the con-
jurer man was of considerable importance to
African societies in the Americas.
Africans in the American South found their
link to the ancestors in the special knowledge and
ability of the conjurer. In fact, when the Civil War
ended, only 15% of the Africans in America were
Christians. It took the efforts of white Christians
and black African Methodists to evangelize the
recently freed populations to make them Christian.
Consequently, the African people relied on the
spiritual visions and sacred talismans of the
conjurer for comfort in the times of sickness,
strength in the times of weakness, and hope
during the many times of disappointment and
hopelessness.
Thus, by virtue of his omnipresence during
slave society, conjurers became, in effect, the spir-
itual leaders of the masses of black people until
the increasing numbers of Christian ministers dis-
placed them during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Indeed, the conjurer and the preacher
were often the same person, suggesting the ability
of the older trade to transform itself into the
newer one among Africans after the Civil War and
into the early 20th century.
In literature and practice, the conjurer is the
person who holds the key to ethical, moral, spiri-
tual, and physical well-being in the community.
Quite clearly, the conjurer can “fix” situations
that might have seemed hopeless to those who
were unable to manipulate the spiritual powers.
There was no fear in the conjurer because he had
conquered all forms of fear, becoming for the
ordinary person a character and personality that
was sent to correct all faults. In some cases, the
masses believed that if you were truly “fixed,” it
would take a powerful conjurer, that is, spiritually
gifted individual, to heal you.
There has always been a link between the spir-
itual and the material in African religion, the one
flowing into the other so imperceptibly that it is
hard to recognize any distinction that makes sense
to the average person. The spiritual and the mate-
rial are not really separate entities, but parts of
one massive whole of human experience in
African thought. Thus, the conjurer might be
thought of as the person who best negotiates the
interstices between the extremes of the human
condition. In the annals of African American,176 Conjurers