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Obeah has been called superstition, “black magic,” and even a crime but those labels have a history, and that history was built to serve colonial power. We sit down with historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner to trace how African-derived spiritual and healing traditions in Jamaica were deliberately stigmatized through slavery, missionary politics, and law.

We follow the chain from a rare 1755 archival reference to the shockwaves of 1760, when Tacky's Rebellion prompts British colonial authorities to outlaw Obeah as a threat to control. Along the way, we unpack why defining Obeah is so difficult when most surviving sources come from enslavers and missionaries, and how Gerbner’s microhistory method reads the archive for what it tries to hide. One of the most surprising turns is the Moravian missionary Zacharias George Caries being called an “Obeahman,” opening up a “space of correlation” where Afro-Jamaicans do not separate Christianity from Obeah in the rigid way many of us inherit today.

We also connect this history to the present: Obeah remains illegal in Jamaica, and the long arc of criminalization still shapes public stigma, community silence, and debates about decriminalization. If you care about Caribbean history, Jamaican culture, African diaspora religion, and the politics of the archive, this conversation offers a new way to see what we have been taught to fear and who benefits from that fear.

Katharine Gerbner is a historian of religion, race, and freedom. She examines religious practices that have been excluded from traditional definitions of religion and develops multilingual archival strategies to uncover stories that have been marginalized and forgotten. She is the author of Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025) and Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She is Associate Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota.

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The strangest thing about the truth is how often it arrives late. A story your elders carried for years gets dismissed as “just talk” until an archive opens, a report drops, a government admits wrongdoing, or scholars finally confirm what communities already knew. When that happens, the past doesn’t simply become clearer. It becomes heavier, more complicated, and harder to tuck away. In today's episode, I offer a reflection on Caribbean history, memory, and what it means to relearn entire narratives, not just “humanize” individual historical figures. I think through why truth is less a single revelation and more a long process, shaped by silence, denial, and distortion.

Then comes the question that won’t let go: what does reconciliation actually require? Forgiveness, acknowledgement, accountability, compensation, structural change? And who gets to decide when it’s “done”? If you care about Caribbean history and culture, political violence, colonial legacies, activism, and public memory, this reflection is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review, then tell me how you choose to carry your history forward.

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Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be Black and Indigenous at the same time, especially in societies that insist those identities must be separate.

We dig into the “void in the archive” and why collective memory and oral tradition become more than storytelling. For Garifuna communities, memory shapes political life right now: claims to ancestral territories, fights for land rights, and daily resistance to anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in nationalist narratives that erase contributions made long before the modern republics were born. From there, we explore Garifuna Settlement Day as an embodied archive and a public demand for visibility, first in Belize and later in New York City. We connect diaspora routes to labor history in the United States, including pathways through New Orleans and the long work of building community “in the company of” other Black populations.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City.

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Produced by Breadfruit Media