Obeah

Obeah, also spelled Obiya or Obia, is a broad term for African diasporic religious, spell-casting, and healing traditions found primarily in the former British colonies of the Caribbean. These practices derive much from West African traditions but also incorporate elements of European and South Asian origin. Many of those who practice these traditions avoid the term Obeah due to the word's pejorative connotations in many Caribbean societies.

Central to Obeah are ritual specialists who offer a range of services to paying clients. These specialists have sometimes been termed Obeahmen and Obeahwomen, although often refer to themselves in other ways, for instance calling themselves "scientists", "doctors", or "professors". Important in these ritual systems is engagement with the spirits and the manipulation of supernatural forces. A prominent role is played by healing practices, often incorporating herbal and animal ingredients. Other services include attempts to achieve justice for a client or to provide them with spiritual protection. Cursing practices have also featured in Obeah, involving the making of objects to cause harm or the production of poisons. There is considerable regional and individual variation in the nature of the rituals that practitioners of Obeah have engaged in.

Amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries, thousands of West Africans, many Ashanti or Efik, were transported to Caribbean colonies controlled by the British Empire. Here, traditional African religious practices assumed new forms, for instance being employed for the protection of Maroon communities. Enslaved Africans also absorbed British influences, especially from Christianity, and later from the Hinduism and Islam introduced by indentured South Asian migrants. The colonial elites disapproved of African traditions and introduced laws to prohibit them, using the term Obeah as a general label for these practices from the 1760s on. This suppression meant that Obeah emerged as a system of practical rituals rather than as a broader communal religion akin to Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santería. After the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s, new laws were introduced against Obeah, increasingly portraying it as fraud, laws that remained following the end of imperial rule. Since the 1980s, Obeah's practitioners have campaigned to remove these legal restrictions, often under the aegis of religious freedom.

The term Obeah has been used for practices in the Caribbean nations of the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Virgin Islands. Caribbean migrants have also taken these practices elsewhere, to countries like the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. In many Caribbean countries Obeah remains technically illegal and widely denigrated, especially given the negative assessment towards it evident in religions like Evangelical Protestantism and Rastafari.