Nonetheless, studies have shown that there were aspects of slave culture that differed from the master culture. Some of these have been interpreted as a form of resistance to oppression, while other aspects were clearly survivals of a native culture in the new society. Most of what is known about this topic comes from the circum-Caribbean world, but analogous developments may have occurred wherever alien slaves were concentrated in numbers sufficient to prevent their complete absorption by the host slave-owning or slave society. Thus slave culture was probably very different on large plantations from what it was on small farms or in urban households, where slave culture (and especially Creole slave culture) could hardly have avoided being very similar to the master culture. Slave cultures grew up within the perimeters of the masters’ monopoly of power but separate from the masters’ institutions.
Religion, which performed the multiple function of explanation, prediction, control, and communion, seems to have been a particularly fruitful area for the creation of slave culture. Africans perceived all misfortunes, including enslavement, as the result of sorcery, and their religious practices and beliefs, which were often millennial, were formulated as a way of coping with it. Myalism was the first religious movement to appeal to all ethnic groups in Jamaica, Vodou in Haiti was the product of African culture slightly refashioned on that island, and syncretic Afro-Christian religions and rituals appeared nearly everywhere throughout the New World. Slave religions usually had a supreme being and a host of lesser spirits brought from Africa, borrowed from the Amerindians, and created in response to local conditions. There were no firm boundaries between the secular and the sacred, which infused all things and activities. At least initially African slaves universally believed that posthumously they would return to their lands and rejoin their friends.
Black slaves preserved some of their culture in the New World. African medicine was practiced in America by slaves. The poisoning of masters and other hated individuals was a particularly African method of coping with evil.
