Bosumtwe to Baptism

"If a Negro is not a Baptist," they sometimes say down South, "someone has tampered with his religion." Last week this ecclesiastical wisecrack got scientific backing from Anthropology Professor Melville Jean Herskovits of Northwestern, who declared in The Myth of the Negro Past (Harper; $4) that the river cults of West Africa predisposed Southern Negroes to favor the Baptist Church.

"In the New World, where aggressive . . . Protestantism made the retention of the . . . African religion difficult . . . the most logical adaptation for the slaves . . . and the simplest, was to give their adherence to that Christian sect which . . . in emphasizing baptism by total immersion . . . most resembled the types of worship known to them. . . . In the U.S., where neither Bosumtwe nor watra mama nor Damballa is worshiped, Negro Baptists do not run into the water under possession by African gods. Their water rituals are those of baptism. Yet it is significant that, as the novitiate . . . is immersed, the spirit descends on him at that moment if at all, and a possession hysteria develops . . . almost indistinguishable from the possession brought on by the African water deities."

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