Book Review Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017).
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EROEN DEWULF’S The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves is a deep dive into the history and origins of Pinkster, a celebration with Dutch roots that became the most important holiday of the year for enslaved Africans and African Americans living in New Netherland and New York during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More than a single study of the Pinkster holiday, Dewulf’s book is also a welcome and intriguing addition to the history of slavery in New Netherland and New York. Previous historians have examined Pinkster in their work, but Dewulf’s study is undoubtedly the most comprehensive study of the subject to date. What’s more, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo provides a strikingly new interpretation of Pinkster’s history, an interpretation grounded in the author’s firm grasp of religious history, Dutch, Iberian, and African history, and the seventeenthcentury Atlantic World. Historians have generally understood African American celebrations of Pinkster as the outgrowth of New World conditions and circumstances. In these histories, the seventeenth-century Dutch brought Pinkster to New Netherland, and free and enslaved people of African descent transformed it into a celebration of African cultural traditions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pinkster is, in fact, a shortened version of the Dutch word Pinksteren, a celebration of the Christian holiday of Pentecost, which has a long history in Dutch-speaking areas of Europe. What’s more, Pinkster celebrations did take place in New Netherland during the period of Dutch control and settlement. The Reverend Jonas Michaelius referred to Pinksteren in a1628 letter from New Netherland, and in 1655 a tavern owner in Beverwijck (today’s Albany) received permission to engage in a traditional Pinkster game of “shooting the parrot” on the third day after Pentecost [p. 27]. These seventeenth-century references to Pinkster indicate that the holiday and its traditions had not only come with the Dutch
settlers to New Netherland, but that it continued to follow a familiar European form in the New World, and Dewulf acknowledges as much. Indeed, his careful and meticulous mining of sources indicates that the Dutch Pinkster celebrations in New Netherland resembled their European counterparts. After the mid-1600s, Pinkster does not reappear in the historical record until the eighteenth century, and numerous descriptions of the Pinkster celebrations in New York City and in Albany survive in mideighteenth and early twentieth-century texts. In these accounts, Pinkster-goers and spectators described enslaved and free people of African descent gathering for a weeklong festival immediately after Pentecost. The writers who observed the festivities took special note of dances, parades, and processions which were all accompanied by West African drums and instrumentation. That these traditions survived long into the nineteenth century testifies to the cultural resistance and resiliency of free and enslaved people of African descent in New Netherland and New York. Based on the few accounts of Pinkster that survive and in light of a long period between the mid-seventeenth and mideighteenth century when Pinkster does not appear in the historical record at all, most historians conclude that the African American Pinkster festivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries evolved over time from the early Dutch celebrations. This was not so, according to Dewulf. “The American version of Pinkster cannot be reduced to simply an offspring of a Dutch tradition,” the author writes [pp., 33–34]. To make this case, Dewulf begins The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo by examining the Dutch Pinkster tradition in the Netherlands and New Netherland. He then turns his focus to the African American Pinkster celebrations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dewulf’s analysis reveals significant differences between seventeenth-century Dutch Pinkster celebrations and the African American variant of the holiday. Traditionally, Dutch Pinkster celebrations included a procession featuring a young, unmarried woman called the Pinkster Bride (pinksterbruid) or the Pinkster Flower (pinksterblom) [p. 15]. The woman typically wore a wreath and crown of flowers and symbolized both fertility and
the coming of spring. By contrast, African American Pinkster festivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries highlighted no such maiden; instead, a Pinkster King presided over the festivities. Significantly, the Pinkster King was a man characterized by physical strength but also political and social standing within the slave community and in his dealings with white enslavers. The role of the Pinkster King is central to Dewulf’s reinterpretation of the African American celebrations of Pinkster. In his third chapter, “In Search of the Pinkster King,” Dewulf offers an extensive analysis of black procession culture and holiday celebrations throughout the colonial Atlantic world. In numerous locations including New England, New Orleans, and throughout the Caribbean, Dewulf points to similar instances of slave communities selecting and organizing around a figure similar to the Pinkster King. Pinkster celebrations and the role and authority of the Pinkster King, Dewulf tells us, were a “manifestation of a well-organized cooperative structure” among enslaved populations throughout the Atlantic world [p. 8]. The striking similarities in the social structures of geographically disparate enslaved communities leads Dewulf to conclude that Pinkster was a “specific variety of a much broader cultural phenomenon,” and the origins of that cultural phenomenon can be found on the West Coast of Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [p. 13]. More precisely, during the sixteenth century large sections of West and Central Africa were either under Portuguese control or influence, and Portuguese Catholic missionary efforts had been especially effective in the Kingdoms of Kongo and Angola. The reach of the Portuguese Catholic missionary effort hinged on the appointment of Kongolese and Angolan lay ministers and the formation of religious fraternal organizations or “brotherhoods” among the converted [pp. 110–113].These lay brotherhoods served various social functions, and often incorporated indigenous West-Central African belief systems and rituals. This fusion, Dewulf argues, included processions and celebrations with a “syncretic character that combined Iberian and indigenous African elements,” potentially including “traditional king election ceremonies in the
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