Thomas Moran, Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, oil on canvas 1861-1862. Chased by hounds and men with guns (upper right), a man and woman flee in swamp stream.

The Dismal Swamp Mfinda

The Ecollective’s Dismal Swamp mfinda imagines as well as investigates life in the secret black fugitive communities that developed in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina between the early 18th to mid 19th centuries.

"Mfinda" refers to a traditional Bakongo space of spiritual transformation. The earliest black inhabitants of the Dismal Swamp most likely knew something about mfinda spaces within large areas of central and central south western Africa.

Several First Nations people (include the Nansemond, Croatan and Hatteras) lived in and around the swamp, using it for hunting and farming. After the European arrives, many of these people were pushed from their lands and the swamp became a refuge for people seeking safety from colonial expansion and violence.

The first people were joined by maroon communities—black people who had escaped slavery and established settlements in the swamp.

These black and native communities interacted, with indigenous people sharing their generational knowledge of the swamp with the new arrivals.

Eventually the indigenous populations fell off and the communities of African descendants grew.

Above: Fugitives in the Dismal Swamp, Virginia, painting depicting the pre-Civil War era of enslavement and the Dismal Swamp legend, 1888. 

Views of historical marker and signage at Lake Drummond in the Dismal Swamp. Photos: Gary Singer

Video: Gary Singer

Panoramic video of Lake Drummond. The plentiful, fresh water in the 3,100 acre lake in the Dismal Swamp was essential to the survival of self-liberating people.

Dismal Swamp trails were carefully hidden

The trails in the Dismal Swamp were carefully hidden but accessible if you recognized the notches on trees and other furtive signs. Thousands of enslaved people followed these trails to full freedom both beyond and within the swamp. Some could have moved on but chose to stay.
The secret communities were built amid a profusion of plant and animal species within a 2,000 square mile, marshy coastal plain on the Virginia-North Carolina border.  
The concealed trails went over fallen logs, through forests, and around the perfect drinking water lake. During the Colonial period, small alligators suddenly emerged in bogs, shimmering in the late June sun, and vanished by October.  
Changes in the swamp's ecosystem, including habitat loss and human intervention, may have led to the alligators' disappearance. The Dismal Swamp was in the northern edge of the alligators' range; they persisted longer in South Carolina

Today spirits of the Dismal Swamp await to be revealed.

One of them is the indomitable Angola Peter who fled slavery and led a massive plot to free others.
When the plot was discovered, Angola Peter escaped capture by fleeing into the Great Dismal Swamp and may have been involved in at least one other rebellion planned from the swamp. 
During his initial years in the swamp, Peter Angola probably lived closer to the periphery, along with others, now known as “fringe maroons” who maintained furtive contact with people on the outside.
From J. Brent Morris' research, we know that “Angola Peter” is cited by this name as the leader of the rebellion in a 1709 letter from Virginia slaveholders to a Virginia magistrate. 
Other self-emancipating black people settled deep within the Swamp and never came out again. Many were born, matured, married, raised families and died there. 
Peter’s first name "Angola" implies that he or his immediate ancestor(s) were brought to Virginia from that region. The first Africans to arrive in North America in 1619 were from a Congo region that was called “Angola” by Portuguese explorers and slave traders – an alteration of the local peoples’ word for ruler or king.  
Angola Peter may have taken “Angola” for his first name because he knew it was derived from the word, “leader,” in the language of his people.  The Ndongo and Loango kingdoms became known by the Portuguese as “Angola.” 
In the Bakongo conception, the mfinda acts as a bridge between the physical realm (nseke) and the spiritual realm (mpémba) with the Kalûnga river flowing between them.
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Cyclical conception of physical reality

The chart below depicts the cyclical mfinda concept based on explanations by Fu Kiau Bunseki

Left: map of Congo including Angola  by G. Mercator - J. Hondius, 1607

October 27, 2024 was a partly sunny day in the Dismal Swamp. As clouds passed over a large open marsh land, the cattails were luminous. This is one of the many enchanting elements of the now misleadingly-named Dismal Swamp. The name goes back to the English colonists' view of swamps as unhealthy tropical miasmas. Photo: Gary Singer

The Yowa, or Dikenga Cross,  is a symbol in Bakongo spirituality that depicts the physical world, the spiritual (ancestral) world, the Kalûnga river (line) that runs between the two worlds, the four moments of the sun, and the mbûngi circle.

Diagram source

Creative Commons/Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

For early 18th Angolan descendants and similar groups, the Great Dismal Swamp wilderness very likely represented a kind of return to traditional metaphysical portals as well as a refuge from bondage. 

By that time, elements of European and indigenous cultures and African cultures were combining so that the early black swamp settlers and future generations to flee there would develop hybrid cultures. Because the survival of black swamp communities depended on keeping them rigorously hidden, the isolation would have reinforced African strains in the hybridization.

This fantastic liberatory story sparked the imaginations of writers as geographically distant but sympathetic as Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, a two-part novel. Although much detail is imagined, she had learned about how people lived and talked in the South during the early to mid 19th century.

In recreating and imagining the lives of black people in the Great Dismal Swamp, we're blending fiction with historical documentation. We'll also explore the environmental aspects of the swamp: its role as a sanctuary for both humans and wildlife, its dense and varied vegetation, and its land and water formations. 

After a return to the present to establish the context, our story begins on a southeastern Virginia tobacco farm before Peter took Angola as his first name. 

(To be continued)