From Hell to Hell: Central Africans and Catholic Visual Catechesis in the Early Modern Atlantic Slave Trade.

This article examines the Jesuit-designed multisensory catechesis administered to newly arrived enslaved Africans in seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias (present-day Colombia), focusing on the prominent use of Christian imagery of hell to convey salvation and damnation. African interpreter-catechists from central Africa, who had survived the Middle Passage, translated and explained these visual and oral teachings, linking the brutal conditions of enslavement and the transatlantic voyage to the Christian concept of hell. Drawing on rare testimonies from the beatification inquest of Jesuit priest Pedro Claver and complementary missionary texts and artworks, the study explores the linguistic, spiritual, and affective responses of enslaved Africans to this catechesis within broader Atlantic cultural contexts. The article highlights how these encounters reveal enslaved individuals as active interpreters of their trauma and faith, contributing nuanced perspectives to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and Afro-Latin American spirituality.