The African resistance tradition favored suicide over assault and metaphysics over politics.

Evidence

Such was the stuff from which legends were made among the Africans. Where to deny to one’s self the eating of salt (the “ocean-sea”?) was a guarantee of the retention of the power to fly, really fly, home. All of it was a part of a tradition that was considerably different from what was made of the individualistic and often spontaneous motives that energized the runaway, the arsonist, the poisoner. It more easily sustained suicide than assault, and its ideological, psycho-social, cultural, and historical currencies were more charismatic than political. When its actualization was frustrated, it became obeah, voodoo, myalism, pocomania—the religions of the oppressed as Vittorio Lanternari put it. When it was realized, it could become the Palmares, the Bush Negro settlements, and, at its heights, Haiti. But always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 835

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the collective African tradition — communal, charismatic, metaphysical — from the individualistic motives of the runaway or arsonist, and traces its degeneration into obeah/voodoo or its realization as Palmares and Haiti.
• QUESTION: The salt-fast and flying-home myth deserves follow-up: what is the deeper cosmological content of ‘denying salt’ as guaranteeing flight — is this a specific West/Central African belief worth researching?