The No. 1 trending song in Jamaica right now on YouTube is Skippa’s Money Walk, produced by DJ Mac and CrashDumny.
The song explicitly celebrates “Henny, weed and Obeah.” the latter being an illegal and widely demonized practice in Jamaica.
Skippa didn’t start this phenomenon in Jamaican music and it goes back to slavery days when Obeah became a means of resistance for African descendants against plantation owners, playing a role in rebellion across Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Rooted in African-derived spiritual traditions, practices described as Obeah have historically been associated not only with causing harm, but also with healing, protection, prophecy and survival.
That history complicates the image of Obeah that many Jamaicans have inherited.
Warning, this is a long read but bear with me and we get into the history of this both demonized and celebrated practice.
Historians Kenneth Bilby and Jerome Handler have documented the role of Obeah in healing and protection among enslaved Caribbean people, arguing that European observers disproportionately emphasized its harmful or frightening dimensions while often overlooking its socially beneficial functions. Their research describes Obeah as encompassing practices involving spiritual forces that could be used to treat illness, bring good fortune, protect against harm and avenge wrongdoing.
In Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica, historian Katharine Gerbner traces Obeah through eighteenth-century Jamaican archives. Her research shows that before criminalization, Obeah could be understood among enslaved Africans and Maroons as a prophetic practice associated with healing and death rites. It has subsequently been interpreted as an Africana religion, healing practice, science, witchcraft and other forms of spiritual knowledge.
Historically, Obeah has been applied to a range of African-derived spiritual practices and forms of knowledge across the Caribbean rather than as a single organized religion with one doctrine, scripture or institution.
Its criminalization in Jamaica can be traced directly to one of the most significant rebellions of the slavery era.
In 1760, Jamaica was shaken by Tacky’s Revolt, an uprising that began in St Mary and developed into a wider challenge to British slave society. In the aftermath, Jamaica’s colonial legislature moved to explicitly criminalize Obeah.
Gerbner notes that December 1760 marked the appearance of the Afro-Caribbean word “Obeah” in British colonial law. The legislation described Obeah as a “wicked Art” and targeted enslaved people believed to possess supernatural powers or to use materials associated with Obeah or witchcraft.
Plantation society depended not only on controlling the physical movement of enslaved people, but also on suppressing independent sources of authority and organization among them. Spiritual practitioners could occupy precisely those positions.
Obeah could provide protection, healing and spiritual confidence. In the context of rebellion, those functions could become politically threatening. Spiritual authority could become another form of power in a society designed to deny enslaved Africans power of their own.
The suppression of Obeah was therefore not simply a religious disagreement. It formed part of a broader struggle over power.
But colonialism did more than outlaw Obeah. It also helped shape what later generations would understand the word to mean.
Historian Diana Paton argues that colonial laws helped produce and police the boundaries between what was accepted as religion and what was categorized as Obeah. In particular, she argues that colonial constructions isolated aspects of Caribbean spirituality that could be labelled “magic,” “superstition” and “witchcraft” from practices that fitted European concepts of legitimate religion.
Paton also connects that construction to colonial representations of Caribbean people as “backward.”
Colonial authorities were not merely declaring particular harmful acts illegal. They were attaching criminal meaning to a broad category of African-derived spiritual power.
Once that category entered law, its stigma could survive beyond slavery itself.
And it did.
Slavery ended in the British Caribbean in the nineteenth century, but the policing of Obeah continued.
Jamaica introduced a stand-alone Obeah Act in 1854. Later legislation culminated in the Obeah Act of 1898. Jamaica’s Ministry of Justice currently lists the Obeah Act among the country’s statutes and gives its operational date as June 2, 1898.
If criminalization had been concerned exclusively with preventing rebellion by enslaved people, emancipation should have substantially weakened the justification for criminalizing it.
Instead, Obeah continued to occupy a place outside officially accepted ideas of religion, respectability and social order.
Even one of the punishments associated with the legislation survived remarkably late.
Until 2013, Jamaica’s Obeah Act still contained whipping as a possible punishment. Parliament passed the Obeah (Amendment) Act that year specifically to abolish whipping as a penalty. The amendment did not abolish the Obeah Act itself.
More than 250 years after Obeah first entered Jamaican criminal law following Tacky’s Revolt, the legal inheritance of that history remained.
Law, however, explains only part of Obeah’s stigma.
Jamaica also developed into an overwhelmingly Christian society in which European-derived Christianity occupied institutional authority while many African-derived spiritual traditions existed outside conventional definitions of legitimate religion.
That does not mean every negative Jamaican perception of Obeah is simply the product of racism or Christianity.
Obeah has also historically been associated with fear, retaliation and practices believed to cause harm. Those associations cannot simply be erased in an attempt to rehabilitate its image.
Today, however, a new generation of dancehall artistes appears increasingly willing to bring that once-taboo language into the open.
Obeah and other forms of spiritual protection have increasingly appeared in contemporary dancehall through the language of being “guarded up.” References to “guard rings” have become associated with protecting wealth, status and lifestyle in an environment where artistes frequently sing about danger, enemies and survival.
And this did not begin with Skippa.
In 2019, The Jamaica Star reported on guard rings within dancehall culture, pointing to musical references from AceGawd and Slyngaz. People interviewed for the story described the rings as objects associated with protection and success, including supposed protection from violence, police and legal problems.
Being “guarded up,” having a guard ring, protecting money and lifestyle —is an ancient practice but there is a historical thread running from the plantation era into contemporary dancehall.
The circumstances are obviously different. An Obeah practitioner operating within an eighteenth-century slave society cannot simply be equated with a twenty-first-century artist singing about a guard ring.
But the underlying concept — spiritual power as a means of protection in a dangerous environment — has survived and evolved.
That makes the contemporary embrace of guard rings and Obeah more than simply another dancehall trend.
Skippa’s recent single “Money Walk,” produced by DJ Mac and CrashDummy, captures that shift.
On the song’s hook, Skippa chants:
“Henny, weed and Obeah.”
The reference has drawn criticism from some dancehall listeners, raising a larger question: why does the word Obeah still provoke such discomfort?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the lyric is not simply that Skippa says “Obeah,” but how casually he says it.
There is no lengthy explanation and no apology. Obeah is not presented as some mysterious relic of Jamaica’s distant past. Instead, Skippa places it alongside Hennessy and weed — familiar symbols within contemporary dancehall lifestyle culture.
For generations, Obeah has frequently been discussed through secrecy, fear and accusation. Dancehall, however, has always had a way of disrupting that kind of silence.
The genre routinely brings subjects into public conversation that more conservative sections of Jamaican society would rather keep private. Sex, violence, poverty, class, colourism, religion, wealth and illicit economies have all found expression through dancehall, frequently challenging traditional ideas about Jamaican respectability.
Skippa is by no means a revolutionary who is consciously attempting to make an anti-colonial statement.
But cultural reclamation does not always arrive as a manifesto.
Sometimes it happens through normalization.
By placing Obeah within the ordinary language of contemporary dancehall, artistes can remove some of the exceptionalism surrounding the word.
Something colonial legislators once described as a “wicked Art” is now be casually named in the hook of a dancehall song.
That does not mean Obeah should be romanticized.
Correcting its colonial history does not require pretending that every practice associated with it has been harmless. Its history contains protection and aggression, healing and fear, assistance and retaliation.
The more revealing question is why one side of that complicated tradition became so dominant that Obeah itself became almost synonymous with evil.
Dancehall’s growing willingness to engage with the subject therefore reveals something larger about Jamaica’s relationship with its African heritage.
Behind the controversy is a much older question about Jamaican identity: who gets to determine which parts of the country’s African inheritance are accepted as legitimate spirituality, which are dismissed as superstition, and which are feared as dangerous?
More than two and a half centuries after Obeah was first criminalized in Jamaica, dancehall is becoming another space where that question is being negotiated.
