Nearly everyone has heard of Vodoun, but even specialists, plagued by scant documentation, know little about it. The authors of these two concise essays give us at least an initial guide to Vodoun’s characteristics and influence on major aspects of Haitian affairs. Harold Courlander is a political commentator, novelist, and folklore collector, while Rémy Bastien, a native Haitian, works for P.A.U.’s housing and planning center in Bogotá. He has taught in several Latin American universities.
In the preface Richard P. Schaedel, an American anthropologist, offers geographical explanations of why Haiti is the poorest, sickest, and most crowded of New World republics. He depicts the agricultural problems of a people 92 percent peasant. Among these are deforestation, a steep terrain impracticable for farm equipment and work animals, and the failure of emigration.
Courlander and Bastien analyze the nature of Vodoun since it originated in Dahomey and was transplanted to French St. Domingue under slavery. Today Haiti preserves more Africanisms than any other New World land, and Vodoun is its most resilient and important African survival. In the first independent Latin American state, long virtually isolated from European culture, Haitian Vodoun crystallized between 1804 and 1860, when a concordat was tardily made with Rome. Even later, the few Old World priests failed to impress Christianity firmly. Many Haitian Catholics today practice Vodoun, via syncretism. Protestants, rejecting all of Vodoun’s enriching activities, remain a small minority.
Through its involvement in the peasant’s otherwise intolerably drab life, Vodoun has succeeded as a folk religion. It provides for Haitians, as Christianity has not, a world view, ties between the living and their ancestors, guides to the unknown, intimate patterns of family and community relations, and many emotional releases through dance, music, drama, and legends. The houngans, or priests, possess a vast herbology and also offer “cures” through visions and rudimentary psychotherapy. Each houngan is independent and a potent force in molding rural opinion.
The authors agree that, although most Vodoun priests are illiterate, do not try to modernize the masses, and have a deep commitment to the status quo, they have not made Haiti backward. Nevertheless, Christianity plus better health, rewarding jobs, and modern schools would cause Vodoun to decline.
Politics and Vodoun have been related since Haiti’s national beginnings, but since rulers generally have feared its power, few have openly opposed it. Few have overtly supported it either, fearing world opinion and the mulatto élite. Yet Vodoun always represented the Negro majority, the peasantry, ruralism, and Africanism, while the mulatto bourgeoisie gravitated to cities, European ways, and Catholicism. Faustin Soulouque (1847-59) and Antoine Simon (1906-11) supported Vodoun, but failed to turn it to their purposes, because they believed in it so fully that they came under the control of powerful houngans.
The present dictator is unique. François Duvalier gained power in 1957 as a mild-mannered physician, only intellectually interested in Vodoun. As his support from army, Church, and traders slipped, he turned for power to the rural Negro. His terroristic militia replaced the army; he persecuted Catholic and merchant opposition, won popularity for defying assassins and foreign pressures, and transformed Vodoun into the symbol of Haitianization—his vehicle for absolute, lifelong power. Bastien thinks that Duvalier succeeded because he did not believe in Vodoun and thus could manipulate it. Today, Vodoun is at its zenith as a national church, but for the first time it is in chains! Bastien predicts that Vodoun’s unique association with Duvalier will probably discredit it when he is gone.
