The History of Slavery - Research Paper Example

Abstract Religion is one of the social structures that make up a society. Religion is an important pillar through which people try to find meaning in life. It further acts as a source of comfort from the hardships and challenges in day-to-day living as well as providing insight into life’s unexplainable mysteries. This paper examines the different roles both positive and negative that Voudou religion has played in influencing the Haitian society and culture. Introduction The Voudou religion in Haiti is highly revered by the general populace. Most Haitians even credit their attaining of independence as having been borne on the shrine of the Voudou religion. In fact, a common saying used in the media is that Haitians are 90% Catholics but 100% Voodoo. Voodoo is more commonly referred to as Vodun, among other titles such as Vodoun, Voodoo, in addition to Sevi Lwa. The name originated from an African word that symbolized 'spirit'. This was in the language of the West African ethnic community of the Yoruba people residing in Dahomey in the 18th and 19th century. The Dahomey kingdom presently comprises three countries namely Benin, Nigeria and Togo. When the slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to the Caribbean islands, they took with them the voodoo religion. Over the years, Voudou has been instrumental in the growth and development of the Haitian culture. The Haitian religion of voodoo is a great influencing factor in their perception and treatment of illnesses. Brodwin documents the various ways in which Haitians approach healing. In order to determine the course of action to take to confront a particular illness, the Haitians have to investigate whether the illness is due to a moral failing on the part of the sick person or whether the illness is purely natural and thus allowing for the use of contemporary modes of medicine. In this respect, they thus attribute illnesses as either coming from God or from Satan. If a disease responds to the contemporary modes of healing that Brodwin refers to as biomedicine, it is viewed as an illness from God. If one cannot afford to buy medicine, he or she will resort to midwives, bonesetters and herbal medicine men. When healing is not achieved even after use of medicine, it is diagnosed as originating from Satan. He explains that there are thus three courses of treatment which the sick individual may choose to adopt. The way of the voodoo involves performing a ceremony by a voodoo priest locally known as a mambo or houngan. The role of this priest entails casting out the illness, which they assume was hexed upon the person by another due to jealousy with the help of a family spirit locally referred to as iwa. They normally achieve this after sacrificing a cock or another animal. The Roman Catholic way involves a similar procedure of casting out the demon through exorcism and prayers. Protestants on the other hand attribute the illness to a sin on the part of the sick person due to consistent involvement with both the voodoo religion and Catholicism, which is deemed to permit various aspects of voodoo (Brodwin, p22). Brown demystifies the various skewed interpretations that voodoo undergoes in a lot of literature and tries to explain the role it plays in the daily living of the Haitians. Mama Lola, the character in Brown’s book, ‘Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess In Brooklyn’, is a voodoo hougan living in New York. Her real name is Marie Therese Alourdes. Her study entailed not only studying the voodoo religion, but also converting to the religion itself through a series of passage rites. Her focus includes both the role of voodoo in day-to-day living in the family as well as the adaptive nature of the religion in helping Haitian immigrants adapt to a new life in America. She traces the genealogical heritage of the voodoo religion and the different roles the voodoo spirits or the Iwa have played in the different stages of the family’s life. Through her analysis, we learn that voodoo serves to liberate women who otherwise suffer domination in Haitian patriarchal society. Men have the upper hand, often using and abusing women as they so wish. However, when one becomes a priestess, she undergoes liberation since she no longer has to come under the dominion of a husband, since she marries a voodoo spirit instead. Mama Lola, for instance, is married to a spirit guide by the name of Ogoun Badagris. Marriage to a spirit guide also comes with other advantages such as financial stability, faithfulness, support and an assurance of a non-abusive relationship albeit the nature of the spirit guide may be unpredictable. Voodoo has also been instrumental in the attainment of independence and the abolition of slavery. As mentioned earlier, a voodoo ceremony conducted by the now famous hougan Dutty Boukman galvanized the Haitian slaves to stage a revolt against their French colonial masters under the leadership of General Toussaint l’Ouverture, a former slave himself. This revolt served to inspire other abolitionists in different parts of the world who referred to Haiti as a prime model. One such individual was Frederick Douglass, an African-American abolitionist who went on to become the Minister to the newly formed Haitian Republic. On January 2 1893, Douglass stated, “I regard her (Haiti) as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century” (Crabtree, para 11). Everette asserts that for these rebellions to succeed in other places, there had to be a charismatic leader in the likes of Toussaint who could effectively mobilize and motivate the slaves to revolt, failure to which it would result in certain death. Unfortunately, such leaders were hard to find and instead, there arose transient revolutionary figures such as Nat Turner in the Southern State of Virginia and Denmark Vesey in North Carolina whose slave revolts never succeeded leading to their capture and subsequent execution. Covert Voodoo networks also helped in the escape of many slaves in the same way that the secretive Jewish and humanitarian operations of Europe helped save a significant number of Jews throughout the Holocaust massacre in Germany. Voodoo would be a source of comfort to slaves in the plantations and since the colonial masters were catholic, the slaves would often disguise their ancestral spirits as saints and worship them in secret. The colonialists however regarded this religion as a great threat and proceeded to arrest any priests they identified. In the aftermath to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti at 4:53pm on 12 January 2010, Astier writes that voodoo has had a therapeutic effect in the lives of those affected. Some local priests claimed that voodoo spirits were communicating with the people and offering them words of encouragement. The voodoo spiritual guides were using their homes as centers to care for children as well as injured victims. Hagerty echoes similar sentiments on voodoo’s role in national healing. She states that voodoo is helping people welcome death as a conduit to another life in eternity. According to their religion, after one dies, he or she spends one year beneath the water from where they proceed to the next life. Furthermore, each person has sixteen lives eight spent in either gender with a view to profiting from all manner of experiences on this earth. In these new lives, Haitians believe that an individual shifts from one body to another gaining insight until eventually joining with God. Funeral ceremonies thus help to facilitate the journey of the dead into their next lives. Thus, Haitians take great comfort in knowing that they shall reunite with their loved ones who perished in the tragedy in another life. In addition to providing solace, we see voodoo helping to explain the incomprehensible circumstances in life. For example, Hagerty states that Haitians believe that the earthquake was a consequence of the wrath of the gods due to the wanton destruction of forests in Haiti. They state that earth being like a mother, suffered great grief due to the destruction of the environment. This in turn led the gods to seek vengeance on her behalf. These views however do not augur well with some critics. Gledhill, for example, strongly believes that voudou will be more of a roadblock in the process of national healing owing to its fatalistic que sera sera attitude. She argues that Haitians have become passive and complacent because of their voodoo beliefs. Whenever a catastrophe occurs, the Haitians just sit back and surmise that it was meant to happen since their God, the great master, willed it. They end up saying ‘Bon dieu bon’, (which in French means God is good), whenever a tragedy happens. Such a complacent perspective hinders efforts at betterment of oneself and the community at large. Kyle and Bishop cite Hegel the legendary philosopher who in a similar fashion voiced his criticism of voodoo paralleling it with the image of a zombie after the 1930 movie that bore the same name. In his dialectic model, he points out that voodoo is a syncretic belief system as evidenced by the various aspects of worship it borrows from other religions, mostly those of the whites such as Catholicism. Due to this borrowing, he posits that the religion is nothing but a continuation of a master-slave relationship through the adoption of the colonial masters’ way of worship. It is therefore destined to be fatalistic in nature, unable to unclench itself from the colonial tentacles. Anyone thus practicing voodoo is but a zombie that has no power of choice. Smith’s in-depth study of the rural Haitian community provides yet more insight into the role of voodoo among the peasant community. Her book attempts to peel away stereotypical assessments of the rural community in Haiti, which by all standards is the poorest group of people in the Western hemisphere. She challenges foreigners who endeavor to provide aid to the Haitians to examine them from a different perspective instead of seeing them as a helpless group of helpless illiterate people entirely dependent on aid. Smith posits that there have long been community based organizations that have also played a significant role in trying to uplift their standards of living. She continues to say that in recent times, such organizations have taken a more political form, which has helped the poor peasants acquire a voice in the political sphere. As regards voodoo, Smith alludes to the famous gathering that took place on the night of August 14 1791 in the village of Bwa kayiman in the Northern part of Saint-Domingue. The gathering comprised more than 200 slaves and culminated in an insurrection the following week that led to the marshalling of the slaves to rebel against their white owners. The peasantry who participated in this revolt went on to fight against discriminatory land policies put in place by the Petion Government as well as staging countless rebellions against the American occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. Smith describes voudou not as a single belief system but rather a multi-faceted religion that incorporates various beliefs from other denominations such as Catholicism. Despite voodoo’s initial growth as a means to fight slavery, Smith states that it continues to serve as an instrument of unity in the rural communities to this very day. In a discussion on melodic machetes or the chante pwen-s songs used to convey a social message, she further explores their employment in voudou. In such cases, the voudou altar serves as a conciliatory tool to settle disputes between warring members. The deities known as Iwas also sing these songs to warn or give advice regarding a particular issue (Smith, p52). Voudou also serves as a form of entertainment to the rural and urban Haitian masses. This finds expression during the Rara festival that takes place during the lent and Easter period, where music bands entertain revelers throughout the night with song and dance. Lasting for six weeks, the festival also provides an opportunity to vent against political injustices and acts as a memorial to the brutal political regimes of the past. Despite the carnival like ambience, the rara festival is also a religious period where people communicate with the Iwa spirit. They also try to tap into the spiritual energy through pouring of libations, whip cracking as well as kindling fires (McAlister, p86-89). On the negative side, voodoo has been wielded against the people to effectively manipulate them. Former president Francois Duvalier or more commonly papa Doc, used voudou to acquire a god like status and thus effectively lord his dictatorial policies over the masses carried out through this tactic. Recognizing the power and respect that the houngans held at the grassroot level among the peasant majority, Duvalier used them to expand his power into the rural parts of the country. He even went on to study the various voodoo practices and rites to the extent that people thought him to be a hougan. He maintained a cordial relationship with these voodoo priests across the country and absorbed a vast majority of them into his security and intelligence detail. Banking on his now reputed involvement with voodoo, Duvalier used this to make himself more popular among the peasantry. They in turn greatly admired their leader and dared not oppose such a person despite his misrule, since he could easily summon the dark forces of sorcery and black magic at his own behest (Corbett, para6). Despite the important role voodoo plays in the rural areas, it has not had a similar impact in the urban areas and neither has it addressed the issues of poverty. A poignant example manifests in the many street children that dwell in the streets of Port au Prince. These children encounter massive crime and violence due to their vulnerability, with the young girls even suffering rape at times. It is common to find the body of a child clogging a drainage system in the town centre. These children go on to form rival gangs on the perilous streets that constantly attack one another (Kovats, p80-82). A kind of violence meted out involves the maiming of members of a rival gang when they are asleep, using crude weapons and even razors. Kovats proceeds to trace the rural-urban migration that has seen the proliferation of slums within Port au Prince. He attributes this urban migration to the fact that the soils in the rural areas have lost fertility after three hundred years of large-scale sugar cultivation. In a country of just eight million people, Kovats states that Haiti is not only over-militarized but also over-armed. He states that this is due to the presence of over 209,000 weapons in circulation. Just like the corrupt President Duvalier, Kovats highlights the looting that President Aristide conducted through stealing of funds in one of the street children’s orphanages called Lafanmi selavi that had long been an epitome of successful management. Conclusion As evident from the above discussion, voudou is an integral part in the lives of the Haitian community. For a vast majority, most of their thinking is centered on the voudou belief system and thus greatly determines how they respond to situations in their contemporary lives. Voudou certainly has a myriad of benefits that have been key in the development of the Haitian culture, the foremost being the zeal it provided to slaves who ended up wresting their independence from the hands of the brutal French regime. Having said that, I am of the opinion that over the years, voodoo has done more harm than good and hougans ought to consider their role in the Haitian society. I concur with critics who posit that voudou engenders a fatalistic and laissez faire kind of mindset, which instills a sense of helplessness in the people. When people always attribute occurrences to something that is beyond their control, they in a sense escape personal responsibility, which makes them fail to confront issues that are within their ability to handle. A case in point as discussed above is during the tyrannical reign of Duvalier where people were scared to confront him due to fear of the voodoo powers he supposedly had. Haiti is dreadfully impoverished and the sooner people begin to believe in their ability to change the status quo, the sooner Haiti will begin to emerge from poverty and prosper like its neighbor the Dominican Republic. Works Cited Astier, H. (2010). Voodoo religion's role in helping Haiti's quake victims. Retrieved 7th June, 2010 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8517070.stm Brodwin, P. (1996). Medicine and Morality on Haiti. The Contest for Healing Power. New York: Cambridge. Brown, K. (1991). Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Corbett, B. (2001). Voodoo and Politics. Retrieved 7th June, 2010 from http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/bookreviews/laguerre2.htm Crabtree, V. (2003). The Role of Voodoo/Vodun In Abolition. Retrieved 7th June, 2010 from http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/slavery.html#Vodun Everette, S. (1997). The History of Slavery. Chartwell: Booksales Gledhill, R. (2010). Voodoo Faith Could Hinder Haiti's Recovery From Quake. Retrieved 7th June, 2010 from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6990002.ece Hagerty, B. (2010). Voodoo Brings Solace To Grieving Haitians. Retrieved 7th June, 2010 from http://ww.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122770590 Kovats, C. (2006). Sleeping Rough in Port au Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Kyle & Bishop, (2008). Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic Voodoo Zombie. Retrieved 7th June, 2010 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7593/is_200806/ai_n32284782/pg_4/?tag=content;col1 McAlister, E. (2002). Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, J. (2001). When the Hands are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Read More