Vodou, Haiti and Separating Sense from Nonsense: Responding to Former USAID director in Haiti

Ezili Dantò analyzes the Vodun song -Going Back to Root - Lasous O M Pwale - I'm Returning to the Beginning

Ezili's counter-colonial narrative on Vodun

Ezili's HLLN Vodun Links
http://bit.ly/5Ak9p9

Bio of Ezili Dantò - Haiti's Warrior Mother
http://bit.ly/11N7y8

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Disturbing and racist article on Vodun by former
USAID Haiti mission director, Lawrence Harrison
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Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years, and yet it remains the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere. Its indicators of progress are closer to Africa's than to those of Latin America. It has defied all development prescriptions.

Why? Because Haiti's culture is powerfully influenced by its religion, voodoo. Voodoo is one of numerous spirit-based religions common to Africa. It is without ethical content. Its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies. It is a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.

Voodoo is practiced mostly by poor Haitians, who make up the vast majority of the country's population. But all Haitians feel its influence, as one of my sons-in-law, who is Haitian and holds a graduate degree from Harvard, assures me. Wallace Hodges, an American missionary who lived in Haiti for 20 years, observed: "A Haitian child is made to understand that everything that happens is due to the spirits. He is raised to externalize evil and to understand he is in continuous danger. Haitians are afraid of each other. You will find a high degree of paranoia in Haiti."

But voodoo is not the only progress-resistant force at work in Haiti. The treatment of the slaves in French St. Domingue--the colony that would become independent Haiti in 1804-- was particularly brutal. The Haitian slaves won their freedom through an uprising that left them in charge of their destiny, but they were left with a value system largely shaped by African culture and by the experience of slavery. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Arthur Lewis, himself a descendent of African slaves, wrote that those who had experienced it "have inherited the idea that work is only fit for slaves."

What other factors contribute to Haiti's endless nightmare? Bad leadership is one obvious candidate. With the exception of Alexandre Pétion (1806-1818), Haiti has never had a president fully committed to modernizing the country. (Once again, we are reminded of the parallels between Haiti and Africa.)

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