OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Vodou, Haiti and Separating Sense from Nonsense: Responding to Former USAID director in Haiti

Some stress policies and institutions when they try to explain the country's tortured history. But bad policies inevitably reflect the agendas of poor leaders--and thus the culture that nurtured them. Those of us who have worked at institution-building in countries like Haiti are well aware of the frustrations that attend such efforts, confirming the truth of Mr. Etounga-Manguelle's observation: "Culture is the mother. Institutions are the children."

Others cite the heavy indemnity that the French extracted from Haiti in 1825 for re-establishment of relations (originally 150 million francs over five years, later reduced to 60 million francs over 30 years) as a major cause of Haiti's poverty. It is also true that for several decades after its independence, Haiti was ostracized by other Western Hemisphere nations, the United States among them, out of fear that Haiti's successful slave rebellion would spread to their own slaves. U.S. policy was changed by Abraham Lincoln; official recognition was extended in 1862.

Still others argue that Haiti's problems are largely the result of a mulatto upper class that identifies itself with the former French masters and treats black Haitians as inferior beings. But for a good part of Haiti's history, black chiefs of state, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier among them, ran the country.

While these and other factors may be relevant, none of them, even collectively, adequately explains the unending dysfunction of Haitian society. Haiti's predicament is caused by a set of values, beliefs and attitudes, rooted in African culture and the slavery experience that resist progress.

The Dominican Republic, which Haiti ruled between 1822 and 1843, has evolved as a more or less typical Latin American country with political instability and slow development. But even that slow development has clearly outpaced Haiti. The Dominican Republic is No. 79 on the U.N. Development Program's Human Development Index, while Haiti is No. 146 (out of 177 countries).

Haiti has received far more development assistance than Benin, the country in the Dahomey region of West Africa whence came the slaves the French imported into St. Domingue. And yet today Haiti's and Benin's level of development are strikingly similar. The British imported slaves into Barbados from the same Dahomey region, but Barbados remained a British colony until 1966, by which time the descendents of the slaves had become black Englishmen. Today, Barbados is a stable democracy on the verge of First World status.

Culture matters. Race doesn't.

Mr. Harrison, who ran the USAID mission to Haiti from 1977 to 1979, now directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save it from Itself" (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Ezili DantÃ²'s Note: Because of its economy is heavily dependent on Northern tourism, the Bahamas has the highest rate of HIV in the Caribbean. (http://www.avert.org/) There's more aids/HIV in the Bahamas (3% rate) than there is in Haiti (2.2% rate of aids/HIV). But it is Haiti that is pictured as more diseased. There's a higher aids/HIV rate in Washington D.C./USA (3% rate). But, because the majority of Haitians are Africans with a Vodun culture and have no wish to be forcibly assimilated, as Mr. Harrison says, into black Englishmen, black Frenchmen, empire is still trying to "civilize" us through exclusion, tyranny, false charity, false USAID benevolence, plunder, pillage, oppression of identity, liberty and self-determination in the way it was done in the rest of the enslaved Caribbean that still, to this day, remain Euro/US colonies! (See, Does the Western economic model and calculation of economic wealth fit Haiti, fit Dessalines' idea of wealth distribution? NO!).