The Evolution of Colonial Voodoo

Abstract

The process of Creolisation, which began with the Spanish colonisation of Haiti, affected every aspect of the slave’s life, including the organisation of his religious institutions. The emerging nativist religions also bore the mark of the emerging Creole culture. In several areas of the island, because of the kind of plantation prevalent — coffee, sugar, indigo, cotton — and the African origins of the slaves, various types of Creolised slave cults emerged. Haitian historians and ethnologists, influenced by the late Dr Jean Price-Mars — a theorist of negritude — have always argued that differences that existed in Voodoo in the beginning of the eighteenth century disappeared by the time of the Haitian Revolution (Trouillot 1970; Denis and Duvalier 1944). According to these historians and ethnologists, during the regular Voodoo meetings in which maroons and slaves participated, the Voodoo cults were unified and standardised and became a cohesive political factor for revolutionary slaves and maroons (Price-Mars 1928: 114; Denis and Duvalier 1944: 21). The underlying assumption in their writings is that ritual, theological, and organisational uniformity is necessary to achieve racial solidarity and political unity. Data provided by colonial chroniclers, missionaries and travellers allows us not only to test this hypothesis, but also to reject it.¹