16196: This Week in Haiti 21:19 7/23/2003 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French
and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100,
(fax) 718-434-5551 or e-mail at <editor@haitiprogres.com>.
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                      July 23 - 29, 2003
                         Vol. 21, No. 19

VOODOO AND HAITI'S IMPACT ON THE U.S.
by Greg Dunkel

(The first of two articles)

As the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence nears, all sorts of
articles on Haiti, the only state in the world founded through a slave
revolution, are popping up, most bemoaning its current fiscal crisis. Some
examine the role the United States has played there, mostly presenting its
aid programs as benevolent attempts to install democracy and alleviate
poverty. Others, more accurately, analyze U.S. efforts in Haiti as stifling
democracy and the people's will along with extracting every possible dollar.

But while it is important to describe the impact that the United States, the
world's only superpower, has and has had on Haiti, we must note that Haiti,
although poor and isolated, has also had a major impact on the United
States.

When Martin Bernal wanted to uncover the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greek
civilization and culture in his book Black Athena, he looked at the words
the Greeks borrowed or absorbed from Egypt or Phoenicia, among other
evidence. The same kind of evidence of Haiti's impact on the United States
shows up in the mainstream U.S. press.

It is safe to say that U.S. Americans associate voodoo with Haiti.

Major newspapers used the phrase "voodoo economics" over 1,000 times in the
last ten years ("voodoo" being the English formulation of the Creole
 "vodou"). The New York Times used it at least 450 times since 1980. "Voodoo
politics" shows up much less frequently -- only 25 times in the last 10
years. "Voodoo Linux," a variant of that popular operating system, also
popped up as well as the "Voodoo" graphics card for games running on PCs.
There were too many descriptions of voodoo rituals to easily count.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language even has a
definition for "voodoo economics": "Based on unrealistic or delusive
assumptions."  But this definition hides the way the phrase is used. When
Warren Buffet, the billionaire head of Berkshire Hathaway, one of the major
players in the U.S. stock market, calls President George W. Bush's tax cuts
"voodoo economics" (Washington Post, May 20, 2003), he was not only calling
them "unrealistic." He was also predicting that they would mobilize his
class, U.S. capitalists, by stirring their great greed, to support these
cuts even if they were not in their long-term interests.

When George H. Bush, the father of the current president, was running
against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, he
called Reagan's supply-side economic policies, with their plutocratic
catering to the rich, "voodoo economics." Reagan's appeal to the ruling
class was more successful than Bush's since he got the nomination, but
Reagan did feel compelled to choose Bush as his vice-president.

There are other examples. Jimmy Carter made the "voodoo economics" charge in
his debates with Ronald Reagan in the '80s. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) in a 1992
press conference accused then President George H. Bush of conducting a
"voodoo" trade policy with Japan. John B. Oakes, a former editor of the New
York Times,  which is considered in American politics to be "liberal," said
in 1989: "George Bush, who not so many years ago was justly critical of
Ronald Reagan's 'voodoo economics,' has become past master of an even more
illusory art form: voodoo politics."

It is interesting to see how these white bourgeois politicians, some of whom
personally have vast wealth and all of whom represent vast wealth, use this
epithet, which in the context they use it has racist connotations, primarily
against other white bourgeois politicians.

In my Internet searches, I came across Kòmbò Mason Braide, a Nigerian
economist and political analyst. He called the recommendation that Nigeria
follow the economic policies of the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve
Board, Alan Greenspan, "voodoo economics" and then went onto to analyze its
effects on the politics of the states surrounding the Gulf of Guinea (Ghana,
Nigeria, Benin and so on). Coming from an economist who lives in a part of
Africa where voodoo developed, this epithet applied to Greenspan has a
special sarcastic edge and Braide tries to make a strong connections to
Haiti (www.kwenu.com/publications/braide/voodoo_politics.htm).

While it is indisputable that "voodoo" is a widely used term in the United
States,  the historical context of its introduction into U.S. society was
the successful slave uprising that began August. 21, 1791 in St. Domingue,
15 years after the United States declared its independence.

The U.S. bourgeoisie, which was in large part a slavocracy, was completely
shocked that the slaves of Haiti could organize themselves, rise up, smash
the old order, kill their masters, and set up a new state that was able to
maintain its independence. This rebellion was such a threat to the existence
of the slavocracy if its example spread and so inconceivable in a political
framework totally saturated with racism and the denigration of people whose
ancestors came from Africa, that the only explanation that they could see
for slaves participating in it was that they were "deluded."

They failed to consider that a majority of the slaves in Haiti, then called
St. Domingue, had been born in Africa in freedom and remembered what it was.
They did not have to be "deluded" into rebelling against their oppression.
They participated willingly.

Which doesn't mean that voodoo did not play an inspirational and unifying
role. It gave them the solidarity they needed to organize a mass uprising of
slaves under the noses of the slave owners.

The slaves in the North of Haiti, the greatest wealth producing slave colony
the world has ever known, organized for weeks beginning in early July, using
the cover of the voodoo ceremonies that were held every weekend.  Finally,
200 delegates, two from each major plantation in the North, gathered on
August 14 at Bois-Caïman, a wooded area on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation,
and set the date for the uprising for one week later, the night of August
21, 1791.

Boukman Dutty, a voodoo priest, was one of the people who led the ceremony
and was  selected to lead the uprising. According to well-founded but oral
sources (see Caroline Frick, The Making of Haiti, p. 93 and C.L.R. James,
The Black Jacobins, p.87), Boukman made both a prayer and a call to arms
with the following speech:

"The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and
rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all
that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime,
but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders
us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the
symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and
listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all."

(To be continued)


WBAI Haiti Special on July 28

The Haitian Collective at WBAI will host a special on Haiti on WBAI 99.5 FM
in New York from 10 to 11 a.m. on Monday, July 28, 2003 to mark the 88th
anniversary of the first U.S. military invasion of Haiti. The program will
feature an interview with Prof. Mary Renda on her new book "Taking Haiti"
which examines how the Occupation helped to shape the emerging imperial
culture in the U.S.. Also community announcements and the latest news from
Haiti, where a new U.S. military occupation now looms. The program can be
heard on the Internet at www.wbai.org. (This program is rescheduled from
Saturday, July 26, which was announced last week.)



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