Spirit Service

Vodún and Vodou in the African Atlantic World

Eric James Montgomery, Timothy R. Landry, Christian N. Vannier, Eric James Montgomery, Timothy R. Landry, Christian N. Vannier

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780253061904
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253061928
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Historia africana

Known in the Dominican Republic and Togo as Vodu, in Benin as Vodún, and in Haiti as Vodou, West African religion has, for hundreds of years, served as a repository of sacred knowledge while simultaneously evolving in response to human experience and globalization.

Spirit Service: Vodún and Vodou in the African Atlantic World explores this dynamic religion, its mobility, and its place in the modern world. By examining the systems—ritual practices, community-based spirit veneration, and spiritual means of securing opportunity and well-being—alongside the individuals who worship, this rich collection offers the first comprehensive ethnographic study of West African spirit service on a broad scale. Contributors consider social encounters between African/Haitian practitioners and European / North American spiritual seekers, economies and histories, funerary rites and spirit possessions, and examinations of gender and materiality.

Offering much-needed perspective on this historically disparaged religion, Spirit Service reminds us all that the gods are growing, assimilating, and demanding recognition and respect.

PART ONE

Encounter

ONE

VODOU GENESIS

Africans and the Making of a National Religion in Saint-Domingue

Terry Rey

OVERVIEW

Our knowledge of the emergence of Haitian Vodou as a religion relies almost entirely on the writings of white observers in the French colonial Caribbean, most of them Frenchmen, of course. Their perceptions of the ritual practices of Africans were clouded by the privileged, sanctimonious, and imperialist biases of their own station in the world. Once a postcolonial optic is employed to dull such biases, however, and relatedly once we consider the power disequilibrium that shaped their encounters with Africans in Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti), polish is given to their observations. Subsequently, a careful, contextualized reading thereof fosters a clearer understanding of Vodou’s origins and the various spiritual resources that the nascent religion drew upon in cementing its foundation. Based on a close and generally chronological reading of five of the most important primary source accounts of Africana religious culture in Saint-Domingue (by Jean-Baptiste Labat, Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Colonel Malenfant, Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières, and Félix Pascalis Ouvière), this chapter provides a critical analysis of Vodou genesis that aims to contribute to our understanding of the religion’s colonial history and to map out a general model for the periodization thereof.

JEAN-BAPTISTE LABAT

A Dominican priest, explorer, botanist, planter, slave owner, mathematician, and soldier, Père Jean-Baptiste Labat first arrived in the French Caribbean colonies in 1694, spending a total of twelve years there. Published in 1722, his six-volume tome Nouveau voyage aux iles françoises d’Amérique, “a veritable 18th-century best seller” (Toczyski 2007, 485), is one of the earliest published accounts of religion in the French Caribbean, including of course Saint-Domingue, though Labat spent most of his time in Martinique. Once in the colonies, it quickly became evident to Labat that to gain knowledge about African culture, he would need to study what seemed to him, and rightly so, the most important African language at the time in the French Caribbean, a creolizing variant of Fongbe, called by the French (and likely, too, by many Africans) “Arada.”

Labat was especially interested in dance and healing among Africans in the colonies. In fact, his first mention of Africana spirituality concerns healing, where, in volume 1, he details the case of a “19- or 20-year-old” Black man who had been bitten on the foot by a massive snake, “some seven feet long . . . as thick as the leg of a man.” While covered in blankets, holding the priest’s hand, and lying infirm between two fires, the victim felt that he was dying, and his massively swollen leg gave Labat that very impression, thus he heard his confession. When an African herbalist was summoned to treat the man, the priest, as a botanist, took keen interest and asked about the herbs he employed. The healer declined to answer, “because these secrets allowed him to make a living, thus he did not want to publicize them.” He did promise, though, that if ever a snake bit the priest himself, he would treat him, too, with the utmost care. “I thanked him for the offer,” notes Labat (1742a, 163), “hoping to never have to take him up on it.” Notably, the snake-bite victim survived, leaving Labat quite impressed.

This case reflects the pivotal role that individual clerical knowledge played in sustaining African spirituality in the Americas. With the communal dimensions of African religions disrupted in serious ways that would require generations to restore in the so-called New World, early in colonial history it was especially the individual healer—his or her knowledge left largely intact and adapted to the local flora and fauna—that laid the first structural cornerstone for Africana religion across the Atlantic,¹ as well as a cornerstone for its remarkable resilience that has helped sustain it ever since.² Although Labat’s observations in this instance were of Martinique, the entire French Caribbean was, for all intents and purposes, the same cultural contact zone. It is also important to note here that most slaves who fell under Labat’s gaze (or his whip) were West Africans, primarily from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin, as was then the case throughout the French Caribbean colonies. This would change in the second half of the eighteenth century in Saint-Domingue, however, with the massive influx of enslaved Africans from Kongo and environs (West Central Africa) then rapidly surpassing the West African influx, which of course would have a significant influence on Vodou genesis, as is further explained later in this section.³

Part of chapter 20 of Labat’s (1742a, 445) first volume focuses on “Maladies of Blacks and Creoles.” It opens with a discussion of a Mina slave who had taken ill after repeatedly eating dirt, followed by Labat’s observation that Minas in general believed that upon dying they would be reincarnated in Africa, hence their putative proclivity to committing suicide (446). As such, we also have in Labat’s text an early colonial Caribbean commentary about African notions of death, dying, and rebirth, notions that continue to animate Haitian Vodouist belief to this day. Labat’s slave ate dirt to die and return to see his father in Africa, even though he loved his master, who had, after all, baptized him and instructed him in the “true” faith. But Père Labat simply “could not shake him from this fantasy” (447).

Because “almost all Blacks who leave their homeland as adults are ‘sorcerers’, or they at least have some tainting of magic, sorcery, and poison,” Labat (1742b, 137) was surrounded by these things and thus devotes an entire chapter to the subject, entitled “The History of Some Black Sorcerers,” which contains four case studies. Labat first speaks here about a slave whose master had taken from him “a sack” and who was supposedly adept at divining when ships would arrive in Martinique, but Labat (1742a, 137) dismissed him as “a charlatan who duped simple folks in order to earn their money.”⁴ Though the “sorcerer” in question would seek to mend his ways and become Catholic to the satisfaction of the missionary, eventually he would confide in Labat that he was quite miserable without his pagan wares and that he missed making all of the money that he once did in his former trade. Incensed by such illusory persistence, Labat (1742a, 491) threatened to have him burned alive, and the Catholic priest torched the sack, the secrets of which went up in smoke with its contents.

Though lumping them together as “sorcery,” rather than categorically denouncing the African healing practices he observed in the colonial French Caribbean, Labat seemingly admired some of them and found therein certain benefits to the colonial enterprise. For instance, when a young male slave from Guinea overheard missionaries lamenting the lack of rain and how their gardens would thus be unfruitful, “he asked them if they would prefer a downpour or a drizzle, assuring them that he could make it happen at once.” With “curiosity prevailing over reason,” the missionaries took him up on the offer, after which the boy performed a ritual employing three peeled oranges, three branches, and supplicant prayers. Then, scanning the horizon attentively, he noticed a distant thin cloud, which he summoned with the sticks to hover over the garden and produce a light rainfall for an hour. The boy next buried the oranges and the sticks in the garden, which, much to the missionary’s stupefaction, was now “perfectly watered”; what’s more, not a single drop of rain fell outside of the garden. Interestingly, he had been taught this art of rainmaking by elders from his homeland whom he had encountered during the Middle Passage (Labat 1742a, 494).

The third case discussed by Labat is that of a female African slave who had been infirm for some time with a mysterious condition. French doctors could not cure her, prompting Labat to take her to African healers, who also failed to do so, leaving the missionary to suspect that she had been poisoned. One night the priest went out for a walk to find the woman sprawled out on a mat in a coffee field, with a “fake Black doctor” kneeling over her with a calabash, a candle, and an “idol,” and “he appeared to be praying with a great deal of attention.” The healer asked the woman if she was now cured, at which point she started to scream and cry, alarming Labat (1742a, 497), who broke up the ritual and “had the sorcerer arrested.” The missionary in turn asked the woman what had made her cry, “and she responded that the devil told her that she would die in four days,” with the icon having served as Satan’s mouthpiece. Labat then denounced “the sorcerer” as a charlatan who only served as the devil’s ventriloquist, thus subjecting him to three hundred lashes of the whip “between the shoulders and knees.” Labat then spit on, stomped on, and burned the ritual paraphernalia that had been employed in the ceremony. This iconoclastic act horrified the priest’s slaves, who warned him that the devil would kill him because of it. But Labat (498) had no fear and proceeded to have the lashed “sorcerer” shackled and bathed in “crushed peppers and lemon juice,” a concoction that was intended both to cause him “horrible pain” (even though Labat believed that African “sorcerers can never feel pain” [498]) and to combat gangrene. As for the woman, she indeed passed away four days later, but Labat (499) got to hear her confession in time so that “she died a good Christian.”

Labat’s fourth case study is of an African slave who had been sentenced to death for allegedly practicing sorcery in St. Thomas. The sorcerer was said to have made an earthen icon talk, a crime for which he was sentenced to be burned at the stake. Present at the execution was a Dane named Vanbel, who saw fit to mock the shackled sorcerer by pontificating: “Hey, you will no longer make your little icon talk; it is now shattered.” This provoked the following reply: “If you want, Sir, I can make that cane that you are holding in your hand talk.” Intrigued, Vanbel had the judge delay the execution to see if the sorcerer could indeed do so. The Dane’s cane was passed to the slave, who “planted it in the earth and performed some ceremonies around it” and then invited its owner to ask the cane to, in effect, prophesy. Vanbel “replied that he wanted to know if a ship that he had been waiting for had disembarked, when it would arrive, what it carried, and what it might have encountered along the way” (Labat 1742a, 500). The slave performed some more rituals around the cane and then invited its owner to approach and listen. The cane spoke and offered details that turned out to be entirely accurate, with the ship arriving three days later, and thus was the convicted sorcerer exonerated (141).⁵

To Labat, equally striking as their healing modalities were the funerary customs among Africans in the Caribbean, for even when a slave who had no relatives on a given plantation died, “everyone cried,” while the bereaved often brought the priest “money or fowls in order to have Mass said for them.” His efforts to refuse such offerings were futile, meanwhile, because those bringing them were of the staunch belief that the masses would only be effective if paid for; so the priest resigned himself “to accept the fowls in order to keep the peace” (Labat 1742a, 162–163).⁶ Labat goes on to describe what was an offertory ritual that today in Haitian Vodou is called manje lemò (food for the dead), which was observed on the anniversary of the death of a relative, especially an elder. At this communal ritual in Martinique in the late seventeenth century, the participants “prayed to God that the deceased’s soul rest in peace. Afterwards, they all fall to their knees and recite every prayer that they know; then, they eat everything that has been brought and drink to the health of the dead” (164).⁷

Despite the enchantment that some of these events might have inspired—and seemingly sometimes did inspire among French missionaries—Labat ultimately took them to be proof “that there really are people who work with the devil and use him for a variety of purposes.” For our purposes, Labat’s observations illuminate the following nine key features of African religious culture in the early colonial French Caribbean: (1) healing, (2) prophecy, (3) divination, (4) sorcery and the negotiation thereof, (5) the manufacture and use of amulets and icons, (6) charismatic religious leadership, (7) drumming and dance, (8) the veneration of the dead, and (9) rainmaking. Significantly, all nine features were of West African origin. To be sure, there were central Africans among the slaves in the colonies at the time, but they were a distinct minority then, such that Labat only mentions them in passing.

In sum, Labat leaves us with an image of vibrant forms of “traditional” African religion in the early colonial history of the French Caribbean, where the Catholic church then struggled to gain a foothold. Things would markedly change in the latter regard with the expansion of the Jesuit mission (1704–1763), which soon found itself ministering to about half of a rapidly expanding African population, especially in Saint-Domingue. It may be suggested, therefore, that the first phase of Vodou’s development, from 1669 to roughly 1750, was largely devoid of any extensive Catholic or Kongolese influences, which would later intertwine in a developmental phase and transform the religion quite dramatically. In fact, Labat’s descriptions of Africana religion in the French Caribbean colonies cannot really be said to be of Vodou per se, as the crucial second phase had not really begun, a phase during which the religion truly crystallized and took on much of the identity that marks Haitian Vodou to this day. As such, Labat offers insight into several West African religious forms in early Caribbean history, though Vodou, as a Creole religion, was still aborning. With that said, West African cornerstones to Vodou were certainly laid during the period in question, such as healing modalities, divination, ancestor veneration, and the cult of Danbala, the serpent lwa (spirit) who remains one of the most important in Haitian Vodou today.

MÉDÉRIC LOUIS ELIE MOREAU DE SAINT-MÉRY

Of the four authors under consideration in this chapter, Médéric Louis Moreau de Saint-Méry has received by far the most scholarly attention, chiefly because his two-volume tome Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue is the single most important source of information about Saint-Domingue that we have. Published in 1797–1799, though complet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Encounter
• Part II. Engagement
• Contributor Biographies
• Index