Across Haiti, Vodou seeing a renaissance
Country in crisis seeks refuge in faith as it becomes more accepted
TPORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti he Vodou faithful sing, their voices rising above the gunfire erupting miles away as frantic drumbeats drown out their troubles.
They pause to swig rum out of small brown bottles, twirling in unison as they sing in Haitian Creole: “We don’t care if they hate us because they can’t bury us.”
Shunned publicly by politicians and intellectuals for centuries, Vodou is transforming into a more powerful and accepted religion across Haiti, where its believers were once persecuted. Increasingly, they seek solace and protection from violent gangs that have killed, raped and kidnapped thousands in recent years.
The violence has left more than 360,000 people homeless, largely shut down Haiti’s biggest seaport and closed the main international airport two months ago. Basic goods including food and lifesaving medication are dwindling; nearly 2 million Haitians are on the verge of famine.
From January to March alone, more than 2,500 Haitians were killed or injured, up more than 50% from the same period last year, according to the U.N.
Amid the spiraling chaos, numerous Haitians are praying more or visiting Vodou priests known as oungans for urgent requests ranging from locating loved ones who were kidnapped to finding critical medication needed to keep someone alive.
“The spirits help you. They’re always around,” said Sherly Norzéus, who is initiated to become a mambo, or Vodou priestess.
In February, she invoked Papa Ogou, god of war and iron, who she believes saved her when 20 armed men surrounded her car as she tried to flee the community of Bon Repos.
Vodou was at the root of the revolution that led Haiti to become the world’s first free Black republic in 1804, a religion born in West Africa and brought across the Atlantic by enslaved people.
The syncretic religion that melds Catholicism with animist beliefs has no official leader or creeds. It has a single God known as Bondye, Creole for “Good God,” and more than 1,000 spirits known as the lwa — including some that aren’t always benevolent.
During Vodou ceremonies, lwa are offered treats ranging from papayas and coffee to popcorn, lollipops and cheese puffs. A ceremony is considered successful if a Vodouist is possessed by an lwa. Some experts consider it a religion of the exploited. “Vodou is the system that Haitians have developed to deal with the suffering of this life, a system whose object is to minimize pain, avoid disaster, soften losses, and strengthen the survivors as much as the survival instinct,” Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon wrote in a recent essay.
Vodou began to take shape in the French colony of Saint-Domingue during funeral rituals for enslaved people and dances called calendas that they organized on Sunday evenings. It also was practiced by slaves known as Maroons who escaped to remote mountains and were led by François Mackandal, a Vodou priest.
In August 1791, some 200 slaves gathered at night in Bois-Caiman in northern Haiti for a Vodou ceremony organized by Dutty Boukman, a renowned enslaved leader and Vodou priest. They sacrificed a pig, drank its blood and swore to keep secret an imminent revolt against slavery, according to a surgeon present at the ceremony.
After a 13-year revolution, Haiti became independent, but Vodou remained oppressed.
The country’s new leaders condemned Vodou worship, as did the Catholic Church.
Catholic leaders demanded parishioners take an oath renouncing Vodou in 1941.
Thousands of Vodou followers were lynched and hundreds of symbolic spaces destroyed in what became the most violent attack in Haiti’s history against the religion, according to journalist Herbert Nerette.
But Vodou persisted. When François Duvalier became president in 1957, he politicized the religion during his dictatorship, appointing certain oungans as its representatives, Hurbon wrote.
By 2003, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Salesian priest who became Haiti’s first democratically elected president, recognized Vodou as one of Haiti’s official religions.
Despite the formal recognition, Vodou remains shunned by some Haitians.
“When you say you are a Vodouist, they stigmatize you,” said Kadel Bazile, a 42-yearold civil engineer.