The Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism: The Practical Consciousness of the African People of Haiti by Paul C. Mocombe

Abstract

The Vodou Ethic and Spirit of Communism: The Practical Consciousness of African People of Haiti. By Paul C. Mocombe. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2016. ISBN 978-0-7618-6702-9. 147 pp. $28.99.Review by Ama MazamaThis book, comprising five chapters, presents itself as a structural Marxist analysis of Vodou in Haitian society, with ultimate purpose of applying author's own phenomenological structural sociology (6) to Vodou. Thus, unsurprisingly, and typical of most works couched in European paradigms, The Vodou Ethic and Spirit of Communism is articulated around principal dichotomies. The first one opposes Haitians to African people worldwide, with strange claim that Haiti is only place in world where Africans have rejected European cultural values and held on to African culture. Indeed, according to author, the majority of black people in Africa and African diaspora, contemporarily, internalize and recursively reorganize a European way of life as black (other) agents of Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their former white colonizers (32). On contrary, he continues,the majority of Africans on island maintained their African structuring structure [sic], what I am calling here Vodou Ethic and spirit of communism social class language game, which they reified as nature of reality as such via language of Kreyol; ideology of Vodou; its ideological apparatuses, i.e., lakous, peristyles, ounfo, Iwa yo, herbal medicine, songs, dances, and zombification; and modes of production, i.e., komes, husbandry, and subsistence agriculture. (33)The second dichotomy, within Haiti, opposes bourgeoisie to masses. This results in emergence of social systems: one is structured by Catholic/Protestant ethic and its spirit of capitalism and is embraced by bourgeoisie; other revolves around Vodou ethic and its spirit of communism and is sustained by masses. Bois Caiman, we are told, was defining moment when masses decided to hold on to African worldview, including Vodou. The author argues particularly adamantly against any notion of syncretism, creolite, or hybridity in Vodou. The images of white saints with which Vodou iconography is replete were simply, according to Mocombe, a strategy used by ougan-yo and manbo-yo to familiarize and re-Africanize those Haitians who were leaving plantation and who knew very little about Vodou while being well versed in Christianity due to their proximity to Europeans and their subsequent embrace of European culture (91). Those images were to facilitate their transition back into African culture. The conflicts that have marred Haitian history, author affirms, are ultimately caused by clashes between European and African cultures, between Catholicism/ Protestantism and Vodou and agents and worldviews that sustain them.Here, Mocombe is introducing Cheikh Anta Diop's two cradle theory, which argues that an abundant African environment produced a culture of sharing and peacefulness on African continent, while an environment marked by scarcity produced European aggressiveness and individualism-and, ultimately, capitalism. Such a twist is a bit surprising, to say least, coming from a self-professed Marxist. …