Vodou Vatican: A Prolegomenon for Understanding Authority in a Synthetic Religion

Abstract

1986 was a year of living dangerously for Haiti. In February, Jean-Claude Duvalier and his rapacious wife Michele fled to France along with her furs and his primitive art and $800 million or so from the treasury. In the wake of this popular dechoukai (Creole for uprooting) of the Duvaliers, came a far more ambiguous cultural uprooting. Almost as soon as Duvalier fils settled near the Cote d'Azur, attacks began on Vodou. Houngans (priests) and mambos (priestesses) were murdered, or forced to recant their religion. Hounfors (temples) were sacked. The mud pits at Plaine du Nord, where every year pilgrim devotees of the Iwa (deity) Ogun gather to immerse themselves in primal sludge (on the days preceding the canonical feast of St. James), were attacked by a group of cement carrying fundamentalist Christians intent on sealing up this source of Vodou grace. That attack was repulsed, but the ferocity of the dechoukai inspired a debate on the future of Vodou as the common religion of Haitians (or the national patrimony as the post-Duvalier constitution lated described it). To engage in that debate we must examine the question of authority within Vodou, especially in light of efforts by Max Beauvoir, Herard Simon, and other Houngans to construct a framework for a segmented, non-authoritarian religion. Causes for these attacks against Vodou are themselves a cause of some controversy. The most common rationale offered by those opposed to the religion is political: the Duvalier regime had co- opted Vodou. Papa Doc and his grossly inept son Baby recruited heavily from the ranks of the houngans to man the Ton-Ton Macoute: the infamous thugs in sun glasses and para-military gear who constituted a kind of SS for the Duvaliers. It is further argued that the Duvaliers were Vodou practioners, and that the family maintained itself in power through the powerful oungas (evil charms) of the religion. 1 Vodou defenders call these charges bogus. The most flamboyant houngan in Haiti, Max Beauvoir of the Port au Prince suburb of Mariani, points out that the Duvaliers co-opted every institution and everyone who remained in Haiti. Hougans, Catholic bishops, Protestant pastors were all Duvalierist in like proportion when it was expedient to be so. According to Beauvoir, the bishops and the pastors, in nefarious collusion with the minions of Ronald Reagan and John Paul H, have used the political revolution to uproot Vodou. They are attempting to transform the oldest African religious practice in the world into