Peter Costello
Anyone seeking a serious and well informed account of vaudou can consult Les mysteres du vaudou, translated as Voodoo: The Search for the Spirit (Thames & Hudson / New Horizons, €14.70 / £9.75), by the Haitian sociologist Laënenc Hurbon, a trained Catholic theologian, who is now a Haitian academic.
May Deren’s The Divine Horsemen (published in London in March 1953) was an insightful book about the subject by an artist, film maker and choreographer sensitive to cultural issues in a different way, which is still worth reading by any serious student of the religious impulses in mankind.
There are numerous histories and biographies relating to the founding of Haiti and its early rulers . It was founded by former slaves as the world’s first Black state in the New Word, which in itself was seen as an outrage in the century of colonialism and empire. The country closed itself off: white visitors were for a long time not allowed to travel more than three miles inland.
In 1900 the island was visited by British writer H. Hesketh Prichard – sometime an equerry to the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle – as a special correspondent for the London Daily Express.
He wrote a grim book entitled Where Black Rules White (London 1900) – in itself revealing title. In his view the question to be asked was “Can the Negro Rule himself, is he congenitally capable?” His verdict was that Blacks could never run a country anywhere.
The Haitian can indeed rule themselves if their country and its life was not interfered with so often by the great powers”
From 1915 to 1934 it was under occupation by the US Marines sent into the country to protect North American commercial interests. The Marines “pacified” the country in the only way soldiers can do, by shooting people.
This is the burden of history that the island staggers under. Anne Heffernan suggests a different answer. The Haitian can indeed rule themselves if their country and its life was not interfered with so often by the great powers, the Spanish, the French, the British, the Americans, even their neighbours in the Dominican Republic…