Lawrence Harrison’s disturbing article in the Wall Street Journal, Haiti and the Vodou Curse, is filled with ethnocentrism, religious intolerance, and ignorance of the subject addressed, namely Haiti’s underdevelopment. Haiti’s poverty is an economic issue. To understand how it arose, one need only review how economic decisions taken inside and outside of Haiti have affected the country.
The foundation for Haiti’s underdevelopment was laid by its colonial administrators. During a combined 300 years of Spanish, British, and French rule, not one school was built in the territory. After Haiti’s independence in 1804, the US and other slave trading countries imposed and economic embargo on Haiti lasting nearly 60 years. This crushing embargo was only lifted as a consequence of the US Civil War. If embargoes are inconsequential as Harrison suggests, then the one against Cuba ought to be lifted and embargoes should be abandoned as a tool for implementing U.S. foreign policy.
Harrison’s article mentions the indemnity extracted by France but conveniently overlooks its impact. In 1821, France demanded that Haiti pays it 150 million francs for loss of revenue from the island. This indemnity is estimated to be equivalent to 21 billion dollars in today’s currency. Paul Farmer said it well, when he said that Haiti paid with money what it had already paid in blood. The payments to France further crippled Haiti’s economy by preventing necessary investments in education and infrastructure.
Beyond these manmade difficulties, Haiti also experienced numerous natural disasters like the earthquake of 1842 that killed half of the inhabitants of its second largest city, Cape Haitian. In 2008, four hurricanes caused millions of dollars of damages. Repeated natural disasters further contributed to Haiti’s economic woes.
Internally, the most devastating measures taken by Haitian rulers have been a persistent reliance on an agrarian economy instead of investing in industrialization. All countries of the world that have relied on agriculture rather than industrialization are today similarly poor and ill-equipped to partake in the information age. This is the real similarity between Haiti and Benin as it relates to development.
To explain Haiti’s poverty, Harrison puts forward a genetic and a religious explanation and gets both wrong. He says that Haitians are mostly of Benin ancestry when indeed according to the database from Harvard and Cambridge University that compiled records from the Trans-Atlantic Trade, Haitians are predominantly of Central African descent.
He misleads the reader to attack Vodou rather than provide a tactile accounting of the history that led to Haiti’s underdevelopment. Harrison, the former head of USAID in Haiti, offered no accountability for his use of US resources during his tenure. He makes no mention of his role in distributing US AID during the brutal Duvalier dictatorship. Jean Claude Duvalier’s regime deposited funds in foreign accounts rather than invest in building the necessary infrastructure for development. It is such corruption and not how Haitian people worship that best explains Haiti’s underdevelopment.
In an attempt to make Vodou seem bizarre, Harrison wrote: Voodoo is one of numerous spirit-based religions common to Africa. It is without ethical content. He says this as though his own religion, presumably a brand of Christianity, is not a spirit based religion. Should we then conclude that beliefs in spirits and in angels are not present in Non-African Religions? If so, is Christ, commonly presented as God or as the Holy Ghost, devoid of spiritual content?
The truth is Vodou is the belief that there is one God and many African Ancestral spirits analogous to European saints. Harrison’s allegation that Vodou is without ethical content is a vicious attack on a religious tradition that teaches one to do good on to others so that one may also experience good things. An old Nigerian proverb, from Haiti’s Nago Vodou tradition makes this clear: Before pricking a bird, prick yourself so that you may know how it feels.
Like all other religions, Haitian religious beliefs are not a hindrance to development. China, Japan, India, and Israel are all non-Christian countries who share the Haitian belief in reverence for Ancestors and they are far more developed than many Christian countries in this hemisphere. Would Harrison have us believe that the poverty found in many Latin American countries is the result of this region’s Christianity?
Rather than say Haiti has a Vodou curse, one can make an equally fallacious argument that Haiti has a Christian curse considering the extermination of its original inhabitants by Christians and the enslavement of Africans by people who once called the territory Saint Domingue. Such an argument would be wrong because it is not religion but people who act on the world. It is people who have the capacity to be kind or cruel to each other.
In the past, Haiti was a victim of human cruelty from the likes of Napoleon and Duvalier. Today, Haiti is experiencing unprecedented support from the world community. How Haiti moves forward will be influenced far more by how aid is spent than by how Haitian people worship. Fortunately, the UN has named former President Bill Clinton to oversee some of that expenditure. Bill Clinton has argued for accountability, for better disaster planning, for coordinating the activities of relief agencies, non- profit organizations, and Haitian Government agencies. Clinton is able to point to these things because unlike Harrison, he can separate a crusade from a development plan.
Jerry M. Gilles, M.D, FACOG
Associate Professor Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine
Yvrose S. Gilles, MA
Author of Remembrance: Roots, Rituals, and Reverence in Vodou
www.bookmanlit.com
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Forwarded by Ezili's Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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Recommended HLLN Link:
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Facebook - Ezili Dantò and The FreeHaitiMovement
Ezili Dantò analyzes the Vodun song -Going Back to Root - Lasous O M Pwale - I'm Returning to the Beginning
Ezili's counter-colonial narrative on Vodun
http://bit.ly/c41rN7
Ezili's HLLN Vodun Links
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Bio of Ezili Dantò - Haiti's Warrior Mother
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Avatar parallels: Warrior Mother, Vodun and the Sky People
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The Avatar Movie From A Black Perspective
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Disturbing and racist article on Vodun by former
USAID Haiti mission director, Lawrence Harrison
Haiti and the Voodoo Curse
The cultural roots of the country's endless misery
By LAWRENCE HARRISON
Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years, and yet it remains the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere. Its indicators of progress are closer to Africa's than to those of Latin America. It has defied all development prescriptions.
Why? Because Haiti's culture is powerfully influenced by its religion, voodoo. Voodoo is one of numerous spirit-based religions common to Africa. It is without ethical content. Its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies. It is a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.
Voodoo is practiced mostly by poor Haitians, who make up the vast majority of the country's population. But all Haitians feel its influence, as one of my sons-in-law, who is Haitian and holds a graduate degree from Harvard, assures me. Wallace Hodges, an American missionary who lived in Haiti for 20 years, observed: "A Haitian child is made to understand that everything that happens is due to the spirits. He is raised to externalize evil and to understand he is in continuous danger. Haitians are afraid of each other. You will find a high degree of paranoia in Haiti."
But voodoo is not the only progress-resistant force at work in Haiti. The treatment of the slaves in French St. Domingue—the colony that would become independent Haiti in 1804— was particularly brutal. The Haitian slaves won their freedom through an uprising that left them in charge of their destiny, but they were left with a value system largely shaped by African culture and by the experience of slavery. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Arthur Lewis, himself a descendent of African slaves, wrote that those who had experienced it "have inherited the idea that work is only fit for slaves."
What other factors contribute to Haiti's endless nightmare? Bad leadership is one obvious candidate. With the exception of Alexandre Pétion (1806-1818), Haiti has never had a president fully committed to modernizing the country. (Once again, we are reminded of the parallels between Haiti and Africa.)
Some stress policies and institutions when they try to explain the country's tortured history. But bad policies inevitably reflect the agendas of poor leaders—and thus the culture that nurtured them. Those of us who have worked at institution-building in countries like Haiti are well aware of the frustrations that attend such efforts, confirming the truth of Mr. Etounga-Manguelle's observation: "Culture is the mother. Institutions are the children."
Others cite the heavy indemnity that the French extracted from Haiti in 1825 for re-establishment of relations (originally 150 million francs over five years, later reduced to 60 million francs over 30 years) as a major cause of Haiti's poverty. It is also true that for several decades after its independence, Haiti was ostracized by other Western Hemisphere nations, the United States among them, out of fear that Haiti's successful slave rebellion would spread to their own slaves. U.S. policy was changed by Abraham Lincoln; official recognition was extended in 1862.
Still others argue that Haiti's problems are largely the result of a mulatto upper class that identifies itself with the former French masters and treats black Haitians as inferior beings. But for a good part of Haiti's history, black chiefs of state, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier among them, ran the country.
While these and other factors may be relevant, none of them, even collectively, adequately explains the unending dysfunction of Haitian society. Haiti's predicament is caused by a set of values, beliefs and attitudes, rooted in African culture and the slavery experience that resist progress.
The Dominican Republic, which Haiti ruled between 1822 and 1843, has evolved as a more or less typical Latin American country with political instability and slow development. But even that slow development has clearly outpaced Haiti. The Dominican Republic is No. 79 on the U.N. Development Program's Human Development Index, while Haiti is No. 146 (out of 177 countries).
Haiti has received far more development assistance than Benin, the country in the Dahomey region of West Africa whence came the slaves the French imported into St. Domingue. And yet today Haiti's and Benin's level of development are strikingly similar. The British imported slaves into Barbados from the same Dahomey region, but Barbados remained a British colony until 1966, by which time the descendents of the slaves had become black Englishmen. Today, Barbados is a stable democracy on the verge of First World status.
Culture matters. Race doesn't.
Mr. Harrison, who ran the USAID mission to Haiti from 1977 to 1979, now directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save it from Itself" (Oxford University Press, 2006).
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Ezili Dantò's Note: Because of its economy is heavily dependent on Northern tourism, the Bahamas has the highest rate of HIV in the Caribbean. (http://www.avert.org/) There's more aids/HIV in the Bahamas (3% rate) than there is in Haiti (2.2% rate of aids/HIV). But it is Haiti that is pictured as more diseased. There's a higher aids/HIV rate in Washington D.C./USA (3% rate). But, because the majority of Haitians are Africans with a Vodun culture and have no wish to be forcibly assimilated, as Mr. Harrison says, into black Englishmen, black Frenchmen, empire is still trying to "civilize" us through exclusion, tyranny, false charity, false USAID benevolence, plunder, pillage, oppression of identity, liberty and self-determination in the way it was done in the rest of the enslaved Caribbean that still, to this day, remain Euro/US colonies! (See, Does the Western economic model and calculation of economic wealth fit Haiti, fit Dessalines' idea of wealth distribution? NO!).
See also:
Haitian pigs meet globalization
Mysterious Prison Ailment Traced to U.S. Rice
Creating New Paradigms - Why it's critical to re-create and adapt the Ancestors' Vodun Psychology by Ezili Danto, April 14, 2008
Ezili's counter-colonial narrative on Vodun
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Ezili Dantò translates and analyzes the Vodun song -Going Back to Root - Lasous O M Pwale - I'm Returning to the Beginning/Source/Root
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Travesty in Haiti - False aid, false charity, false orphanages, false benevolence
Bush Administration Accused of Withholding "Lifesaving" Aid to Haiti
Bwa Kayiman, 2008: Reclaiming the Haitian People's Vodun Narrative at Bwa Kayiman
HLLN Links to US "free trade" fraud promoting famine in Haiti
The Revolutionary Potential of Haiti, its creeds, values and struggle
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Comments
Along with the historical facts, this one is especially good: "It is people who have the capacity to be kind or cruel to each other."
Sounds like the Shah of something but certainly not clarity. You're ignorance Rajshah is only matched by Lawrence Harrison's lack of knowledge about the Haitian people, its Vodun culture. But since both of you insist on talking about voodoo as if that is something real and not Hollywood made vision of Black people - one lives and learns that in Rajshah voodoo ceremonies people eat cats, how does it taste Rajshah? I hear it's a delicacy in some countries. Did you escape to there? Is that how you know such things to come here and recount it to the Internet public? One also wonders why both you and that USAID mission director Lawrence Harrison, who reign in the time of the bloody Duvalier against the people’s wishes, don't go back to whatever tribe your ancestors herald from, for surely you're as much immigrant here as the Gilles, no? Or where you one of the Black autochthones here before Columbus – indigenous to the Americas, not just Africa. But the planet? If one is indigenous to the Americas, that would include the US, no. But that’s all besides the point isn’t Rajshah, or should I say Lawrence Harrison? Let’s just take your first sentence – uhmm? Your write or should I say Lawrence Harrison, former USAID director in the time when US was supporting the bloody Duvalier, writes that “Haiti RECEIVED billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years?” Are you sure? It was the NATION of Haiti that RECEIVED monies from the US? Of course not. So Lawrence Harrison starts his racist missive with an OUTRIGHT lie and the rest is just more embellishment. As the Gilles were too polite to ask, why don’t I. How much of those dollars did you as USAID Mission director along with your subcontractor and the local elites, actually pocket Laurence, oops, sorry, Rajshah? For those who wish to see a comparison – here’s some REALITY – and it’s always been the same. US aid to Haiti is corporate welfare for people like Lawrence Harrison and Rajshah. No more, no less. To pay USAID mission director’s salaries and their children’s private schooling. For an interesting breakdown of today’s earthquake aid monies and how it breaks down, go to:
Haiti Numbers - 27 Days After Quake by Bill Quigley. “For every one dollar of U.S. aid to Haiti, 42 cents is for disaster assistance, 33 cents is for the U.S. military, 9 cents is for food, 9 cents is to transport the food, 5 cents to pay Haitians to help with recovery effort, 1 cent is for the Haitian government and 1⁄2 a cent is for the government of the Dominican Republic.” Where’s Haiti’s billions at? Oh, I see, the billions paid to the UN to provide security to Haitians since 2004? Got it. It’s over $610 million per year for the UN “peacekeepers” to live in Haitian hotels, isn’t it? That’s the aid to Haiti, right? And who are we-Haitians at war with, that we need “peacekeepers?” Port-au-Prince is just a small part of Haiti, right. 80% of the population lives outside of Port au Prince, right. So, pray tell, Rajshah/Harrison, where was the UN soldiers, those amongst the 9,000 UN in Haiti, stationed, for instance outside the area the earthquake hit, where were the bulk of the UN soldiers when the earthquake hit, when the four 2008 back-to-back storms ravaged Gonaives, when the 2004 hurricanes hit? They were where? Ok, how about USAID and its 10,000 NGO’s in Haiti, now that’s some voodoo disappearance, I agree, Rajshah. They must have been eating cats somewhere and cavorting in greedy glee anticipating, like vultures and vampires, the earthquake windfall of funds they were about to partake in- that great corporate welfare niche that USAID and the World Relief Organizations’ swim in at decent people’s expense the world over. No? Then Lawrence and Rajshah must have been with Duvalier-the-son, somewhere in France or hunta leader, Cedras in Panama counting the dollars they hid away together with these, their former subcontractors, for USAID/US Embassy? No. OK. You were counting all that money the US gave Guy Phillip, the DEA-accused drug dealer - scheduled by the US Embassy in Haiti, at some point, along with FRAPH death squads - to take over the reigns of presidential office in Haiti? Isn’t that you’re reality Rajshah? I agree that’s some repugnant voodoo! But the Haitian people’s spiritual path is Vodun and it’s never helped to provide the ideology to drop a nuclear bomb, enslave, colonize, conduct two bloody European World Wars, nor conduct a war in Iraq based on voodoo WMD lies? Never. It’s only tried to survive Lawrence Harrison’s and Rajshah’s ilk for over 500years. And being strong and sacred, it has and shall continue to extend the “sacred energies” that the word “Vodun” means in the Fon African language.