Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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On August 22, 1791, Haitian slaves revolted after Vodou priests consulated their oracle
and determined with what strategies a revolution would succeed. The revolutionaries
defeated an army sent by Napoléon Bonaparte. They declared independence on January
Threatened by the Haitian slave revolt, the United States and Western Europe slapped
economic sanctions on Haiti. This turned the prosperous colony into an impoverished
that reparations of 90 million gold francs ($21.7 billion today) be made to former slave
owners. 372 Haiti has yet to recover.
In the North American colonies, meanwhile, slave owners were largely successful in
using corporal and capital punishment to strip African slaves of their religious traditions,
which were characterized by whites as barbaric, primitive, and sexually licentious.
The sensationalistic book Haiti or the Black Republic, written in 1884 by S. St. John,
spread this characterization by portraying Vodou as an evil devil-worshipping cult. The
book contained gruesome descriptions of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and black magic;
some were extracted from Vodou priests by torture à la the Spanish Inquisition. It was a
great source for Hollywood screenswriters, who began churning out voodoo horror flicks
in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the herbal knowledge, myths, and conjure traditions that did manage to
survive in the American colonies mingled with European and Native American medicines
and traditions to become hoodoo.
Marie Laveau was a Haitian who had played an important role in the Haitian revolution.
She arrived in Louisiana in 1800, and in 1809 Vodou arrived in New Orleans en masse
when Haitian slave owners who had escaped to Cuba with their slaves during the
revolution were expelled from Cuba. Many came to the French- and Spanish-speaking
port city of New Orleans with their slaves. 373
legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans in 1890.
Today an estimated fifteen percent of the citizens of New Orleans practice Vodou. It is
also popular in other North American cities with significant African and
Haitian communities.
Vodou is practiced by roughly 60 million people worldwide, not only in Benin and Haiti,
where it was officially sanctioned as a religion in 2003, but in the Dominican Republic,
Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Ghana, and Togo. In Brazil, Vodou is called Candomblé. In
the English-speaking Caribbean, it is Obeah.
In the United States, Vodou has exerted a powerful influence on what Michael Ventura
ntieth century would, Ventura
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