Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City

Caribbean Religions in New York City 55
village, town and so on, worshipped its own spirit. Only through migration from the
countryside to urban areas did the cult of a ‘vodou’ move into other regions, where it
gained new worshippers. Later, the tribal religion developed into a complex system of
beliefs and practices in Haiti because of its suppression during slavery. Nonetheless,
it is regarded with suspicion by outsiders even today. Melville Herskovits, one of
the first non-Haitians to conduct anthropological research in rural Haiti in the 1930s
(during the end of the US occupation), wrote about Vodou:
More than any other single term, the word ‘voodoo’ is called to mind whenever mention
is made of Haiti. Conceived as a grim system of African practices, it has come to be
identified with fantastic and cruel rites and to serve as a symbol of daring excursions into
the esoteric. Not only has emphasis been placed on its frenzied rites and the cannibalism
supposed on occasion to accompany them, but its dark mysteries of magic and ‘zombie’
have been so stressed that it has become customary to think of the Haitians as living in a
universe of psychological terror. (1964: 139)
Because of many biased publications about Vodou it is difficult to understand the
religious concept of Vodou or even to approach believers impartially. According
to Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot the main problem is that Vodou was
created by many individuals from various cultures over centuries, and that Vodou has
no written doctrines and no national institutional structure (1995: 123). The middle
passage created an individualization of the enslaved Africans who were forced out
of their social context, transported together with people from other groups under
horrible circumstances over the ocean and then had to work together with other
slaves under inhuman conditions until their death in a hostile environment. 36 Though
African people were transported to Santo Domingo, the Spanish name for the colony,
as early as 1503, the beginning of Vodou can be traced back only to the French period
of suppression which started officially in 1697. Under French rule the number of
Africans increased dramatically. In 1685 the French government announced the Code
Noir which officially regulated the treatment of slaves in French colonies. The Code
Noir ordered, for instance, the baptism of every slave and prohibited the practice
of any religions apart from Catholicism. Any meeting of slaves was also prohibited
because of fear of slave uprisings. Enslaved Africans therefore started to adapt
Catholic rites and reinterpreted them according to their own traditions. In this sense
Catholicism acted as a masque for their beliefs and practices (see Hurbon 1972: 77).
During the first part of the eighteenth century, shortly before the end of the
slave trade over the Atlantic, a large number of enslaved people from the kingdom
of Dahomey arrived in Saint Domingue, the French name of the colony, among
them many Fon who were influence by Yoruba (Hurbon 1995a: 21). Despite the
prohibition the enslaved Africans managed to practise some religious rites in secret
so that some African traditions, in particular of the Fon and Yoruba, survived the
time of suppression.
From the start the enslaved Africans fought against their oppression vehemently,
some passively, for instance by refusing to work or to obey, and some actively, by
36 See Mintz and Price 1992 for information about the birth of the African-American
culture; for the individualization process, see pp. 42–3.