Haiti, African religions and God

I HAD a conversation with my friends in my favorite after-work hang-out recently. During this conversation, I was again made to consider the level to which our erstwhile colonial masters have done a job on us where our acceptance of our black selves is concerned.

We were talking about Haiti and the recent floods there in which a few persons died. The consensus was that the people of that 'God-forsaken' country were reaping the rewards of their sinful ways. God had literally 'forsaken' that country. In fact, He had condemned its people to suffer because they had rejected Him and chose to follow 'the evils of obeah and voodoo'.

I was roundly chastised for suggesting, first of all, that a large portion of the Haitian people were Christian, many Roman Catholic, and then I was dismissed out of hand for suggesting that there was nothing wrong with the religious practices of the so-called adherents of 'voodoo'. In fact, persons in the group eyed me suspiciously and I could see them reassessing me as a person when I claimed that the religion was an acceptable one.

Christianity is basically a European religion. Although its roots are in the Middle East and Christ himself may never have travelled to Europe. It was the Christianisation of Europe which facilitated the spread of our religion to all parts of the world. In places like India and China, however, the indigenous religions still hold firm root, despite the efforts of many to convert their populations, either by force, by proselytising or by missionary service.

In Africa, as elsewhere, there were indigenous religions. When Africa was raided by Europeans and thousands of boatloads of its people forcibly taken to the Americas to work as slaves, these people carried their religion with them. Many of them, taken from Ghana and Nigeria, were Yoruba and so (to state it simply) Orisha worshippers. The religion that is called 'Orisha' is a complex one. There is a belief in a creator God and a pantheon of Orishas, each of which has a specific role. In this religion, the relationship between the creator and humanity is a bit, but not fundamentally, different from what we Christians believe. This religion, these beliefs, was a major part of the psychological structure that enabled black people in the west to endure the inhuman suffering of slavery.

The slave owners, however, seem to have recognised its power and in order to 'break' the slaves, outlawed the religion and then systematically set about in an effort to ruin it by teaching those born in the west that all forms of African worship were evil. To practise any form of this was said to be devil worship and to be abhorred. This was taught in schools and in churches to the converted. To survive, the religion went underground, or it was given a Christian 'face', with Oludumare, the creator, being equated with the Christian God and the Orishas equated with Roman Catholic saints. Some of these groups became more and more Christianised, and led to the quasi-Christian denominations in which the worship would be marked by much drumming and trumping and this eventually led to the Revivalist and Zion Baptist movements.

different fate

This did not always meet with approval and Earl Lovelace's novel, The Wine of Astonishment, describes the systematic brutal destruction of one of these churches by the colonial government. But the ones that went underground suffered a different fate. They survived (some more completely and more 'whole' than others) as Shango in Trinidad and Tobago, Santeria in Cuba, as Orisha in Brazil, as Voudon (Voodoo) in Haiti, as Obeah and Mayal in Jamaica, in the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Suriname, Puerto Rico, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela, among others. The colonial masters did succeed in convincing us that these forms of worship equated to worship of the devil. So ask a Jamaican about Hinduism, for example, and he would say that it is the religion of the people of India. He would not accept it as the true religion, but he would acknowledge it. But ask him about any aspect of African worship? 'Deviltry,' he would respond.

In this regard, we in the Caribbean are among the most brainwashed people in the world.

Keith Noel is a retired educator. Send comments to columns@gleanerjm.com