With friends like these, Haitians don’t need enemies
February 6, 2010
On Wednesday February 3, 2010, the CBC surpassed its usual efforts to promote irrationality. The show in question was aired on the radio program, The Current, hosted that day by both Anna Maria Tremonti and a CBC producer, David Gutnick (www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2010/201002/20100203.html). Also featured was an interview with Wade Davis, the unctuous pontificator featured in an earlier post on this blog (Davis was selected by the CBC to present the 2009 Massey Lectures, where he celebrated a wide variety of dubious beliefs as ”ancient wisdom”). Davis has been called upon again for his “expertise” because he is author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness – books that evidently “explore Haitian voodoo, magic and zombies”.
Tremonti, Gutnick, and Davis are all ardent supporters of voodoo, and the only opponent given air time is a silly Christian missionary with her own brand of religious nonsense to spout. We are told by Tremonti et al. that viewing voodoo as a primitive relic is a “stereotype”. One of the main practices of voodoo, the horrific spectacle of animal sacrifice, is not mentioned; instead “voodoo priests” are commended for instilling in people “a deep sense of responsibility toward the other”, helping the poor and downtrodden to “live with life and loss”, and providing “a set of ideas that tries to deal with the mystery that death implies”. It is even pointed out that “there are a lot of people who think Voudou [sic] will actually play a major role in how Haitians rebuild their capital city for the 21st century”.
In addition to voodoo’s purported capacity to “help” people deal with suffering, the role of voodoo priests in “healing the sick” is also mentioned. This viewpoint, however, fails to examine how the religion enables its practitioners to extract funds in the name of quackery. Although Jean-Bertrand Aristide warned Haitians in his autobiography to be “careful to distinguish the voodoo priest from the charlatan who deceives people through sleight of hand, and whose aim is to get rich”, how can a legitimate “voodoo priest” and a charlatan be differentiated from one another? In the case of AIDS treatment, for example, a “voodoo priest” charges $1,400 to pray to “voodoo spirits for guidance”, administer an emetic, and to dispense vitamins “to promote blood flow”. This is in contrast to a three-month supply of antibiotics to treat AIDS-related infections, which costs $350. As the result of a belief in voodoo, ineffective and expensive ”cures” are provided in lieu of scientifically valid treatments.
What is particularly outrageous is the CBC’s promotion of Max Beauvoir, “a friend and mentor” of Davis - a person referred to as the ”pope of voodoo”. Beauvoir, a person educated in scientific methods in the U.S. and France, had no interest in voodoo until his dying voodoo priest grandfather beseeched him to follow in his footsteps. He now has a grand residence on the outskirts of Haiti where he and his followers “dance around a giant totem to the beat of drums”, ”light bonfires to summon the spirits’, and “drain the blood of animals like that scrawny white goat to, among other things, heal the sick”. This “voodoo priest” is not universally admired. On the contrary, Amy Wilentz, in her book The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, describes Beauvoir as an opportunist who has “the oily manner of a man whom you wouldn’t want to leave alone with your money or your child”.
Even more disturbing is the fact that Beauvoir has been linked to the Duvaliers - the brutal dictators that controlled the country for decades while bleeding it dry – and even had to flee to the United States after Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier was exiled. Part of the Duvaliers’ power, in fact, was made possible by the “voodoo priests” that the CBC is legitimizing. It has been noted, for example, that Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier managed “to persuade and coerce Haiti’s leading voodoo priests to work with him to neutralize his enemies”, which helped him to instill widespread fear in the population. As Claude Douge, a religious scholar, points out, “once he had the priests in his hand, he had the Haitian people”.
It goes without saying the Haitian people have suffered terribly over the last centuries because of colonialism, imperialism, and other horrendous circumstances that were not of their own making. Unfortunately, however, many misguided people, such as many journalists working for the CBC, seem to think that supporting voodoo will somehow ”empower” the country. But voodoo is merely a tool of the powerful to keep the Haitian people submissive, and it should be exposed for what it is – a collection of ancient superstitions that are preventing Haitians from understanding the nature of their oppression and fighting against it. It is disgraceful that smarmy romantics like Wade Davis are enabling charlatans like Max Beauvoir to increase their wealth and power by exploiting the ignorance and suffering of the Haitian people.
4 Responses to “With friends like these, Haitians don’t need enemies”
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February 7th, 2010 at 11:43 am
I find your categorization of “Voodoo equals evil”, as simplistic as the viewpoints of the adversaries that you are citing in your blog. Although, I will fully agree that (since religion has existed) charlatans have used Voodoo AND Christianity AND Islam to manipulate people, I find it utterly absurd to reduce any of the above mentioned religions or philosophies to simply a tool for manipulation. Please realize that long before anybody gave a damn about Haiti, when Haitian children were dying of common curable illnesses and the rest of the world preferred to slaughter livestock in order to maintain beef prices instead of donating them to the poor, Voodoo represented for many, a cultural cement and a means of transmitting knowledge on plants and traditional cures to common ailments. Putting aside however, all subjective opinions on the intrinsic value of this religion (or any other), it remains today the religion in Haiti which offers access to the greatest number of people. The voodoo priests (if organized) a highway into the heart of Haitian culture. Why not work together and use this infrastructure to provide education, information and other vital things to the Haitian people? As concerns Duvalier and voodoo, I think you should take a closer look at the horrors committed under Aristide and the instability and slow steady destruction and looting of Haiti (by it’s own politicians) since Duvalier’s departure. I am not a fan of any Haitian President, but at least during the time of the Duvaliers, there was a 20 year period during which people could build businesses, roads, schools without wondering if it would all disappear with the next change of regime. Nothing was constructed under Aristide except a safe haven for all the drug lords and gangs of S. America and a culture which glorified retribution and violence. Excuse my vehement response, but Haiti is a complex country with very complex social issues and I am rather tired of the “George Bushes” of this world pontificating on “easy” solutions which simply do not take into consideration the realities of the culture they are trying to affect. Why not try to evaluate objectively and use all the assets at our disposal…including Max Beauvoir, a scholar who has invested many years of his time learning and studying Haitian culture, to move Haiti into this century.
February 7th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
The vehemence of the response is appreciated. As Jonathan Rauch has argued in Kindly Inquisitors, knowledge develops by choosing between conflicting views.
I would never state that “voodoo equals evil”. This is a religious statement; my point is that voodoo is a socially negative force, not a positive one.
Knowledge of herbal remedies has nothing to do with voodoo; voodoo is about apeasing the spirits of the dead, which have not been shown to exist. The problem with the “voodoo priests” is they use their “knowledge” to fool people into thinking that they have some kind of supernatural power. This can then be used to exert social control and inhibit the questioning of their actions (largely for the purposes of extracting wealth).
The idiocy of Christianity and Islam, and the oppression of imperialism, does not mean that voodoo is socially beneficial. The horrors committed by Aristide do not justify the actions of the Duvaliers. Although the Duvaliers may have “made the trains run on time”, any benefits that they MIGHT have brought are far outweighed by the existence of the Tonton Macoutes.
Once again, how does one differentiate between a charlatan and a priest (voodoo or otherwise)? How do we know that the “scholar” Max Beauvoir, with his prayers, chanting, and animal sacrifice, is actually “healing the sick”?
The reason why we should not promote the use of the voodoo infrastructure is because all these services can be provided without condescendingly supporting socially negative and grotesque practices such as animal sacrifice and human supplication before nonexistent spirits. We should be having an honest conversation about voodoo, which Tremonti et al. do not believe in, instead of pretending that it has value.
February 21st, 2010 at 10:39 am
“Davis has been called upon again for his “expertise” because he is author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness – books that evidently “explore Haitian voodoo, magic and zombies”.”
Well, actually, Davis’s book debunked the mystical elements of the zombie belief and treated it a problem in ethnopharmacology. I take it from the qualifier “evidently” that you haven’t actually read the book you’re mischaracterizing?
February 21st, 2010 at 3:15 pm
The “mischaracterization” is the CBC’s not mine. My contempt for Davis is due to listening to his unctuous pontifications on the Massey Lectures (examined in a previous post), as well as his condescending promotion of irrationality more generally.