by Greg Dunkel

(The first of two articles)

As the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence nears, all sorts of articles on Haiti, the only state in the world founded through a slave revolution, are popping up, most bemoaning its current fiscal crisis. Some examine the role the United States has played there, mostly presenting its aid programs as benevolent attempts to install democracy and alleviate poverty. Others, more accurately, analyze U.S. efforts in Haiti as stifling democracy and the people‚s will along with extracting every possible dollar.

But while it is important to describe the impact that the United States, the world's only superpower, has and has had on Haiti, we must note that Haiti, although poor and isolated, has also had a major impact on the United States.

When Martin Bernal wanted to uncover the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greek civilization and culture in his book Black Athena, he looked at the words the Greeks borrowed or absorbed from Egypt or Phoenicia, among other evidence. The same kind of evidence of Haiti‚s impact on the United States shows up in the mainstream U.S. press.

It is safe to say that U.S. Americans associate voodoo with Haiti.

Major newspapers used the phrase "voodoo economics" over 1,000 times in the last ten years ("voodoo" being the English formulation of the Creole "vodou"). The New York Times used it at least 450 times since 1980. "Voodoo politics" shows up much less frequently -- only 25 times in the last 10 years. "Voodoo Linux," a variant of that popular operating system, also popped up as well as the "Voodoo" graphics card for games running on PCs. There were too many descriptions of voodoo rituals to easily count.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language even has a definition for "voodoo economics": "Based on unrealistic or delusive assumptions." But this definition hides the way the phrase is used. When Warren Buffet, the billionaire head of Berkshire Hathaway, one of the major players in the U.S. stock market, calls President George W. Bush's tax cuts "voodoo economics" (Washington Post, May 20, 2003), he was not only calling them "unrealistic." He was also predicting that they would mobilize his class, U.S. capitalists, by stirring their great greed, to support these cuts even if they were not in their long-term interests.

When George H. Bush, the father of the current president, was running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, he called Reagan's supply-side economic policies, with their plutocratic catering to the rich, "voodoo economics." Reagan's appeal to the ruling class was more successful than Bush's since he got the nomination, but Reagan did feel compelled to choose Bush as his vice-president.

There are other examples. Jimmy Carter made the "voodoo economics" charge in his debates with Ronald Reagan in the '80s. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) in a 1992 press conference accused then President George H. Bush of conducting a "voodoo" trade policy with Japan. John B. Oakes, a former editor of the New York Times, which is considered in American politics to be "liberal," said in 1989: "George Bush, who not so many years ago was justly critical of Ronald Reagan's 'voodoo economics,' has become past master of an even more illusory art form: voodoo politics."

It is interesting to see how these white bourgeois politicians, some of whom personally have vast wealth and all of whom represent vast wealth, use this epithet, which in the context they use it has racist connotations, primarily against other white bourgeois politicians.

In my Internet searches, I came across Kòmbò Mason Braide, a Nigerian economist and political analyst. He called the recommendation that Nigeria follow the economic policies of the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, "voodoo economics" and then went onto to analyze its effects on the politics of the states surrounding the Gulf of Guinea (Ghana, Nigeria, Benin and so on). Coming from an economist who lives in a part of Africa where voodoo developed, this epithet applied to Greenspan has a special sarcastic edge and Braide tries to make a strong connections to Haiti (www.kwenu.com/publications/braide/voodoo_politics.htm).

While it is indisputable that "voodoo" is a widely used term in the United States, the historical context of its introduction into U.S. society was the successful slave uprising that began August. 21, 1791 in St. Domingue, 15 years after the United States declared its independence.

The U.S. bourgeoisie, which was in large part a slavocracy, was completely shocked that the slaves of Haiti could organize themselves, rise up, smash the old order, kill their masters, and set up a new state that was able to maintain its independence. This rebellion was such a threat to the existence of the slavocracy if its example spread and so inconceivable in a political framework totally saturated with racism and the denigration of people whose ancestors came from Africa, that the only explanation that they could see for slaves participating in it was that they were "deluded."

They failed to consider that a majority of the slaves in Haiti, then called St. Domingue, had been born in Africa in freedom and remembered what it was. They did not have to be "deluded" into rebelling against their oppression. They participated willingly.

Which doesn't mean that voodoo did not play an inspirational and unifying role. It gave them the solidarity they needed to organize a mass uprising of slaves under the noses of the slave owners.

The slaves in the North of Haiti, the greatest wealth producing slave colony the world has ever known, organized for weeks beginning in early July, using the cover of the voodoo ceremonies that were held every weekend. Finally, 200 delegates, two from each major plantation in the North, gathered on August 14 at Bois-Caïman, a wooded area on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, and set the date for the uprising for one week later, the night of August 21, 1791.

Boukman Dutty, a voodoo priest, was one of the people who led the ceremony and was selected to lead the uprising. According to well-founded but oral sources (see Caroline Frick, The Making of Haiti, p. 93 and C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, p.87), Boukman made both a prayer and a call to arms with the following speech:

"The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all."