Anthropos 85.1990: 475^482
The Maroon Republics and Religious Diversity
in Colonial Haiti
Leslie G. Desmangles
Abstract. - Anthropological literature about Vodou suggests
that African religious traditions brought by the slaves remained
intact throughout the colonial period in Haiti. This article pre
sents two theses: first, the nature of the ethnic compositions of
the Maroon republics throughout the island, new environmental
factors, and the socio-political situation in the colony would
have resulted in radical transformation of African traditions;
second, culture contact between Africa and Europe in Haiti
caused Vodou to incorporate Roman Catholic beliefs and prac
tices in its theology. This subterfuge resulted in a religious
symbiosis, the juxtaposition of religious beliefs and practices
from two different continents. [Haiti, Maroon republics, Vodou,
Rada, Rétro, symbiosis, confréries]
Leslie G. Desmangles, Ph. D. (Philadelphia, Temple Univ.,
1975); Assoc. Prof., Director of the Area Studies Program at
Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.; field research on the religions
of Africa and the Caribbean; - publications include articles and
book reviews in different journals (see also References Cited).
The African slaves who came to Saint-Do
mingue, as Haiti was called during the colonial
period (1492-1804), were a mixed group of people
who possessed different cultural and religious her
itage. Tom from their homelands and transplanted
in a new milieu, they left much of that heritage
behind them. In many parts of the New World,
however, they managed to salvage some of that
heritage from the wreckage that was left of their
old way of life. Under the weight of slave labor,
they dinged tenaciously to their traditional African
beliefs and practices, to their gods, and to their
ritual ceremonies which were sources of inspira
tion and comfort to them. In these ceremonies,
the slaves danced, tended offerings in homage to
these gods, and became spiritually possessed by
them, a non-material achievement which allowed
the slaves to embody divine powers whom they
believed would free them from their oppression
and brutal displacement.
These ceremonies had a profound effect not
only on colonial plantation life, but on the history
of Saint-Domingue as well. Many of the slaves
believed that they were the elect of their gods and
that, while they were spirit possessed, these gods
would appear in large ships to take them back to
Africa. Under the guidance of slave leaders viewed
as messiahs, they conducted countless raids on the
plantations, often brutal and costly in human lives
and materials. Because the planters perceived the
slaves’ religion as a threat to the economic and
political stability of the colony, they were quick to
enact a number of edicts to regulate the religious
lives of slaves throughout the colony. One of such
edicts, the Code Noir of 1685, made it illegal for
the slaves to practise their African religions openly
and, as we shall see later, under stiff penalties
to the contrary, ordered all masters to have their
slaves converted to Christianity within eight days
after their arrival to the colony (Gisler 1965; 79).
The severity of such laws drove African ritu
als underground. To circumvent the officious in
terference in their rituals by their masters, the
slaves learned to overlay their African practices
with the veneer of Roman Catholic symbols and
rituals. They used symbols of the church in their
rituals as “white masks over black faces,” veils
behind which they could hide their African prac
tices. Moreau de Saint-Méry, an eye-witness of
Vodou during the eighteenth century, reported that
makeshift altars and votive candles concealed the
Africanness of their rituals (1958/1: 55). The pres
ence of these symbols not only prompted the slaves
to use them in these rituals, but their inclusions of
prayers revering the Catholic saints caused them to
establish a system of correspondences between the
African gods and these Catholic saints. These cor
respondences consisted of a system of reinterpre
tations described by Herskovits and others (1937;
Simpson 1980; Métraux 1958). Particular symbols
associated with the gods in African mythology
were made to correspond to similar symbols asso
ciated with the saints in Catholic hagiology. Thus,
for example, the Dahomean snake deity Damballah
was made to correspond with St. Patrick because
of the Catholic legend about Saint Patrick and the
snakes of Ireland. Hence, the slaves succeeded in