The Anti-Superstition Campaign of 1941

From 1941 the Roman Catholic clergy in Haiti, most of them French, ran a national campaign to make parishioners renounce Vodou. Participants were called rejete, rejectors, and the campaign asked each of them to swear an oath renouncing Satan and all his works, with Vodou understood as falling under that description. The government of Elie Lescot instructed civil and military authorities to support it.

In practice that meant raids. Temples were entered, drums, pots, flags and altar objects were carried out and burned, sacred trees were felled, and practitioners were arrested. The legal basis was a Haitian penal law of 1935 against pratiques superstitieuses, which had itself replaced the machinery of repression built during the United States occupation of 1915 to 1934. The state had been criminalising this material for a long time before the Church made a campaign of it.

The campaign fell hardest on the rural poor, for whom the temple was also the meeting house and the mutual aid society, and it sharpened the division between a French-speaking urban elite and a Creole-speaking countryside. By 1942 the reaction against it was strong enough to force a retreat, though prosecutions continued in a sporadic way for years.

The most durable result was the opposite of what was intended. The ethnologist Jacques Roumain attacked the campaign in print and founded the Bureau d'Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince, whose business was to collect and protect exactly the objects the campaign was burning.

This entry sits in the atlas beside material on sacrifice because it shows the mechanism working in the open.

The charge against Haitian popular religion was never a single allegation that could be examined. It was a bundle: superstition, sorcery, the sacrifice of animals, and, at the far end, the sacrifice of people. The first three were real and describable, the last was not, and the bundle let the last one borrow credibility from the others. Anyone arguing that Vodou needed suppressing could gesture at a drum and imply a corpse.

The bundle was assembled over a long period and by several hands. Nineteenth-century foreign writing, above all Spenser St John's account of the Bizoton trial, supplied the atrocity. The occupation of 1915 to 1934 supplied the administrative apparatus, and American popular writing of the occupation years, William Seabrook's The Magic Island above all, supplied the register in which Hollywood then presented the religion to a world audience. By 1941 a Haitian priest could invoke all of it without arguing any of it.

Two things are worth holding at once. The persecution was real and the objects burned are gone. And the religion was not what its persecutors said it was: the ethnographic record, from Alfred Metraux onward, describes a religion of service to the lwa in which animal offering has a place and human sacrifice does not.

Describing a living tradition through its accusers is the failure this entry exists to name.