Haiti and the Voodoo Curse: The cultural roots of the country's endless misery.

Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years, and yet it remains the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere. Its indicators of progress are closer to Africa's than to those of Latin America. It has defied all development prescriptions.

Why? Because Haiti's culture is powerfully influenced by its religion, voodoo. Voodoo is one of numerous spirit-based religions common to Africa. It is without ethical content. Its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies. It is a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.

Voodoo is practiced mostly by poor Haitians, who make up the vast majority of the country's population. But all Haitians feel its influence, as one of my sons-in-law, who is Haitian and holds a graduate degree from Harvard, assures me. Wallace Hodges, an American missionary who lived in Haiti for 20 years, observed: "A Haitian child is made to understand that everything that happens is due to the spirits. He is raised to externalize evil and to understand he is in continuous danger. Haitians are afraid of each other. You will find a high degree of paranoia in Haiti."

But voodoo is not the only progress-resistant force at work in Haiti. The treatment of the slaves in French St. Domingue—the colony that would become independent Haiti in 1804— was particularly brutal. The Haitian slaves won their freedom through an uprising that left them in charge of their destiny, but they were left with a value system largely shaped by African culture and by the experience of slavery.

Good comments, Jeff, you think clearly....What you speak of is Christian _idealsim_, which is a beautiful concept. I wish more Christians expressed their idealism.

The backpedaling begins. Christians are just a bunch of superstitious yahoos approximately equivalent to voodoo believers, uh, uh, uh, EXCEPT for a handful of idealists, uh, uh, uh, of which you are one -- yeah, that's the ticket!

Let me get this straight.

What you are saying is Haitians have reproduced way beyond the point of being able to feed themselves.

Don’t you think that’s a problem in and of itself?

BTW, before the earthquake there were approximately 350,000 orphans in that country. Another problem.

All the money isn’t going to solve these problems until the Haitians start doing something different.

Demographics is a funny bird. One standard is that poor nations have a high reproduction rate until they achieve a certain plateau of prosperity, unique to them. Then very suddenly, the number of children per family drops to between 2.3 and 2.1, just sustainability.

Most recently, this happened in Mexico, which had maintained a birthrate of about 6 for decades. Then, in just a few years, it plummeted, attributable to reaching a plateau of national prosperity. Importantly, the highest birthrate among Mexicans remained among illegal aliens in the US—higher than in Mexico. But this is dropping rapidly as well.

There has been an interesting concept being shared by those nations assisting Haiti, that for once, instead of funneling money through their useless and corrupt government, the relief will be in material goods, distributed by these nations, while *ignoring* the Haitian government.

In other words, these other nations can ship in building supplies, and erect a lot of good quality housing quickly, which is then given to people as their own, at a fraction of the time and expense of going through the Haitian government.

Everything to improve their society, from setting up marketplaces and putting Haitians to work running them, providing food and medicine, getting children in school, even creating a more honest police force, is done while ignoring their government. I think the idea is once they actually see how things can work, they will be less inclined to going back to what doesn’t work.

Of course, the odds favor that this won’t work, but we can hope.

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