The slavers in Haiti never wanted the slaves to learn to read and write, nor even to be converted to Christianity.
Hence, they kept their African religions and knew next to nothing about what was happening on the next plantation, let alone the outside world.
By contrast, in the mid-19th century free blacks in Jamaica were penning a petition to Queen Victoria—ie., they could read and write, knew about the world, and were led by a pastor (whose photo shows him wearing glasses).
A world of difference...
My ex-wife (a Christian) believed that my rock albums contained evil spirits and refused to allow them in our house.
Your link to the entire article doesn’t work, it is only an excerpt. This one does
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533204575047163435348660.html
The African culture was to live in a land of plenty and when the game ran out to move on. There is no work ethic culture.
The haitians havent changed they have no work ethic, they wait for the US or someone else to do any work that gets done.
Scarlet O’Hara’s grandmother escaped from Haiti after the revolution and settled in Savannah, Ga.
It seems evil to me to maintain this culture thru continual aid.
Something else that is never discussed is the African cultural “value” of getting over on someone else. For Americans, this is best illustrated in the Brer Rabbit fables. The “moral” of the story was never to do what is right but to get over on whomever you’re dealing with. I read this great essay years ago (wish I could remember where) about the way this paradigm still affects sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. Those is charge will say and do whatever they have to in order to secure money, food or what-have-you, then to use it only for personal gain. They get over on both the givers and on the intended recipients. This is a mark of pride for them and those still starving will accept it instead of rising up.I wish I could be clearer but I explain it better speaking.
No mention of Robertson?
Haiti’s problems start from its very origins under the French.
To begin with, there is a shortage of arable land, so the vast majority of crops were for export, not food. So from the very beginning, slaves were only fed the bare minimum of food, mostly dried fish and whatever crop was available. Many slaves died of overwork and starvation.
For this reason, that Haiti was pretty much a “death camp”. When slaves were purchased in Africa, only the troublesome and violent slaves were sent to Haiti. The “good” slaves were sent to America.
So when the slaves finally revolted in Haiti, they had no hesitation whatever in butchering their overlords. But from that point, the “death camp” was run by the slaves, at least in so far as the contentious French, British, and American powers would let them. For years thereafter, Haiti was a pawn in their games.
The only honest government in Haiti’s history was the US Marine Corps.
btt
Voodoo (Haiti), Sanaeria & Arara (Cuba) and Candomble (Brazil) all have their roots in the slaves taken from the Nigerian Yoruba tribe. The Yoruba practice the original form of the shamanic religion using a pantheon of “orishas” (spirit guardian) which the Caribbean and Brazilian variants have adapted to the Catholic saints. This pantheon does not number in the hundreds, it numbers a dozen or so.
You cannot understand the retrograde power of voodoo in Haiti unless you understand the reign of repressive terror under “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his death squads the Ton Ton Macoute. Like many suppressive regimes actively and passively supported by the us (Bautista’s Cuba, many others), we did precious little to encourage a democratic government, rather, we saw any regime that was anti-communist to be in our interest to support, particular if the repression and poverty led to a groundswell of support for reform, even reforms of the sort we fought our Revolution from Britain over.
Instead of helping democratic institutions grow in the 3rd World, our foreign policy has an embarrassing record taking the easy way out and providing many repressive regimes with arms and police training (School of the Americas). This is not a popular message on this forum, but it IS history and a large part of the reason why we have leftist governments erupting in South America and much of the developing world.
Marxism doesn’t take root in the West in its revolutionary guise (they use surrogate causes like environmentalism, climate, etc.) because our standard of living does not give the Marxists ammunition via the misery index. Conservatives are blind on this issue and will never understand how we, the good guys, can be so hated in the world. Where you don’t have misery, you don’t have revolution, period.
The daughter-in-law, and her children, of President Stenio Vincent had to flee Haiti when he left office. She lived in the lap of luxury during her father-in-law’s reign, but she wound up as my aunt’s maid in NY. We all called her Mrs. Vincent. I never new what her first name was. Anyway, she eventually had to be let go because she was scaring my cousins half to death with her voodoo talk.
Voodoo is a symptom of an underlying disability.
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