The Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism: The Practical Consciousness of the African People of Haiti by Paul C. Mocombe (review)

This book, comprising five chapters, presents itself as a structural Marxist analysis of Vodou in Haitian society, with the ultimate purpose of applying the author’s own “phenomenological structural sociology” (6) to Vodou. Thus, unsurprisingly, and typical of most works couched in European paradigms, The Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism is articulated around two principal dichotomies. The first one opposes Haitians to African people worldwide, with the strange claim that Haiti is the only place in the world where Africans have rejected European cultural values and held on to African culture. Indeed, according to the author, “the majority of the black people in Africa and the African diaspora, contemporarily, internalize and recursively reorganize a European way of life as black (other) agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their former white colonizers” (32). “On the contrary,” he continues,

the majority of the Africans on the island maintained their African structuring structure [sic], what I am calling here the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game, which they reified as the nature of reality as such via the language of Kreyol; the ideology of Vodou; its ideological apparatuses, i.e., lakous, peristyles, ounfo, lwa yo, herbal medicine, songs, dances, and zombification; and modes of production, i.e., komes, husbandry, and subsistence agriculture.

(33)

The second dichotomy, within Haiti, opposes the bourgeoisie to the masses. This results in the emergence of two social systems: one is structured by the Catholic/Protestant ethic and its spirit of capitalism and is embraced by the bourgeoisie; the other revolves around the Vodou ethic and its spirit of communism and is sustained by the masses. Bois Caiman, we are told, was the defining moment when the masses decided to hold on to the African worldview, including Vodou. The author argues particularly adamantly against any notion of syncretism, créolité, or hybridity in Vodou. The images of white saints with which Vodou iconography is replete were simply, according to Mocombe, a strategy used by ougan-yo and manbo-yo to familiarize and re-Africanize those Haitians who were leaving the plantation and who knew very little about Vodou while being well versed in Christianity due to their proximity to Europeans and their subsequent embrace of the European culture (91). Those images were to facilitate their transition back into African culture. The conflicts that have marred Haitian history, the author affirms, are ultimately caused by the clashes between European and African cultures, between Catholicism/Protestantism and Vodou and the agents and worldviews that sustain them.

Here, Mocombe is introducing Cheikh Anta Diop’s “two cradle” theory, which argues that an abundant African environment produced a culture of sharing and peacefulness on the African continent, while an environment marked by scarcity produced European aggressiveness and individualism—and, ultimately, capitalism. Such a twist is a bit surprising, to say the least, coming from a self-professed Marxist. But it may be the case that Mocombe, just like Frantz Fanon before him, has felt the need to stretch Marxism to make it fit the African reality. And thus Mocombe takes great liberty with Marxism, to the point of sacrificing the integrity of that theory and casting serious doubt about its usefulness for African people by arguing that indeed it is not the economic mode and social relations of production that are responsible for a given society but instead its “socioreligious cultural (ideal) conceptions” (69). However, the theoretical conundrum resulting from his parallel use of incompatible paradigms—one argues for the primacy of culture and the other for the primacy of material conditions—does not seem to bother the author at all.

Nor does he shrink from making unsubstantiated and often outrageous claims. In fact, Mocombe...