HAITI: THE COUNTRY RELIGION AND POLITICS

HAITI: The Country Religion and Politics



Table of Content

Introduction3

Religion and Politics4

Conclusion9

Bibliography10

HAITI: The Country Religion and Politics

Introduction

Haiti, a country in the West Indies, occupying the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which lies between Cuba to the west and Puerto Rico to the east. The remainder of Hispaniola forms the Dominican Republic. Haiti's terrain is predominantly mountainous, and its main population centers are near the coast.

The first free modern nation in the Western Hemisphere after the United States, Haiti declared its independence in 1804. It is the only independent Latin American country whose European culture, including its Creole language, is primarily French. It is also the only one in which the majority of the people (about 95%) are of African descent.

The country's ethnolinguistic composition contrasts with that of the ethnically mixed, Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. But other dissimilarities are equally sharp. For example, the Dominican Republic's per capita income is more than twice that of Haiti, which has the lowest in Latin America. In addition, Haiti's rural population is more than 35% greater than that of the Dominican Republic, but with less than 40% as much agricultural land. Finally, Haiti's literacy rate, average life expectancy at birth, and other social indicators compare unfavorably with figures for its neighbor. Such disparities have been major reasons for friction between the two states.

Despite the introduction of small-scale industries and the dissemination of sanguine reports about mineral wealth, the economic outlook for Haiti has been bleak. The nation's basic economic problem is how to raise production levels to overcome grinding poverty and keep pace with population growth, a challenge that would be hard to meet even under the best political conditions. However, such conditions have seldom existed in Haiti, whose history shows a succession of unstable or exploitative regimes, with a 19-year interlude of U.S. occupation early in the 20th century.

Religion and Politics

Racial tension and politics boiled over in 1791, and a slave revolt began. Although the majority of Black Haitians are Christian, customs prior to their arrival in the New World were well entrenched and subsequently interwoven with new religions. Voodoo was a common religion in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Haiti voodoo was used and viewed as a common thread that united African slaves from different countries and languages. With tensions rising among the races, the Haitian leaders, primarily François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, Georges Biassou, Jeannot, and Boukman (a voodoo priest), used the religion to fanatically rally and engage the impoverished and runaway slaves alike to the cause of rebellion.

On one hand, Haitian elites challenged Haiti's images in Western discourses by embracing a positivist anthropological perspective to locate their country and its people in a position that supplants the Africans closer, however, to the Europeans. Early Haitian anthropologists, while rejecting scientific racism and its thesis of racial inequality, embraced the barbarism-versus-civilization paradigm to situate Haitian society and its elites at the avant-garde of African backwardness. According to this view, even when the majority of the inhabitants of the new republic ...