Tradition du vaudou : zombification, domestication ou esclavagisation continuelle des Nègres

Abstract

This scholarly article sets out to cast, responsibly, a measure of historical light on the maleficent practices of zombification and the enslavement of Black people rooted in the vodou tradition. In doing so, it ventures into the secret world of vodou in order to bring these shadowy practices out of obscurity, contributing both to the enrichment of public scientific debate on the tradition of domestication and enslavement through zombification and to the change that may be envisaged in contemporary slaveholding social relations in Haiti — a change called for by the humanities and social sciences. In light of theories of social ills and of data drawn from methods for analysing traces and experiential narratives, it explains and documents the endemic evil of Black zombification ravaging Haitian society. Mobilizing the humanized epistemic knowledge valued in the humanities and social sciences, the findings from research on traces and experiential narratives attest to the scale of the zombification tradition within vodou and to its devastating consequences for Haitian families. These results weigh the historical burden of a vodou tradition that manages, in the name of culture, to perpetuate this infernal system of zombification as the worst traditional form of domestication, depersonalization, objectification and domination of one human being by another — indeed, as the worst contemporary mode of enslavement, exploitation and oppression of the Black person by his own fellow human being.