By Fernando Crocheron

Black history is comprised of a pastiche of subcultures and religions, many derived from long lost or suppressed tribal traditions and beliefs. Among these, the spiritual practice of Voodoo has historically been vilified and misrepresented in the Western hemisphere.
The National African Religion Congress is an umbrella organization based in Philadelphia that strives to ensure the religious freedoms and tolerance espoused by the U.S. constitution are also extended to practitioners of African-based religions.
According to Dr. George Ware, president of the congress, it is a certifying body for African religions, religions of the African Diaspora and religions that came across the ocean with the slaves into the new world, primarily into the Caribbean and Central and South America. These religions include Voodoo out of Haiti, Santeria out of Cuba, Candomblé of Brazil, and Changó Baptist out of Trinidad and Tobago, along with the practices that have come directly from Africa like Ifa-Yoruba out of Nigeria and the Akan religion from Ghana.
The following is an interview with Ware about Voodoo and other religious ideas.

Denver Urban Spectrum: To the best of your knowledge, how many practitioners of Voodoo are there in Haiti and the United States?
Dr. George Ware: Well, in Haiti, there’s a saying: the people are 90 percent Catholic and 120 percent Voodoo. Needless to say, the indigenous religion of Haiti is Voodoo. Many people have suffered from cultural genocide, which has been linked to activities of the “Church” to take people away from their religion by offering food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, and possible opportunities for immigration into America and other lands.

DUS: Essentially, you are saying that the Haitians were pressured to renounce their native religion to receive the aforementioned benefits?
Ware: Precisely. Without really saying it, they let it be understood that you cannot get any of those things that they offer unless you moved away from Voodoo.

DUS: Sir, can you provide a number of how many Voodoo practitioners there may be in the United States?
Ware: What I’d like to do is take a look at the religions of the African Diaspora as a group, as opposed to looking at Voodoo which is the Haitian practice and the Latino practices because you also have all of the people of Puerto Rico, Cubans and Mexicans. You have people who emigrated from Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Caribbean like Jamaica, Granada and places like that. But, you also have the African- American populations many of whom from the 1950s forward had nationalistic and Afro-centric interests, and turned away from Christianity and Islam towards African religions.
In 1957, Oba Sergiman was the first African American initiated into Santaria; he was the beginning of a large number of African Americans initiated into Santaria, which is the religion of the Cuban people. So there is a close association between African Americans and Cuban Americans and Puerto Rican Americans in terms of these religions. So you have millions of practitioners throughout the United States, especially in areas where you have large immigrant populations like Miami, New York, Houston, Dallas and Los Angeles.
So wherever you find large Latino populations or immigrants from Central and South America you will find large numbers of practitioners, although they may not so easily acknowledge it because many of those people have immigration problems and aren’t looking for any trouble or attention. Many of them are also aware of the tremendous prejudice which is held in this country with respect to African–based religions.

DUS: It seems many people just do not want to talk about Afro-centric religions, especially Voodoo. What are some of the myths, legends, etc. that you’d like to dispel, specifically about Voodoo?
Ware: First of all, when you use the word Voodoo, that is a catch-word for negativity and evil. That’s the perception of the average person. In other words, if you were to go out into the streets and use that word, you would find that almost everybody you met would have an opinion and primarily that opinion would be negative.
Yet, if you were to go further and ask questions about their knowledge about the religion and practices they would have very little to say, because those perceptions come from the movies, the press, other religions, but it’s not substantiated by any factual information. Voodoo as practiced in Haiti is a religion,with a belief in God, a belief in Christ and a belief in the Holy Spirit, which we look at as the Seven Powers of Africa; which are forces like angelic forces that are the focal point of the religion. These religions out of Africa center around drums, song and dance. And trans-possession, which all of those are like, the drum conjures up images of negativity from the movies. Songs, which people call chants. And don’t mention the word possession, and God forbid the mention of animal sacrifice.

DUS: Sir, you mentioned trans-possession; would you expand upon that a bit?
Ware: In Africa, people go into trance states during ceremonies. And in those trance states, they possess or they bring forward the spirit of the African powers, which comes into a ceremony and rises and catapults the people. In all of these religions, there are ceremonies which involve drumming, singing and dancing. And during the course of that, people go into states.
Actually, they are not much different than if you were to go to a Pentecostal church. They sing and make music! (much laughter)

DUS: Yes, the Bible says make a joyful noise unto the Lord!
Ware: And in the middle of that, something very beautiful happens, but it is also something very mysterious. People go into states, and in those states, they may have things of value to pass on to the congregation.

DUS: Regarding the uninitiated, i.e., those that have not been exposed to Voodoo, why would the religion appeal to them?
Ware: In order to understand the prejudice with respect to Voodoo, you’ve got to look at the politics of slavery. In the 1700s, a group of so-called backwoods, ignorant savages in Haiti, who were enslaved people, rose up against the government of the French who had a colony there. They overthrew that government and established the first independent republic in the New World. By 1805, the Haitians had established the first Black republic in the New World. 
Imagine an independent Black republic existing simultaneously with slavery, which existed in South and Central America, the Caribbean and the United States.  Consider for a moment the implications that country had for the rest of the slave-holding areas. If you could have an explosion of those phenomena throughout Central America and the United States, what would have happened to the Golden Triangle of the industrial revolution based on slavery, rum, tobacco and cotton? It (slavery) fueled the economic and industrial revolution in Europe, and transformed Africa into a devastated environment.  As a result, slavery helped to stabilize the New World which had been devastated as a result of the destruction of the Indians.

DUS: Was Haiti perceived as a threat?
Ware: They were a threat to the capitalist and industrial revolutions that were taking place at that time! So a campaign was waged not only against Haiti but also against the minds of African people throughout those regions. For instance, the drum was outlawed. Then, a real serious effort was now made to introduce a new brand of Christianity: a religion of forgiveness, humbleness. A special branch of Christianity was introduced to Black people that was not the messianic, aggressive Christianity that brought Pizarro and others to the New World, which was a very militant branch. Here was a religion that focused on not trying to get material things, and accepting the conditions that you found yourself in, and looking for a new life after death.

DUS: So they were spoon-fed the concept that it was Christ-like to be placid or docile?
Ware: Precisely! So simultaneously, they were being programmed to have a negative reaction to anything that smacked of Africa. So the newspapers and the churches – all of these groups launched a campaign, which was very successful because today I tell people to guard against the Mantan Moreland syndrome. Mantan Moreland, the actor if you remember, would be walking along a road in the dark and he would hear a noise.

DUS: His eyes would get all big and roll aroun’ in his head!” (much laughter)
Ware: And the first thing you would know, he was running for his life. So Black people in America have a Mantan Moreland syndrome when it comes to African religions, and it doesn’t take very much for them to go “Oooh, what was that! There it go agin’, Oh, let me get outta here!”
And we have to guard against that kind of programming and brainwashing, which prevents us from being able to give consideration to our own culture, while simultaneously, we today talk about the spectacle of destruction in our own communities, the inability of the Black community to organize themselves and work towards unity. Spiritually, we are alienated from our own ancestral past. How are we going to find unity towards one another when we don’t even have unification with our  ancestral past, our great grandparents and our ancient ancestors? By being spiritually disconnected from that, how are we going to unify with one another in the present when we are not connected to our past?

DUS: Is Voodoo still relevant in this modern era where the orient or understanding of all existence is sought or determined via science and technology?
Ware: OK, I am a chemist by training; I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry. I spent 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry, and I am really a victim of inductive and deductive reasoning. But, everyday I work with young people in the inner city with drug problems, Black on Black violence, families which are disturbed with pathologies within them that make it hard for them to stay together.
I take these young people off the streets who have no knowledge of my religion, and I give them a spiritual bath and do some mumbo-jumbo like an incantation, which I would call a prayer, but that’s what people who look at it would call it. I turn them loose and they walk back into modern society, put their lives together, and make sense of it. We take the ancient practices out of Africa, apply them to the urban experience; people pick up their lives and move forward after being spiritually grounded, without having to convert to the religion. We take Christians and Muslims. It doesn’t make a difference because guess what? God is not sectarian. God is just God and it doesn’t matter whether it’s Voodoo, Christianity, Islam or Buddhism; all religions have basically the same creed, code and ethics.
I would say that today we rely too much on science and technology to solve all of our problems and yet it is not the solution to all of our problems. It only helps solve some problems. Once again, there are millions and millions of practitioners of African-based religions in the United States today, because people are looking for new paradigms, looking for new ways to address their problems.

Editor’s note: More information can be found at the National African Religion Congress Web site at www.narcworld.com. A recommended reference on Voodoo is Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren, a documentary on video and in paperback.

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