the colonial rule of Catholic France, it contains elements borrowed from Catholicism, including both "stylistic" characteristics--ceremonies with intonations, incense-burning, and other attributes of the Catholic Mass--and "spiritual" characteristics, notably a veneration of the Virgin (Rigaud 8-9). It functions both on an individual level, providing the Voodoo believer with a means of contact with and invocation of the spiritual world, and on a social level, binding people together locally through group rituals which often involve dance, and more broadly through the tradition of pilgrimage to Voodoo shrines, notably that of Saut D'Eau (Laguerre 100).
Voodoo per se is a distinctively Haitian religion. But and this is a point to which we shall return below--it is characteristic of a whole range of "nativist" slave-developed religions which are found in many parts of the New World where African slaves were brought and settled in large numbers. It thus represents one face of the moral and spiritual response of Africans who found themselves in chains in a strange land, and who needed to call on their moral resources to the full if they were to survive.
Haiti is part of the island of Santo Domingo, which was originally discovered (so far as Europeans were concerned) by Christopher Columbus. As happened in much of the Caribbean, its original Native American Indian population was effectively wiped out in the period after European settlement. While some Indian blood surely flows in present-day Haitians, the Indians as a distinct ethnic group vanished in early colonial times. At the end of the 17th century, the eastern half of Santo Domingo fell from Spanish into French hands, and was subsequently developed as a major French plantation colony in the New World (Laguerre 8-10). Black African slaves were brought over in large numbers to provide the plantation work force.
Haiti was an "exploitation" colony for the French, not a "...