Understanding African Religious Practices in Colonial and Post-Colonial Ayiti

By Paultre Pierre Desrosiers

...Rediscovering Ayiti's heritage in this rather dark moment of its bicentennial is indeed a challenge. The religious heritage of the Ayitian people is often view through the personal experience and cultural improvisation of those who regarded Ayiti as a simple extension of the African continent in America. As such, the Ayitian religious experience has assumed spiritual inferiority and subjected to the same misrepresentation and basic stigmatization which have been reserved for traditional religions of Sub-Saharan Africa.A very unique quality of African religious practices in Ayiti is that it is transcultural and transgenerational. It is transcultural, because of the vast and indelible imprint of many world cultures creating a new African belief system that embodies cultural ideals and values central to the lives of the Ayitian people. It is trans-generational because the ancestors have been able to perpetuate their heritage (Ko Ako ni maci) in spite adverse conditions, and their descendants have, through the years, preserve and rethink the fundamental cultural heirlooms that their forefathers carried into captivity. They have been able to retain a system of values, attitudes, and beliefs, which provide people with a mechanism to understand the world in which they live and have been able to transform the colonial icons into more acceptable and distinctive African religious materials closely associated with African concepts of identity, language and culture. This book explores the evolution, character, and dynamics of African religious practices in colonial and post-colonial Ayiti and analyzes early phases of religious transformations stimulated by the encounter between indigenous, European and the African religious practices. It traces the development of these practices in Ayiti from its sources in the brilliant civilizations of ancient Africa to new belief systems and practices. It illustrates the cross-cultural dynamics of African-based religious systems in colonial and post-colonial Ayiti, the possibilities and limits of the African Diaspora retention of African religious practices and the construction of belief systems as affected by differing colonial histories and landscapes...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1072494892
• ISBN13: 9781072494898
• Release Date: June 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"