Toward an Ethnohistory of Haitian Pilgrimage
Accounts of Haiti's saint and lwa cults usually credit two sources, West African spirit veneration and southern European popular Catholicism. Rey adds a third and argues it has been the most neglected. Central Africans, chiefly Kongo, Mondongue and Mbundu, made up the majority of captives landed in Saint-Domingue in the decades before 1804, and they came from a region where Catholicism had been established for two and a half centuries. He quotes an eighteenth-century Capuchin on Kongolese devotion to Mamanzambi, on first fruits carried long distances, and on villagers cutting a new forest road for a procession, then sets that beside what he observed at Plaine-du-Nord and Bord-de-Mer-de-Limonade, where pilgrims bring offerings, become possessed and immerse themselves in mud and lagoon water. The freshwater simbi spirits who inhabit those waters are Kongolese. Warning against treating African cultures as a parts shop for matching traits, he keeps the claim broad and makes Kongolese Catholicism a living root of Haitian pilgrimage.
Rey, T. (2005). Toward an Ethnohistory of Haitian Pilgrimage. Journal de la Societe des americanistes, 91(1), 161-183.