Ordinary laws are turned against the healers of New Orleans

A set of ordinary statutes was turned against Vodou healers in New Orleans in the decades around 1900. From 1909 federal mail fraud law was invoked against practitioners who did business by post, and conviction carried a penitentiary sentence. The Louisiana Board of Health prosecuted people for practising medicine without a licence under the Medical Practice Act of 1894, and a revision in 1929 set a fine of fifty to a hundred dollars or ten to ninety days in the parish prison. The city passed its own statutes against fortune telling and obtaining money under false pretences in 1897, in 1916 and again in 1924. This ran in parallel with the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the persecution of Vodou leaders there. Stories circulated in the United States about bloodthirsty rites and human sacrifice, told to justify the occupation, supplied the reasoning for the prosecutions in Louisiana.

In 1896 the bishop of Cap-Haitien condemned the religion of most Haitians in terms he chose for their violence. It was responsible, he said, for violations of the purity of the faith, for offences against the saints and for outrages against God himself. Whatever the cost, he went on, the tumour had to be removed, and a pitiless war had to be waged against the army of brigands, the bokor, whose mere existence disgraced the country. Eradication campaigns had begun soon after the first African captives were landed and had continued through the colonial period; what changed after independence was only that the state conducting them was Haitian. A bishop describing a large part of his own flock as a tumour is worth reading twice. The people he wanted removed were the ones who buried the dead, treated the sick and held the rural communities together in a country with almost no doctors.

Holman Bentley finished the Kikongo New Testament in 1893. Four centuries had passed since the king of the Kongo was first baptised, and in all that time no gospel had been put into the language, though a catechism had. Bentley worked closely with a young man called Nlemvo, whom the mission regarded as its first convert and who, Bentley wrote, helped him with all his literary work. Nlemvo's uncle, the man who had brought him to the mission as a boy, kept a small brass crucifix he prayed before and had it fixed to the wall by his bed when he was dying. He was known by a Kikongo word meaning believer, a recognised category of person who required crosses and holy water at a funeral. Twice at Sao Salvador, Bentley recalled, someone stood up after the sermon to tell the congregation to listen, because this was what their old relatives had told them.

The Jamaica International Exhibition opened in 1891 under Governor Henry Blake. Kingston was hung with wreaths and triumphal arches, fireworks were set off, and visitors came in from the countryside and from abroad over the fourteen weeks it ran. Haiti had attempted the same thing ten years before. The Haitian Exhibition of 1881, staged under Lysius Salomon, failed to raise the foreign interest in Haitian agriculture that its organisers wanted. Jamaica hoped for more and got less than it spent, since the show ended as a financial loss. The colony counted tourism and foreign investment as the real return. Royal Mail steamers arriving weekly were joined by United Fruit ships bringing visitors from Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Government money then went into hotels, and the Myrtle Bank, the Constant Spring and the Queen's became the places tourists stayed. Both islands were being drawn into an American commercial system, from opposite ends of it.