If you bring together the religious practices of dozens of West African cultures, mix vigorously, and season with Catholic Christianity, you will have something like voodoo. That is what happened in Haiti as slaves from Africa were brought to the island to work plantations there, starting in the 1500s. They were baptized as Catholics, but instead of praying to the saints they worshiped their familiar tribal gods, called loa. Their rituals, led by voodoo priests or priestesses, involved offerings to the loa and sometimes possession of the worshipers by the loa. Since the loa were very powerful, some followers of voodoo used rituals to enlist their aid in black magic.
Again and again the Haitian authorities, first Spanish and after 1697 French, tried to suppress all African religions, rightly seeing the potential for defiance and rebellion, but such efforts only strengthened the determination of the slaves to continue their practices in secret. In 1791 it was voodoo priests who instigated and guided the rebellion that eventually led to Haiti's independence in 1804.
Despite opposition from the Catholic Church, voodoo has continued to thrive in Haiti and places to which Haitians have gone, including Louisiana. It is there that we have early attestations in English. A Carolina newspaper reported in 1820 that in New Orleans a house was being "used as a kind of temple for certain occult practices and the idolatrous worship of an African deity, called Vandoo." The form we know in English today, voodoo, appeared in the writing of New Orleans author George Washington Cable in 1880.
Voodoo mixes many African cultures. According to one source, it incorporates elements from "Fon, the Nago, the Ibos, Dahomeans, Congos, Senegalese, Haussars, Caplaous, Mondungues, Mandinge, Angolese, Libyans, Ethiopians, and the Malgaches." The name voodoo also has a number of possible sources, including Fon vodun and Ewe vudu. Since the Ewe form is closest to modern English, we will use it here.
Ewe is spoken by more than one and a half million people in Ghana, about 15 percent of the population, and it is an official literary language there. Nearly a million people in Togo also speak Ewe. It is a member of the Volta-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family.
One other contribution to English from Ewe is the obscure and obsolete name John Canoe. In pre-Civil War North Carolina, that name designated the leader of a group of slaves who went from house to house at Christmas time singing and asking for gifts. According to research by Frederic Cassidy, the name came from an Ewe word sounding like John Canoe and meaning "sorcerer-man."
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