From Vaudoux to Voodoo |
Moreau de St-Mery
Descourtliz
Malenfant
Drouin de Bercy
Webley
d'Alaux
Guérin
d'Hormoys
Larousse
Allain
St John
Froude
Castellanos
Prichard
Aubin
Marcelin
Niles
Wirkus
Eh! eh! Bomba!
Appearing first in a footnote in 1797, this 'voodoo chant' from colonial Saint Domingue has enjoyed a rather illustrious career in print, not least because no one until the 1930s claimed to know what it meant or even what language it was in.
As one author quotes another, who in turn is quoted by someone else, it would not have been a surprise if it turned out to have been entirely fictitious.
However, it is now accepted that the chant is in the Kikongo language spoken in x area of West Central Africa. This discovery challenges some long-held assumptions about the formation of slave religion in colonial St Domingue.
Gathered together here are: an electronic archive of some the key documents, with an introductory overview of the chant's publishing history and detailed guide to further reading.
Overview
[Describing] the dance which forms part of the vaudoux rituals Moreau de Saint-Méry details in his classic Description ... de la partie française de l'ile de Saint-Domingue (1797) he tells us how the initiates are led into a circle by the Vaudoux king. He then taps each one lightly on the head with a palette de boiswhile chanting / intoning an 'African song', which is repeated in chorus by those who surround them.
In a footnote, he provides a transcription of the words of this song:
Eh! eh! Bomba, hen! hen!
Canga bafio té
Canga moune dé lé
Canga do ki la
Canga li.
And adds:
Les deux premiers sons de la première ligne sont prononcés très-ouverts, et les deux derniers de la même ligne, ne sont que des inflexions sourdes.
Note that he makes no attempt to translate the song, as Drouin de Bercy did, when he transcribed another chant in his polemical work on Haiti published nearly twenty years later.
When the song reappears in print in a short pamphlet on the self-styled Emperor, Faustin Soulouque, the author, Theophile Guerin anticipates the question: 'What does it mean, this euphonic, pure-blood African dialect?' and answers: 'No one knows.' Soulouque ruled Haiti from 18xx to 18xx and it was during his regime that foreign awareness of vaudoux grew, as he was the first leader of the new country to encourage its practice.
The same year, in a more substantial assessment of the regime, Gustav d'Alaux begins his chapter on l'illumisme nègre with the song. And it is d'Alaux who proves to be a valuable source for the Baptist missionary Underhill
- Its first appearance in print: Moreau de Saint-Mery.
- Then in the 1850s, no doubt influenced by the Soulouque regime (Guerin, D'Alaux)
- Picked up by Underhill, who in turn is quoted by Campbell (the antebellum context)
- Warner and Castellanos on New Orleans in the 1890s quote it (Castellanos himself drawing on Allain's Souvenirs of 1883)
- De Vaissiere 1909 quotes it alongside the chant in Drouin de Bercy (but briefly mention the 'Notice historique' first published in 1889, made much of by Fouchard and Fick).
- And it continued to circulate: Price-Mars quotes it (1928), as does Seabrook and other American visitors to Haiti during US Occupation?
- None of these examples offer a translation until C L R James in Black Jacobins (1938), but he confuses the two chants and transposes Drouin de Bercy's translation of the other chant onto Eh! Eh! Bomba!
- So what does it mean? Recent scholarship has identified several attempts to translate the chant: Jean Cuvalier (1946), Fernando Ortiz (1950). Cesaire drew on Cuvalier in his Toussaint (1961): a translation challenged by R Bourgeois who offered an alternative in a 'Letter to Aime Cesaire' (1969).
- Caroline Fick enlisted help of Kikongo expert to arrive at a new translation, while David Geggus (in his superb analysis of the documentary evidence relating to both chants) offers another.
