Justice for Judas

Throughout Haiti this week, the people of the villages will enact the Judas hunt, an ancient Holy Week ceremonial which they have colored and absorbed into their own folklore. In effigy, "Monsieur Judas" will come to visit the peasants as one of the twelve apostles and an honored guest. But as soon as the death of Christ is announced on Good Friday, the symbolic traitor will flee, and the hunt will begin early on Holy Saturday.*

The Judas figure varies throughout the Black Republic, according to local artistry and whimsy. In Colonie des Vacances. a prosperous village of whitewashed mud and thatch huts outside Port-au-Prince's fashionable suburb of Petionville, he is usually a raffish, cotton-stuffed fellow in sport jacket with a pink boutonniere, a big cigar and harlequin glasses; in remote Basse Guinaudee (pop. 300) on the southern peninsula, he is a rustic with a ragged face and sisal beard.

After some elder has hidden the effigy, village women and children brandishing sticks and kitchen knives search the villages, crying, "Qui bo' li?" (where is he hiding?). Then entire populations, including stiff-jointed ancients and bare-bottomed small fry, join in the Ra Ra processions that snake out into the countryside, laughing and joking and singing creole chants to the accompaniment of throbbing tambours and booming vaccines (huge bamboo pipes that give off hollow, resonant notes when blown). Waving clubs, machetes and old colonial swords, they thrash through the ravines and cane-brakes, and if by chance they first come upon a neighboring band's Judas, so much the better--they whack it up with glee. By noon Haiti is strewn with dismembered dummies, bleeding sawdust, and rags.

This year the rumor went around that the authorities and more sophisticated islanders were embarrassed by the primitive revelry of the Ra Ra bands, and would attempt to ban them from the capital. But in Port-au-Prince, police said they had no orders to stop the merry processions, and even priests admitted that they saw no harm in the Judas hunt. "We take a neutral view, neither encouraging nor discouraging it," explained one. "It is part of the people's need for release."

*The people of other Catholic countries also punish Judas at the end of Holy Week. In Spain and Portugal and several Latin American countries, peasants burn Judas in effigy. Mexicans blow him to bits with firecrackers.

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