Haiti's Cultural Mashup

According to Wikipedia:

In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

Mashup originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces together.

I have been reading Toussaint Louverture by Madison Smartt Bell, which is an account of Haiti in the time of the French Revolution and its independence told from the point of view of one of the main protagonists of the Haitian drama.

Haitian society at the time included Creoles (born in Haiti) and immigrants (most of whom of course were Africans imported as slaves). There were whites (divided between the planters and the "petit blancs"), coloreds (or mulattoes), and blacks. Of the former slaves, there were those who were freed prior to the revolutionary period, those who were freed by the revolution, and maroons who were communities formed by run-away slaves. The political situation included French administrators sent by Paris and when France was at war with England and Spain, British and Spanish invading forces (not to mention Irish troops in the French army). I assume that the African-born were from a number of West African cultures.

It was a time of rapid cultural change. The French Revolution was changing not only political institutions and the aristocracy-commoner divisions of society, but many other aspects of French culture. The African-born were aculturating to Haitian cultures from their original African cultures. Haiti itself had left the slavery based plantation culture and was evolving new cultural institutions.

The military situation was incredibly complex with royalist and revolutionary French, British and Spanish forces, with differing social compositions of foot-soldiers and officers, in different geographic regions of the country, and with constantly shifting loyalties as bands shifted allegiance from one cause to another, from one leader to another.

We know that Haitian Creole is a "mashup" of French and African languages and Haitian religion is a "mashup" of Voudou (based on Christianity and African animistic religions) and Catholicism. It should not be surprising that other Haitian institutions are also "mashups" of European and African institutions (although the realization surprised me).

Bell points out that Louverture was especially adept at navigating the troubled waters of Haitian transition society. He seems to have acted as a French colonial official, plantation patron, African tribal leader, quasi-religious leader, abolitionist, plantation owner and entrepreneur, and independence leader. He moved from role to role seamlessly, sometimes in on a single occasion drawing on several roles as the need arose.

Globalization is reaching into Asian, Latin American, and even African societies bringing rapid cultural changes in its wake. It may be useful to think about this experience of hyper-velocity change in Haitian history to sensitize us to the complexities of the process, and perhaps to draw lessons or at least inspiration from Louverture's magesterial dexterity in dealing with Haitian complexities of his time.