I need to begin with some apologies. First: To all my readers for a most egregious error: in mis-identifying Norman Manley's birthplace in Manchester. Over the past few months, I have persistently misrepresented the place as Marlborough. It isn't Marlborough, which is in the same parish, but Roxburgh.

John Maxwell

It is at Roxburgh where you will find some of the most vulgar depredations of the bauxite industry - the land is gouged and ravaged, as I once said, as if by some cosmodemonic monster.
Second: I must apologise to all my e-mail correspondents for my failure to reply to the dozens of emails they send me. The problem is that for nearly a year I have been having serious problems with my Internet connections generally.

How much of this is due to sabotage and how much to incompetence, others' - or mine is a question I am still trying to solve.

In the meantime, I wish to thank all those who have been so generous about my work, whether they agree or not with me from time to time. It may be a good idea to send some of your letters to my editor (editorial@jamaicaobserver.com) who, I'm sure, would love to get them.

The crime continues

The argument about reparations for slavery seems to me to have been conducted on a one-dimension and unreal plane. The main argument appears to be that the slave-owning countries ought to pay damages for the crime of slavery.
This ignores an enormous area of injustice and would seem to forgive, a priori, crimes against humanity, and specifically black humanity, which continue even more ferociously, to this day.

BUSH. said that Haiti was one of the dark corners of the world

Look next door to Haiti, for instance, which is routinely libelled by the unthinking as 'one of the dark corners of the world', to use Mr Bush's elegant nomenclature.
If Haiti is a 'dark corner of the world' there is no question that it has been made so by genocidal policies originally conceived centuries ago and relentlessly reinforced and modernised and enforced to this day.

Haiti is demonised for violence, voodoo and what the more genteel racists term 'haplessness'. Haplessness is a disease of rape victims: they bring rape on themselves and therefore deserve neither consideration nor justice.

Even those who consider themselves sympathetic to Haiti appear to find it impossible to dispel the miasma of lies and disinformation originated by Thomas Jefferson and the slave-owning leaders of the infant United States and perpetuated in song and story to this day.

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, depicts in that book one area of the lethal racism of the Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the Congo. He might be expected to be less prejudiced about Haiti than most. In a review of a new (2004) biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture Hochschild says:

"When the slaves there rose up in 1791, they sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic world. But the rebels did more than win. In five years of fighting, they also inflicted a humiliating defeat on a large invasion force from Britain, which, at war with France, wanted to seize this profitable territory for itself. And later they did the same to a vast military expedition sent by Napoleon, who vainly tried to recapture the colony and restore slavery.

The long years of race-based mass murder (which included a civil war between blacks and gens de couleur, as those of mixed race were known) left more than half the population dead or exiled and Haiti lives with that legacy of violence still. Seldom have people anywhere fought so hard for their freedom."

But, as some angry Haitians have pointed out, Hochschild makes the mistake dozens of Eurocentric critics of the Haitian revolution have made: he ascribed the success of the revolution entirely to Toussaint. Toussaint's demeanour contrasts so starkly with that of Haiti's real liberator, Dessalines. To the Europeans Toussaint was the 'Noble Savage'. Dessalines was simply, a savage.

Marguerite Laurent, chair of the Haitian Lawyers' Leadership Council describes the now official Haiti narrative: " Adam Hochschild regales us with tales of luxury in colonial Haiti and conveys, in various cumulative ways, how particularly horrific and savage the Haitian Revolutionary war was (more than, I would suppose the French and American ones were perhaps) and how Haiti used to be "the most lucrative European colony in the world" but that today "most Americans think of Haiti as a wasteland of repeated coups and dire poverty, which hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees are willing to risk their lives in small boats to escape."

"As soon as I read the title, much less the opening lines, I knew what was coming: that old self-serving and warped story about how violent Haitians are, how they won, in combat, against the then most powerful nations on earth (French, British, Spain) because disease and pestilence killed-off the Europeans and how their 200-year history so far ONLY shows that Blacks simply can't govern themselves without white guidance and "civilisation."

"Adam Hochschild doesn't say this typical drivel outright, but that, in essence, is the gist of his article entitled: "Birth of a Nation - Has the bloody 200-year history of Haiti doomed it to more violence?"

Laurent continues: ".the partisan view that "Haiti is violent and was doomed at birth" is the typical point of view sold as TRUTH for generations - for no less than 200 years and five months to be exact, to an already well-conditioned-to believe-Black-is-innately-violent US public. First off, according to white supremacy doctrines, Haiti wasn't even supposed to exist much less still be barely surviving and today meriting the attention of not one, but three of the most powerful Western troops on earth to be on its soil to demobilise and disenfranchise its people once again."

Laurent also wonders why the French extorted at gunpoint 125 million gold francs for its losses in Haiti while it sold to the United States for one tenth that price The Louisiana Purchase - an area equal in size to the then United States.

A chronic allergy

Ben Dupuy, Secretary General of the Haitian Parti Populaire National - PPN - told President Aristide after the first coup against him in 1994:
"With friends like the US, we don't need enemies."
Or, as the renowned American medical anthropologist and physician Dr Paul Farmer says:
"The US government has a chronic allergy to Haitian Democracy."

Dr Farmer has lived and worked in Haiti for nearly three decades and in the words of his biographer, Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains, Random House) he is 'A man who would cure the world". At this moment, I believe, Dr Farmer is in Rwanda, trying to do there what he has done and is doing in Haiti, treating the sick and training people to take care of themselves. In his other lives he is busy devising treatments for HIV/AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, among other things.

Farmer says "The idea that some lives matter less [than some others] is the root of all that's wrong with the world."
Farmer has written extensively and eloquently on Haiti and its suffering, the result of what Farmer calls 'structural violence" - the constant and unacknowledged persecution of the poor by the economic systems which govern them. In one of his books, Pathologies of Power he tells, in simple, unemotional language, the stories of the suffering of his Haitian patients.

"When in 1991 international health and population experts devised a "human suffering index" by examining several measures of human welfare ranging from life expectancy to political freedom, 27 of 141 countries were characterised by "extreme human suffering." Only one of them, Haiti, was located in the Western hemisphere. In only three countries on earth was suffering judged to be more extreme than that endured in Haiti; each of these three countries was in the midst of an internationally recognised civil war."

At the beginning of his book, Pathologies of Power, Farmer tells the story of two Haitians, a young woman named Acéphie who died of AIDS and a young man named Chouchou Louis tortured to death by the army.

According to Farmer "Little about Acéphie's story is unique; I have told it in some detail because it brings into relief many of the forces restricting not only her options but those of most Haitian women. Such, in any case, is my opinion after caring for hundreds of poor women with AIDS. Their stories move with a deadly monotony: young women-or teenage girls-fled to Port-au-Prince in an attempt to escape from the harshest poverty; once in the city, each worked as a domestic; none managed to find the financial security that had proven so elusive in the countryside.

The women I interviewed were straightforward about the nonvoluntary aspect of their sexual activity: in their opinions, poverty had forced them into unfavourable unions. Under such conditions, one wonders what to make of the notion of "consensual sex."
After reading Farmer I ask: Under such conditions, one wonders what to make of the notion of consensual globalisation?

Africans and the slave trade

In the early 16th century, the Portuguese landed on the coast of what is now Angola, and humbly petitioned the ruling monarch, the Manikongo, Nzinga Mbemba, for permission to trade. The Portuguese made elaborate promises of foreign aid and technical assistance - they would supply artisans and teachers as their part of the bargain which allowed them access to his Kingdom's markets .

The Manikongo converted to Christianity and changed his name to Affonso. Soon, he began to realise he had been tricked and wrote to his fellow sovereign, John of Portugal, urging him to control the behaviour of his agents.
According to Affonso the Portuguese had " set up shops with goods and many things which have been prohibited by us, and which they spread throughout our Kingdoms and Domains in such an abundance" that they had effectively bought the loyalty of Affonso's vassals and subjects.

Worse than that, "the merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the lands and the some of noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them wishing to have the things and wares of this Kingdom which they are so ambitious of; they grab them and get them to be sold; and so great is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and you Highness should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service."

King John's agents, better armed and organised than Affonso, tried to murder him and succeeded in killing one of his successors, Antonio I. They broke up the kingdom into a number of small vassal states which formed part of what later became Angola and the Congo. Then they began the wholesale capture and exportation of Africans as slaves.

Those who blame the Africans for selling their brothers into slavery have accepted the official European narrative of Africa as they accept the official European/American narrative of Haiti. That is as accurate as saying that Joseph Mobutu and Jonas Savimbi, both friends of Ronald Reagan and the United States, represented modern Africa.

As I have said before, globalisation is simply another name for slave society in the 21st century. The poor, as in New Orleans and Port au Prince and Port Antonio are forced to accept the dictates of the rich. The alternative is rebellion and slaughter.

In Haiti, the Americans between 1915 and 1934 completed the ethno-political division of the society with the invention of an army loyal to the élite white and 'high-yaller' clients of United States, as in The Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America.

The repression continues today in Cite Soleil and everywhere else. The death squads of Central America are not expressions of popular sentiment. They are the enforcers of globalisation.

Jean Bertrand Aristide, like Toussaint a peace-loving patriot, was like Toussaint, kidnapped and flown abroad to exile and would, if Bush had had his 'druthers' perished like Toussaint in a dungeon far away from home.

Meanwhile the world accepts the Authorised Version of Civilisation. King Leopold and George Bush had the same civilising mission, bringing the blessings of Christianity and Freedom (Reg US PatOff.) to the dark corners of the world.
Leopold's crusade in the Belgian Congo reduced the population of the Congo by 10 million between 1880 and 1920.

Jan Vansina, professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin who made the estimate, said the Congo lost one-half of its population in those 40 years. If we compare that estimate to the European estimates of the effects of the slave trade, we must begin to realise that either Leopold was even more brutal than the slave traders, or that someone has made a huge mistake somewhere.

That sort of controversy is par for the course of civilisation. The civilisation/globalisation of Iraq has either cost two thirds of a million lives according to the medical doctors or about 35,000, according to the spin-doctors.
And how many angels can dance on the head of a peon?

Copyright ©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

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