Learning from Haiti’s spirit of endurance

I beg to differ with my sister Anne Khaminwa on some points. For starters Haitians have their own historical shoes, they don’t need to dream of Kenyan ones!

I am not a cobbler but permit me to state that I am not convinced that Kenyans and Africans cannot learn from the spirit of endurance that has guided the Haitian people over two centuries of struggle. The current situation in the Republic of Haiti has everything to do with its being perhaps not the first – as there are other examples in the Americas – but the first black republic in the diaspora that survived: The Napoleonic wars, wars with the neighbouring Dominican Republic, stifling killer reparations (in 1825 the French who had been defeated in the 1804 Revolution hit back and demanded 150 million francs ‘in exchange for liberty’(see http://www.nathanielturner.com/haitimakescaseforreparations.htm as well as George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism).

Haiti bore the brunt of the 1915 US occupation and the politics of colourism paving the way for the combine harvester multinationals and to cap it all the Duvalier era of family rule. On banana republics, my dear Anne. Why are they banana republics? Does the name United Fruit or Mama Yunai ring a bell? I will not delve into Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and their chapters in Central/South America in the 1920’s, drawing heavily on banana workers.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Take a glimpse at the works of Paul Farmer: The Uses of Haiti and Pathologies of Power for an alternative view on ‘Western participation’. With all due respect, I do not adopt this portrayal of the western project in our societies as a benevolent undertaking. If anything, far from ‘participation’, it was intrusion, dislocation and in Fanonian terms depersonalisation in terms of our identity and immiseration.

As the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillén put it in his 1934 anthology of protest poetry, the whole the Caribbean/Latin America or what we call the Black Atlantic had been transformed into West Indies Ltd, with ‘dark smiling natives’ at the service of United Fruit plantations, banana steamers chugging away loaded with the sweet fruit and the sweat of overworked underpaid night workers.

Ever heard that famous Belafonte song Day-O? The darkness, I submit, was and is in the callous might of the exploitative forces that have bled Haiti and the rest of the Third World dry, aided and abetted by a complicit and complacent ruling elite. It is not in the psyche of the people of the Americas and by extension the wretched of the earth.