There’s no more shocking proof of the lingering consequences of colonialism than the violent anarchy devastating Haiti. Brutal gangs now control most of the country.
This is the end result of European powers ruthlessly squeezing the tiny Caribbean republic dry — and the subsequent amnesia about a systematic crime against humanity, especially among the Western nations most implicated in that mobster-style extortion of a poor country: France and the United States.
What was once called Saint-Domingue was so profitable, producing 60% of the world’s coffee and 50% of its sugar, that it is estimated one in eight people in France depended on trade with that distant Caribbean colony.
But in 1804, after an astonishingly successful slave revolt, the world’s first black republic, Haiti, was declared. Clearly colonial powers felt that the shock of such a massive loss of revenue and the scandalous example of an independent black republic could not be tolerated. So they set in motion measures, right up to the 21st century, to crush such a show of independence.
The initial strike was the arrival in 1825 of a squadron of 15 French warships in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Faced with the bargaining power of 500 cannons, Haiti was forced to agree to pay 150 million francs in compensation for the loss of France’s profitable plantations and all their human chattels.
This debt, though later reduced to 90 million francs, was not paid off until 1947. In fact, it was a “double debt”, as to pay it off Haiti was compelled to take loans, at interest, from French banks — which also helped to finance the construction of the Eiffel Tower. By 1914, 80% of the Haitian government’s budget went to pay off this debt at the expense of an increasingly impoverished population.
In that same year, a United States warship anchored at Port-au-Prince, and a team of marines marched to the so-called Haitian National Bank, from where they removed gold reserves worth $500,000 (approximately $15-million today). This was taken back to New York “for safe-keeping”.
The following year the Americans invaded with the standard justification of “restoring order and maintaining stability”. That occupation lasted until 1934, and during some of those 19 years, more was spent from the national budget to pay the US officials enforcing the occupation than on the then two million population.
If this was an individual, the actions of France and the United States would be denounced as “debt bondage”. In a major investigation in 2022, The New York Times established that most of Haiti’s developmental potential — many billions of dollars — was siphoned off by the West. Haiti has been strangled from the start.
Historical injustices ignored
Even so, almost no reporting of the current turmoil makes reference to this callous saga of exploitation. The unrestrained gang activity after the recent resignation of the unelected prime minister is widely portrayed as a case of hopeless Third World incompetence, rather than two centuries of pitiless Western extraction which has condemned the country to perpetual impoverishment.
Nor has that history ever been taught in French schools. The amnesia is almost complete. While proposals for reparations for slavery are largely scoffed at, the New York Times found an almost total loss of memory today among those French elite whose wealth stems from Haitian “reparations” for the loss of slaves.
In South Africa too, Thabo Mbeki’s visit to Haiti in 2004 for the bicentenary of the world’s first black republic was generally greeted with baffled scorn by our commentariat. This reflected widespread ignorance of the significance of a great slave rebellion which defeated the armies of France, Spain and Britain.
Its monumental importance was captured in The Black Jacobins by the radical Trinidadian writer CLR James: “The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement”.
Begun in 1791, the revolt was led by the extraordinary Toussaint L’Ouverture, a slave until 45. James recounts how the slaves overthrew the shackles of their own minds: ‘The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of 60,000 men and a French expedition of similar size under (Napoleon) Bonaparte’s brother-in-law.”
It was an astonishing military triumph against staggering odds. Perhaps that’s why brutal attempts have been made ever since to destroy that achievement and ensure the real crime is forgotten.
The Black Jacobins was first published in 1938, and in the preface to the 1980 edition, the author recalled meeting young South African exiles in Ghana in 1957 who told him how important this book was to them: typing out pages in order to circulate them covertly back home.
CLR James’ conclusion also stands as a perceptive assessment of the balance of violence during the Struggle against apartheid, noting: “cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetrating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased”.
In Haiti, aside from Western extortion and occupation, there have always been local elites ready to do the bidding of others for their own profit. Here we had Jacob Zuma and his flunkies; in Haiti there was the infamous “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-1971), with his infamous Tonton Macoute goons, then his equally vicious son “Baby Doc” (1971-1986).
Whenever a reforming leader comes to power, entrenched local and international interests move quickly to undermine them.
The current crisis should be seen as a syndrome which Tolstoy accurately identified as: “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means — except by getting off his back”. DM