Past Imperfect: Independence Day
200 years after overthrowing its colonial rulers, Haiti struggles with a dismally familiar slate of "third world" problems � not to mention a lack of respect.
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By William Jelani Cobb The storyline is familiar: a ragtag band of revolutionaries, desperately outgunned and facing the best-equipped European power of the day. An 18th century colony staking its claim to liberty and freedom in the face of an exploitative mother country. An economy based upon the labor of thousands of enslaved Africans. And an underdog victory that creates a new independent nation.
But there is a historical plot twist here.
The revolution was a vi
ctory � not only for Haiti, but for every enslaved person in the West.
In this case the revolutionaries aren't named Washington, Jefferson and Madison, but instead L'Ouverture, Dessalines and Christophe. The year is 1791 � not 1776. And the revolution we're speaking of took place in the French colony of San Domingo, not British North America.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Haitian Independence. In 1804, a woefully under-equipped army of ex-slaves under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated Napoleon's Army and declared themselves a sovereign state � making Haiti second only to the United States as the oldest independent nation in the Western hemisphere. But don't expect any grand recognition of its sibling state from these shores. The US relationship with Haiti has been defined during these two centuries by fear, disdain, contempt and, ultimately, disregard. And, sadly enough, those sentiments have not been confin
ed to the elite corners of American power.
The South Queens, NY community where I grew up was a virtual black United Nations, with families representing dozens of Caribbean and Latin American countries and a handful of immigrants from Africa itself. And that community often found itself fractured along ethnic lines: West Indians who were suspicious and distrustful of African Americans, and vice versa. Within the Caribbean community, Jamaicans found themselves at odds with Trinidadians and Trinidadians with Guyanese. But all these segments were united in their contempt for the Haitian immigrants, fueled by ignorant ideas about Haitian religious practices and conspiracy theories about the country's relationship to the AIDS virus. Disdain for Haiti was surpassed only by ridicule for Ethiopia � whose famine was the basis for humor that covered our shame by association.
But unbeknownst to us, both Ethiopia and Haiti had been the two of the most important outposts of the A
frican Diaspora. In 1896, Ethiopian forces defeated the Italian Army at the Battle of Adowa � becoming the sole beacon of African independence during the era of colonialism. And in 1804, Haiti had set the original example of black freedom in the allegedly new world.
The facts are remarkable. Columbus had visited the island (and named it Hispaniola) in 1492; within 50 years, disease and Spanish labor policies had slashed the indigenous population from millions to fewer than 50,000. Nearly 30,000 Africans had been imported to replace them in the island's gold mines and developing sugar plantations. France seized the western portion of Hispaniola 1697 and renamed it San Domingo. Over the next century, the region became the crown jewel of the French colonial empire, producing 3/4 of the world's sugar supply and accounting for nearly a third of France's annual trade revenue.
But this kind of profit did not come easily; sugarcane is a labor intensive crop and, given the va
st numbers of Africans being imported into the colony (by the end of the 18th century between 29-40,000 blacks were arriving each year), it was cheaper to simply work slaves to death and replace them than it was to spend money on decent amounts of food and clothing. At its height of sugar production, the life span of the average slave arriving in San Domingo was seven years. The cheapness of life in the colony led to insanely brutal practices by slaveholders. In Black Jacobins, his noted history of the Haitian Revolution, CLR James wrote that:
Mutilation [of] limbs, ears and sometimes private parts was common... their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands, emptied boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match...
By 1791, the French Revolution's claims to "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" had echoed across the Atlantic and that same year San Domingo saw a series
of uprisings. What began with an attempt to gain additional political rights for persons of mixed race (who constituted a distinct social group in the colony) quickly evolved into widespread slave revolts that destroyed almost 200 sugar plantations by the end of the year.
Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former coachman who had been a slave until age 45, the army of ex-slaves waged a guerilla war against the island's slaveholders � and their colonial reinforcements. In 1796, L'Ouverture shocked the world by abolishing slavery and declaring himself Lieutenant Governor of the colony. When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in 1799, he resolved to reestablish control over the insubordinate black population declaration, sending his brother-in-law General LeClerc to the island with 28,000 men in 1802. A year later 20,000 of them were dead � wiped out by yellow fever and L'Ouverture's ghost-like guerilla warfare tactics.
L'Ouverture was captured by French in 1802 and sent to
France, where he died in prison, but his lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines commanded the forces, vanquishing the remnants of LeClerc's army in November 1803. In January 1804, the territory was declared an independent nation and renamed "Ayiti" � the indigenous name for the island, which meant "high land."
The revolution had been a victory � not only for Haiti, but for every enslaved person in the west because the Haitian uprising hastened the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The US Constitution provided 20 years of protection for the trade, but Haiti raised fears throughout the South � especially in South Carolina, where blacks constituted the majority of the population. Those fears directly influenced the outlawing of the slave trade in the US in 1808.
Haiti's founders found there were consequences to having the audacity to demand freedom. For much of its history, Haiti was treated as a pariah nation, diplomatically ignored by the western powers. The United
States did not extend diplomatic recognition to Haiti until the verge of the Civil War, when it was believed that the nation might be a good dumping ground for free blacks in America. In 1915, the United States cited the Monroe Doctrine and invaded Haiti (allegedly to prevent European powers from seizing the country and grabbing a foothold in the western hemisphere during World War I). Though the U.S. cited security concerns as the rationale for the invasion, it was widely believed to have had economic motives � the US remained on the island for the next 19 years, long after the war had ended, and instituted forced labor policies that echoed Haiti's experience with the French 124 years earlier. President Franklin D. Roosevelt removed American troops in 1934, when the Great Depression made it too expensive to maintain a military presence on the island.
In the 1950s through the 1980s, the US backed the successively brutal dictatorships of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier. Mo
re recently, the first Bush Administration established a policy of granting asylum to Cuban refugees almost automatically, while detaining or returning Haitians � a policy that lasted well into the Clinton years and was not modified until the activist Randall Robinson embarrassed the administration with a hunger strike.
History is full of tragic ironies. And none more than Haiti's legacy as a nation that delivered itself from the shackles of slavery only to struggle against poverty, corruption, debt and foreign powers for the next 200 years. The revolution was one of history's plot twists, but its subsequent storyline is riddled with these clich�s of the alleged third world. Freedom, as the maxim tell us, ain't exactly free. And in the case of Haiti, it has been more expensive than even Toussaint might have suspected.
First published: February 3, 2004 About the Author
William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College
and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Visit his website at www.jelanicobb.com <http://www.jelanicobb.com/>.
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The Africana QA: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
As part of its Black History Month programming PBS will be airing four one-hour episodes of Henry Louis 'Skip" Gates Jr. film series America Beyond the Color Line.
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By Ken Gibbs
Recently, the innercities of America have undergone somewhat of a media
facelift. In the last five years they've received more attention for the charismatic rappers and athletes they've produced than the third-world state of squalor that many exist in. Mass media has willingly embraced and capitalized on the fashion and artistic trends emanating from these economically depressed and politically ignored areas. As a result they have made it easy to forget that these seemingly distant lands are at the centers of our major cities, and that the people living there are Americans entitled to as much of this nation's dream as anyone else.
The four-part PBS series America Beyond The Color Line with Henry Louis Gates Jr. examines the problems of America's innercities, going into Chicago's Robert Taylor homes and speaking with residents, life-long and recently removed, about what brought them there, why they've stayed, and how � if at all � they think they can get out. But instead of just focusing on how the black underclass is living, Gates goes deep
er. At one point he sits with a group of Chicago high school students and simply asks, "Do you think you've got a chance at making it in this society?" When speaking to a teenage mother Gates asks why she didn't chose to abort, if not on the first, why not the second, or third pregnancy? In South: The Black Belt, Gates speaks with Mississippi native Morgan Freeman about why he's chosen to move back to what was a bastion of racism when he left nearly thirty years ago. East Coast: Ebony Towers takes Gates through DC and New York, where he meets with some of the most influential African Americans in the country, like Colin Powell and Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. And Los Angeles: Black Hollywood brings Gates behind the glitz and glamour, where a pragmatic dialogue with Chris Tucker, Alicia Keys and producer Arnon Milchan makes it clear why a love story between Denzel Washington and Halle Berry was cooked up for the big screen after their legendary Oscar wins. The range of int
erview subjects and their varied realities paints a vivid picture of the growing disconnect between the black American middle and underclass, but it also highlights the problems they share.
Gates, also founder of Africana.com, recently took a moment to speak with us about his reasons for creating this series. Here is what he had to say.
How long have you been working on American Beyond the Color Line?
I've been thinking about it for along time. When I did the Africa series I thought of it as a trilogy: part one would be Africa, part two would be black America, and part three would be blacks in Latin America. So now I've completed two of the three and I'm in development for the third part.
Black America is a huge topic, what's the focus of the series?
I wanted to focus on the class divide that's resulted since Dr. King was killed in 1968. Largely, as a result of the progress our people have made through Affirmative Action < http://www.africana.com/research/encarta/tt_606.asp>, the black middle class has at least tripled, almost quadrupled [since then]. But on the other hand, the percentage of black children living at or below the poverty line is about forty percent, which is what it was when Dr. King was killed. So we have two classes in the black American community and they're perpetuating themselves, which means that unless we do something drastic � both internally and externally � this class divide will be a permanent aspect of the black experience in a way that no one could have imagined during the Civil Rights < http:/
/www.africana.com/research/encarta/civil.asp> era. It's a huge gulf, a chasm between the black middle class and the black underclass.
Were people like Colin Powell and Vernon Jordon aware of the challenges faced by younger, poorer people like Lindell, the young man living in Chicago's Robert Taylor homes?
They were acutely aware � and so were the people in the innercity, very articulate, about the bad choices that our own people have made, how we are internalizing our oppression. If Bo Connors and George Wallace had sat down with other white racists of the 1960's and said, "How can we keep these negroes enslaved?" even after they passed the Voting Rights Act < http://www.africana.com/research/encarta/tt_393.asp> and the Civil Rights Act, they couldn't have come up with a scenario more nefarious than the one that we're living out today, where we're dropping out of school, we're getting pregnant when we're teenagers, we're doing drugs, we're selling drugs, and that's destroying our community.
What kind of tone were you striving for?
I was trying to recreate the effect of sitting in the barbershop or the beauty parlor or in the living room � when black people are talking to black people, there are no excuses and they're not worried about what white people think � and by and large, I achieved that in the series. People were remarkably honest and candid and open about our own complicity in their own oppression, and also about the burden racism, the burden of being black in American society. I thought that showed when we had the brown-skinned actresses sitting around in the living room talking about intra-racial discrimination, they said even black directors won't cast them in A list parts because they're dark, and needless to say, white people aren't casting them either. That kind of thing was new and fresh.
How did you decide who to include in the film?
I was looking for people who were representative of different aspects of the black community, and some people are obvious, like Colin Powel, Vernon Jordan, Franklin Raines. But also prisoners, when was the last time you heard prisoners interviewed? I wanted to show the hope and the despair. The successes and the failures, the people who are mired in poverty and the people who were phenomenally successful. So I did a lot of research and a lot of thinking, and I went into the Robert Taylor homes [in Chicago] and just found the Massenburg family. I found Patrice Massenburg in an elevator, and I just asked her who she was. She wanted to know what I was doing with my film crew and I told her and said can we come back and interview you? She said, "Yes, give us an hour." An hour later we were in her apartment all afternoon interviewing her mother and her, two generations of single women trying to make it out of the ghetto. The priso
ner � I walked in that prison and I looked in that cell and I saw this guy. He wasn't even scheduled to be one of the people I interviewed and I just picked him, it was just a vibe. It was serendipity and a lot or research both that yielded the interviewees.
I noticed that the title of the film series is America Beyond the Color Line, but the book is titled America Behind the Color Line. What's the difference?
That was a glitch. I was joking with a reporter about how 50 years from now someone will do a PhD dissertation on the subtle nuances, the differences and why. The BBC wanted to call it America Beyond the Color Line. I always wanted to call it America Behind the Color Line. So they called it America Beyond the Color Line, and it ran in England this past summer. The production company was supposed to change the name for the American version and they didn't do it, they got confused, so the book is called what the series should be called. But it's fine.
What was the most important interview?
It's a tie between the prisoner Gary, though he has a different name in the book, and Patrice and Carolyn Massenberg, the voices of the innercity. These people are extraordinarily articulate and they understand the role of individual choice, determination and hard work, as well as the role of historical forces. I was so moved by how hard it is to make it out of the ghetto, that, as I said to the camera, if I'd grown up there, no matter what � with my same parents and attitude � I'm not sure I would have made it out because the forces are so overwhelming. The sequence I did with Arnon Milchan, the great producer in Hollywood, when he breaks down the economics of racism at the box-office and says that even if he cast Halle Berry in Jodie Foster's part in Panic Room < http://www.africana.com/reviews/moviestv/movies_83.asp> it would have made half of the profit, $
50 million dollars instead of $100. And when he says that a love story between Denzel and Halle will never be made because white people will not go to see black people be in love, that was amazing to me. But if he placed Russell Crowe in my mythical love story with Halle Berry it would have made two, maybe three million dollars. We've never had anybody from Hollywood with real power break it down that specifically for everyone to see, and it was a very courageous and honest thing that he did.
How do you anticipate such honesty will be received?
I think it will be seen as a wake-up call to the black middle class that we have to constitute ourselves as a political force � vis-�-vis the White House and the congress - to help to get federal programs to help our brothers and sisters stuck back in the ghetto, who are suffering. But we've had pre-screenings, where people would see the promo-tape, and the response has been electric so far. I'm very gratified about that, because I don't take the side of the right or the left. I say it's both sets of forces. The right wing would say, "If these people work hard, stay in school, there is no more racism, it's a level playing field, etc." Well that's bullshit. And on the left people say it's not a matter of individual responsibility, it's about these big historical forces. Well, that's too simplistic as well. It's both. We have to create opportunities, but our people have to have the will to stay in school and embrace these
opportunities, and that's not happening.
First published: February 3, 2004 About the Author
Ken Gibbs is entertainment editor at Africana.com.
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