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The Haitian Revolution and
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
By Molefi Kete Asante
(First Published in City Press, May, 2004)
There was no other place for me
to be on January 1, 2004, but in Haiti, called Ayiti by the local
people, during the bicentennial celebration of the first African
republic in the world. When the Africans of Haiti revolted against
the French government and defeated Napoleon’s Grand Army of
France in 1804, a new chapter had been written in the history of
liberation. New names emerged in history to reflect the honor they
had won: Papa Boukman, Mariesaint Dede Bazile, Toussaint L’Ouverture,
Dessalines, Christophe, and Petion. These are the names of Africans
that live in Haitian history.
Here I was in this historic country
on one of the most significant commemorations in the history of
the African world? And yet as we were beginning our celebrations
there were other forces arrayed to disrupt the festivities of the
200th year of Haitian Independence.
A full year earlier it was reported
that four Western powers that included the United States, Canada,
France, and Britain met to discuss ways of destabilizing Haiti.
These reports ran rampant in the black community in the United States.
We worried that the democracy the Haitian people enjoyed in electing
their president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide would be stolen from them.
This country which occupies about a third of the island of Hispaniola,
the other two thirds being occupied by Dominican Republic, was once
the richest colony the Europeans ever had. It produced nearly one
half of the wealth of France when it was under the control of that
nation. The Africans who entered Ayiti, entered early, after all
this was the first land that Columbus saw when he sailed across
the Atlantic toward America. It was historic in Europe’s consciousness,
but ever more for Africans, it was the land where our ancestors
first tasted the whip on their backs, the land where they first
planted and harvested sugar for the white man. Ayiti, the land of
the Taino Indians became in time the land of the blacks who badly
defeated the white nation of France.
What is Ayiti to us? It remains
one of the most potent symbols of black revolution against injustice
in the annals of history. It is a statement of the will of the oppressed
to throw off their shackles. It engages the imagination of the entire
world with its disciplined assertion of African opposition to European
slavery. Ayiti showed other oppressed people that oppression does
not last forever if the people have a will to fight to overthrow
their oppressors. Blacks in other colonies in the Caribbean and
in the southern states of the United States found examples in the
Haitian people. There is a veritable line of heroes who took the
Haitian model for their revolts and rebellions. In the United States
the most noteworthy was Nat Turner, but there were others like Denmark
Vesey and Gabriel Prosser, all inspired by the deeds of the Haitians.
And so, it was that way in other parts of the Americas.
Under the leadership of Toussaint,
Dessalines, and Christophe, military heroes of gigantic proportions,
the Africans of Ayiti whipped, defeated, and humiliated the greatest
white army of its day.
The battle of Vertiers will live
in history as the proudest moment of the Ayitian Revolution. I stood
at Vertiers before the glorious statues of the giants of the revolution
and wept because we have not retained the consciousness of what
our ancestors did at that sacred place. Last week I heard from a
friend in Ayiti that now French and American soldiers regular urinate
on the statues at Vertiers. How quickly we lose our way in history
when the oppressor believes that it is still possible to humiliate
black people.
Napoleon had sent LeClerc and Rochambeau,
two of his favorite generals to subdue the rebellion in France’s
wealthiest colony. But when the battles were over, the enslaved
had thrown off the shackles of slavery and sent the French back
to their homeland.
Here on this Island, shared with
the Dominican Republic, Papa Boukman and Mariesaint Dede Bazile
in a ritual of defiance on August 14, 1791 declared the enslaved
Africans in revolt against the brutal French slave masters. The
holy area, marked only by a tree more than 250 years old, is called
Bois-Caiman. So it was here in this isolated region of the country,
under a huge stand of trees, that Boukman, a nyanga, and his accompanist,
Mariesaint Dede, carried out the African ceremony that committed
the black people of Ayiti to revolution.
When they had defeated the French
Army, the Haitian people had every intention of remaining free,
although they were the only free African nation in the American
hemisphere. As it would be, up rose another leader who was a builder.
The name he had from slavery was Henry Christophe. He built the
great fortress of La Citadel and the great palace of Sans Souci.
The first building was to protect the country; the second was for
him to live in and host the people of Ayiti.
Every visitor to Ayiti must visit
La Citadel, the massive, wonder-of-the-world fortress erected by
King Henry Christophe the Great. He built seventeen fortresses along
the coast of Ayiti to protect the liberty of the first black republic.
But clearly none of these fortresses came close to the magnificence
of La Citadel with its 365 windows, each window was armed with a
cannon, its massive walls built with stones, rocks, and the blood
of animals, and its impregnable mountain fastness earned for it
the name Invincibility. Napoleon never tried to recapture Ayiti,
La Citadel was never attacked, and it remains till this day the
soul of Ayiti.
Once at the small town on the point
called Fort Liberté where Christophe proclaimed himself King
of Ayiti I pondered the meaning of the Revolution. Here we were
200 years after the defeat of the French and yet so many French
and white Americans wanted to dismiss Haiti from the history books.
They also wanted to destabilize a popularly elected leader who was
leaning toward more progressive politics.
When a group of one hundred thugs
was given guns and access and allowed to terrorize a country that
had deliberately disarmed its police and abandoned its military
as symbols of peace the plot was fully hatched.
I do not believe that whites have
ever forgiven the African people of Ayiti for defeating the greatest
European military power of its day. What it proved was that the
will of the people to be free was stronger than all of the forces
of military power.
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had legitimately won grants and
loans from the Inter American Bank to assist the people with roads,
schools, and employment, but the American government had blocked
the money from distribution in the country. The government could
not fulfill its pledges to the people without the money. Consequently
there was disappointment and frustration.
This allowed a small cadre of
Aristide’s enemies to instigate unrest because he had not
fulfilled his promises and the representative elections had been
flawed. Meanwhile, Aristide was in his second term and had one year
more to go before a new election would be held in 2005. Nevertheless,
the plan afoot was to topple the democratically-elected leader during
the year of Ayiti’s most historic celebration.
The kidnapping and overthrowing
of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide remains a stain on the idea
of democracy. But it almost always goes without saying that those
who shout the most for democracy can be seen all over the world
doing the least for democracy.
On the morning of January 1, 2004,
at 5 AM, I went along with a great flow of Ayitian people to the
Presidential Palace Plaza for the ritual “eating of soup with
the peasants” that had been announced by President Jean Bertrand
Aristide. During the enslavement of Africans by the French it was
against the law and custom for blacks to eat soup, so the Ayitians
turned the eating of pumpkin soup into a national symbol of resistance.
President Aristide announced two
centuries of freedom and announced a millennium of peace, but the
trouble was already brewing in the town of Gonaives.
When President Thabo Mbeki, immensely
popular in the Caribbean, came to the podium to speak there was
intense and prolonged applause. The people of Ayiti felt that they
had at long last found an African nation whose history was such
a parallel to their own. They applauded the South African people
and listened eagerly to every word by President Mbeki. There were
no incidents of violence or misbehavior during the speeches of President
Thabo Mbeki, Prime Minister Perry Christie of the Bahamas, and Congresswoman
Maxine Waters of the United States.
An Afrocentric philosophy, where
the people always work in their best interests, will place contemporary
Ayiti on the same base as historic and heroic Ayiti. This country,
ostracized by Europe, invaded twice by the United States, bankrupted
by France, and isolated from other Caribbean islands by white racist
colonialists has maintained African courage, dignity, and heroism
despite the political, economic, and cultural daggers stuck in its
back.
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
who sought dignity for his country, should be accorded respect because
history will certainly show him, even with his faults, as one of
Ayiti’s most enlightened leaders.
Molefi Kete Asante is one of
the most published contemporary scholars, having written more than
sixty books and three hundred articles.
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