Black History month has recently passed, but we wanted to give readers another reminder of the  history of our region.

I was horrified recently when I heard on BBC Caribbean that Coast Guard officials in Turks and Caicos Islands had deliberately collided with a boat carrying Haitian migrants, causing it to capsize in shark infested waters. To add insult to injury, the survivors were locked in a detention centre and prevented from speaking to journalists in the aftermath of the incident. This shocking story immediately brought to my mind the haunting lyrics of poet and composer David Rudder from his melancholic requiem called “Haiti I'm Sorry.” He asked, “They say the Middle Passage is gone, so how come overcrowded boats still haunt our lives?” This brutally compelling question brings into sharp relief the scandalous state of affairs that is CARICOM’s policy with regard to the Haitian Republic.

Haiti is a special case in the Caribbean. Haiti represents the prevailing international opinion of independence, sovereignty and freedom for people of African descent, whether on the continent itself or throughout the diaspora. Haiti dared to violently throw off the yoke of bondage colonialism, imperialism and all notions of racial inferiority in a relentless ten-year war of attrition that, in the words of Prof. George Lamming, proved that black men were men. For this audacity, Haitians have been made to suffer. Their country has been turned into a terrible cautionary tale to the rest of us; that if we don’t drink the swill from the swine trough of white supremacy, we too will be imprisoned in a barren wasteland desperately seeking a means of escape.

Only in Haiti did black men take their freedom. Haiti disproved all the arguments and theories about the nature of man in general and the black man in particular. Haiti disproved Darwin and his theory that Africans were savages requiring slavery for our own well-being. Haiti disproved Hegel’s opinion that Africans had no voice in history by indelibly infusing history with the most brutally eloquent free man’s creed. Haiti also disproved Paine’s statement that Africans were simpletons, incapable of comprehending the nature and meaning of liberty, by expounding its true meaning. Haiti defied and defeated the largest and most sophisticated armies and navies of the time.

On that glorious New Year’s Day in 1804, Haiti declared for oppressed people everywhere that bondage was not the natural state of any man and so Haiti became the threat of a good example. For this Haiti had to pay. That payment has been exacted with the utmost brutality, ranging from an unconscionable indemnity imposed by France that has amounted to almost $20 billion as the price for recognizing Haiti as a free Republic to, and perhaps most insidiously, being despised by their Caribbean brothers.

When Toussaint L’Ouverture was kidnapped by the French, his last words to them were,"In overthrowing me you have cut down only the trunk of the tree of liberty, it will spring up again from the roots for they are many and they are deep.” We as Caribbean people need to draw our strength from those roots.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 9:47 pm and is filed under lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.