Thesis #4: The Haitification of Nigeria 

Haiti, the first formal black republic, was founded with high hopes in 1804 by self freed ex-slaves who defeated the army that Napoleon had sent to re-enslave or, if necessary, exterminate them. What is the path whereby Haiti has arrived at its present condition of chaos where desperately poor Haitian boat people are fleeing the country as economic and political refugees?

Let us take a look, first at Haiti in 1803-04; then at Haiti in 2000-2005; and then see how the sad decline was inflicted.

Haiti 1803-04

In November 2005, the poets known as The Maroons had this to say in celebrating the birth of Haiti:

On this day [in Nov. 1803], 202 years ago, African slaves on the island of Haiti (then known as St. Domingue) defeated the one and only Napoleon Bonaparte. . . . On this day, 202 years ago, Maroons of the past, African soldiers (former slaves) ripped off the shackles of slavery and spit them into Napoleon's face. Under the command of men like Toussaint Louverture (hailed as the Black Spartacus), Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Petion, Boukman, Biassou, Hyacinthe and Makendal the chains of slavery cried out in pain as West African slaves and the newly rising mulattoes/Afranchi gave birth to an independent nation, the first black republic...Haiti.

202 years ago, Rochembeau bowed down to Dessalines power. He fled with his tail between his legs and returned to Napoleon a defeated general, defeated at the hands of a former slave. On this day, 202 years ago, African cultural continuity played a pivotal role in the outcome of the slave uprising. With their age-old beliefs, history and culture intact, the enslaved Africans were able to forcefully and relentlessly resist the oppression they encountered in St. Domingue. Though largely misunderstood and maligned by Westerners, the Vodun religion our ancestors carried across the Atlantic Ocean infused them with a fiery determination to free themselves from human bondage.

Dessalines, at the head of the triumphant indigenous army, entered Cap on Nov. 30, 1803. On December 4, the French also surrendered the northwestern peninsula and Mole St. Nicolas to the victors and the French occupation and control of Haiti ended forever." (Heroes of Haiti, W.F. Burton Sellers)

27 days later, the first free black nation was born, the first black republic, the originator of freedom,

--Excerpt from “The Maroons Salute The Battle of Vertieres...on this day, 202 years ago” By The poets known as The Maroons

But now, two centuries later, this is Haiti:

Haiti 2000-2005

Let me quote from a news report datelined Nov. 17, 2005:

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world and getting poorer.

Only parts of sub-Saharan Africa are worse off. The armed rebellion that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide early last year [2004] and the continuing insecurity ever since have steepened the decline. Prices rose 15 percent this year, while most incomes stand still at less than a dollar a day. And many Haitians fear that elections later this year will erupt in violence.

''We will never let the election find us in Haiti,'' said Jippy Hamilton, a 29-year-old mechanic.

   For the past eight months, Hamilton and his childhood friend Ricardeau Felix have been scouring the city for scrap, building a 16-foot speedboat for a rare direct shot at Miami.

''I have no life here,'' he said. ``Even if I die at sea, I have no choice. There is no life for me in Haiti.''

---

In this old French colonial port, one sailor plans to smuggle his own family out. A journalist is fleeing political gangs. An unemployed mechanic hopes to be a better father from afar. A single mother prays that she can find a future for her children in Miami, even as she leaves them behind.

   They are people whose wrenching personal stories are often lost under the category of ''economic refugees.'' They drown, they get robbed, they climb into the most wretched of boat holds, packed body to body in steaming heat, hoping to go anywhere but here.

   Haiti's relentless poverty has bred a paralyzing sense of helplessness, with thousands of people concluding that the only way to take control of their lives is to leave - no matter what the risk.

   They make news now and then, as in the televised landing of 220 Haitians on Miami's Rickenbacker Causeway in 2002 and the drownings of three women whose bodies washed up in Pompano Beach on Nov. 5. But mostly, they are invisible.

   U.S. and Bahamian officials stopped about 3,200 migrants in the last fiscal year [i.e. 2004], fewer than in some years, more than in others. The Coast Guard has clamped down since the 2002 incident, dramatically reducing the number of migrant ships sailing straight into Miami. Smugglers have reacted accordingly. They carry fewer people at a time, charge more and take a circuitous route.

   Migrants often make several attempts just to complete the first leg of the journey, to Providenciales in the British colony of Turks and Caicos, 150 miles north of Haiti. From there, they hope to move into the Bahamas and then try to slip into Florida on speedboats.

   In the north coast port of Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city, handmade boats with anywhere from 10 to 200 passengers sail into the pipeline every week. Many more leave from the northern town of Port-de-Paix and the offshore island of La Tortue.

   Some make it to their destination. Others don't.

Storms sink them or drive them far off course. Winds die and stall them for weeks as passengers run out of food and water. Coast Guard cutters intercept them, destroy their boats and send them home.

Smugglers deceptively loop around and drop them back off in Haiti, or leave them to perish on uninhabited islands. Armed bandits attack them.

   Ima Pyrrhon, 23, lost her husband on a trip that left here with 15 people in August. She was told that he and six others drowned when the boat capsized. She says she can barely speak since it happened.

``We had three children and another baby on the way. ... We made this decision. We had no choice. He was all I ever had.''

---Excerpt from “Sailing north only way to escape for some Haitians” by JOE MOZINGO, Knight Ridder Newspapers, KRT Wire, Nov. 17, 2005

Now, how did Haiti get from the high achievement of defeating Napoleon, two centuries ago, to this desperate poverty and fleeing boat people of today? As Noam Chomsky put it:

Haiti, in fact, is a parable of Western savagery. That was one of the first places Columbus landed, and he thought it was a paradise—it was the richest place in the world, and also probably the most densely populated place in the world. And in fact, it remained that way: France is a rich country in large measure because it stole Haiti’s resources, and even early in the twentieth century, before Woodrow Wilson sent the U.S. Marines to invade and wreck the country in 1915, American scholarship and government studies on Haiti were still describing it as a major resource center—it just happened to be an extremely rich place. Well, take a look if you fly into Haiti today. The island consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—the Dominican Republic we’ve [i.e. the U.S.] also brutalized, but Haiti much more so—and you can just see if you look down from the plane: on one side its brown, on the other side its sort of semi-green. The brown side is Haiti, the [once] richest place in the world. It may not last another couple decades—literally it may become uninhabitable.”

--Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, pp. 400-401

A little chronology of events will help here.

1791-1804: The War of Independence. The Republic of Haiti was founded in 1804 by

Dessalines the conqueror of Napoleon, with a constitution that forbade foreigners from owning land in Haiti.

1825: France exacted reparation of Fr.150m for the loss of its slaves; this was the

condition for recognizing Haiti, and letting it into the global market. This reparations debt led to decades of French domination of Haiti’s finance, with catastrophic effects on the new nation’s economy. This debt was not liquidated till 1887.

1849-1913: In total disregard of Haitian sovereignty, U.S. Navy ships entered Haitian

   waters 24 times to “protect American lives and property”.

1915: U.S. Marines invade, occupy and begin administering Haiti on the excuse of

   humanitarianism and enforcing America’s Monroe Doctrine.

1916: A “treaty” turned Haiti into a political and financial protectorate of the U.S.A.

1918: A “plebiscite” conducted by the Marines “approved” a U.S. sponsored

constitution that allowed foreigners to own land in Haiti. U.S. investors move in and take large tracts of land for plantations worked by extremely cheap labor. [23¢ per day compared to  $3 per day in Panama, in 1926]

1922: the U.S. grants loans to fund Haiti’s national debt.

1934: U.S. Marine rule ends.

1947: Haiti liquidates the 1922 debt to the U.S. ending U.S. control of Haiti’s finance.

1934-1957: A succession of Haitian presidents attempt unsuccessfully to change the

constitution to allow them extra terms in office. Some were blocked. One, Lescot, was overthrown by students and mobs.

1957:Dr Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier elected President; rules Haiti with the help of

   the state-sponsored death squads-- the Tonton Macoute.

1964: Papa Doc “elected” President-for-life.

1971: Papa Doc dies. His son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier inherits position of

President-for-life. Under the Duvaliers, in the 1960s and 1970s, US-owned assembly plants move in to exploit labor kept extremely cheap by Tonton Macoute terror.  In the early 1980s, Haiti is subjected to the dogmas of IMF Fundamentalism. Under USAID-World Bank programs, 30% of the cultivated land is shifted from food for local consumption to export crops. As tourism booms and poverty deepens, and terror blankets the land, boat people begin to leave in the 1970s.

1986: Baby Doc overthrown

1990: Aristide elected President; inaugurated in Feb. 1991; He tried, against USAID

opposition, to raise the nominal minimum wage from 25¢ to 37¢ an hour; was overthrown seven months later by the Duvalierist military, plunging the country into a political crisis from which it has not fully emerged.

Haiti as a theatre of the race war

It is important to view Haiti properly in the context of the race war. Since Columbus first visited the island, the whites [first the Spanish, then the French, and then the Americans] have attacked and exterminated or enslaved the non-whites they found or brought there.

Phase One: The Spaniards vs theAboriginal “Indians”

Columbus described the people he found as “lovable, tractable, peaceable, gentle, decorous,” and their land as rich and bountiful. Hispaniola was “perhaps the most densely populated place in the world,” Las Casas wrote, “a beehive of people, “ who “of all the infinite universe of humanity, . . . are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity.” Driven by “insatiable greed and ambition,” the Spaniards fell upon them  “like ravening wild beasts, . . . killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing and destroying the native peoples” with “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard before, and to such a degree” that the population is barely 200 persons, he wrote in 1552, “from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed.” “It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel,” he wrote: “not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.” “As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures, . . . [they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do with them as they liked.” . . . The Spanish effort to plunder the island’s riches by enslaving its gentle people were unsuccessful; they died too quickly, if not killed by the “wild beasts” or in mass suicide. African slaves were sent for from the early 1500s, later in a flood as the plantation economy was established.

--[Chomsky, Year 501, pp. 198-199]

That was the Spanish war of extermination on the native Indians.

Phase Two: The French vs the Africans

With African slave labor, Saint Domingue, as the French renamed the Island, became the greatest wealth-producing colony in the Americas. By 1789, it was producing three-quarters of the world’s sugar, and was also a leader in the production of coffee, cotton, indigo, and rum. In coercing the labor for this production from 450,000 African slaves, the French

hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars . . ., forced them to eat shit, . . . cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or unto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitos, . . .threw them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup” – when not “flaying them with the lash” to extract the wealth that helped give France its entry ticket to the rich men’s club.  [Chomsky, Year 501, p. 201]

Against such horrors, African rebellions were frequent. These rebellions finally exploded into the liberation war that began in 1791 and that saw the defeat of Napoleon’s army in 1803. That was the first part of the French-African phase of the race war that the whites inflicted on the blacks, and the Africans won it in the end.

   The second part of this French-African race war in Haiti began with the indemnity/reparations imposed on Haiti by France in 1825. It was a long economic war and the French won it.

Phase Three: The Americans vs the Africans

This American-African phase of the race war began in 1915 when Woodrow Wilson, --the man famous for his “idealism” [Wilsonian Idealism] who, in his oratory, defended the rights of small nations to self-determination; the apostle of world peace who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919—sent in the U.S. Marines to occupy Haiti. In their 20 years rule, “Wilson’s troops murdered, destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery” as Chomsky says. They indulged in “indiscriminate killing of natives” and some of them boasted that they “hunted the Cacos [i.e.Haitians] like pigs.” [Chomsky, Year 501, p. 202]

The economic side of this race war has continued till today and has produced the exodus of boat people since the 1970s. They are, indeed, refugees from an economic war orchestrated by the World Bank and USAID to produce a situation where “Haitian wages, expressed in U.S. dollars, had fallen 39% from 1983 to 1991; “where assembly workers spent as much as one-quarter of their daily wage, and two hours of time, just getting to and from work”; where, “in 1990, an estimated 70 per cent of the Haitian workforce was either unemployed or underemployed: and where each job in the assembly export sector in Haiti feeds an estimated five to seven people”. “How do seven people survive on a wage of 14 U.S. cents an hour?” Here are two reported examples of how:

1] “An extremely competent looking woman in her late thirties who had worked in the plant for four years as an inspector made H$4 a day. . . . the equivalent of US$1.48 a day. Travel cost her 52 U.S. cents a day and she spent 37 cents a day on food. That leaves 59 U.S. cents. To make H$4.00 she works a nine hour day. She has two sons, eight and ten. She told us, ‘The money goes very fast. Often there is nothing left for the weekend.’. . .

2] A young man had worked in the plant for four years. He was making H$3 a day. He had a wife and two children, aged one and four-and-half. It cost him 41 U.S. cents a day for transportation and he skipped lunch. This meant he could go home with 70 cents a day. He and his family can afford only one meal a day. His home is a one-room straw hut. . . When it rains, the house becomes flooded and everything is drenched. For such a house for his family, he pays US$115 a year rent. What else can you afford on wages of 14 cents an hour?”

--from “Sweatshop Development” in The Haiti File, pp.136, 137

When you reflect on these phases, it is clear that despite beating Napoleon in battle, the Africans of Haiti have come full circle in 200 years, from chattel slavery and its physical brutalities back to wage slavery with its economic and physical brutalities today.

  (The books to read on Haiti are The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James; The Irritated Genie by Jacob Carruthers; The Haiti Files ed by James Ridgeway; “The tragedy of Haiti”, Chapter 8 of Year 501: The Conquest Continues by Noam Chomsky; AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer)

   Now, let us inspect the key spots on the Haiti Highway on which Haiti has been forced to travel since 1804: Haiti was dragged into the Debt Trap in 1825; It was held in the Debt Trap, by trick or by force till 1947; The USA repeatedly violated its sovereignty in the second half of the 19^th century and finally invaded it in 1915; occupied it till 1934 and re-organized it for American economic control and exploitation; Haiti has never recovered from the damage inflicted by the American occupation and by IMF fundamentalism with its dogma of a foreignized and export-oriented, open-door economy. In Haiti’s case this means that foreign companies pay no taxes, and can get virtually free labor at less than $2 a day.   Hence the exodus of Haiti’s boat people. This journey has taken Haiti 200 years to accomplish.

How Nigeria is almost there too

Nigeria has already gotten itself into imperialist economic and political control through the debt trap and the dogmas of IMF fundamentalism; the U.S. Navy is already in physical possession of Nigeria’s off-shore oilfields in the Gulf of Guinea; its economy, through the OBJ foreignization program, is largely in foreign hands; and the number of political assassinations suggests that Nigeria’s equivalent of Haiti’s Tonton Macoute already is active. OBJ is already taking land from Nigerians and settling on it white, racist Rhodesian farmers expelled from Zimbabwe. He has already instigated a shift of farmland from cassava for local consumption to cassava for export. Predictably, this shortsighted policy will lead to mass starvation like the Irish Potato Famine in the 19^th century. But what country today can welcome 100million starving refugees from Nigeria? The economy is already in ruins. All in all the Haitification of Nigeria is almost completed. The large oil revenue is all that masks the full extent of the economic and social disaster. As for the exodus of desperate Nigerians, it has been on for sometime now: the members of the economically destroyed middle class have been “checking out” to seek employment elsewhere; young women have been escaping to Europe to engage in prostitution; able-bodied young men have been stowing away or paying human trafficking syndicates to smuggle them into Europe. Thus, Nigeria has managed to go very far on the same road, almost reaching, in just 45 years, where it took Haiti 200 years to reach. If OBJnomics persists and gets entrenched, it can’t be long before the exodus of desperate Nigerians reaches Haitian proportions.

   So long as we remain trapped on the