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Haiti: Reflections on a revolution in historicaland contemporary perspectivesFrancis KornegayPublished online: 10 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Francis Kornegay (2008) Haiti: Reflections on a revolution in historical and contemporaryperspectives, International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, 3:1,113-117, DOI: 10.1080/18186870802321632

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BOOK REVIEW

International Journal of African Renaissance StudiesVol. 3 (1) 2008

pp.113-117

ISSN (Print) 1818-6874ISSN (Online) 1753-7274© University of South Africa PressDOI: 10.1080/18186870802321632

Francis KornegayCentre for Policy ResearchJohannesburg, South Africafrancis@cps.org.za

, by Peter Hallward, Verso, 2008. 442pp.

, by Madison Smartt Bell, Pantheon Books, 2007. 333pp.

Haiti, only the second country to gain its independence in the Western hemisphere at the turn of the nineteenth century, remains to this day the most enigmatic of mysteries in the political history of the Americas – and this, in spite of its central place in this early history of the hemisphere. Perhaps this can be understood as Haiti having been something of a proverbial ‘nigger in the woodpile’ in the transatlantic Age of Revolution whose fate was intimately – and inconveniently – intertwined with that of the thirteen young, post-revolutionary former colonies on the American mainland to its north and, across the Atlantic, to the French revolution which triggered the beginning of Saint Domingue’s traumatic transformation into Haiti. In a very real sense, the case of Haiti is also a case of ‘victor’s history’ written from the vantage point of the dominant socio-racial and class forces that came to dominate the political, economic and cultural relations of the Euro-American transatlantic, with particular reference to the early post-colonial United States (US) – conceived in birth as ‘half slave, half free’ – and post-revolutionary France. And

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114 Francis Kornegay

yet, much of transatlantic and inter-American history is only dimly understood in the absence of an in-depth understanding of the black revolution on Saint Domingue and how Franco-American collusion strangled it in its crib, and how this crib-death has resonated down through the ages in distorting and stunting Haiti’s national development

Haiti’s slave insurrection was an unwelcome departure from the script of Franco-American democratic transformation which was not intended for the benighted ‘black race’ who were consigned to being ‘beasts of burden’ in the transatlantic plantation-based political economy and ‘the world the slaveholders made’ – from the southern former colonies of the American mainland, on down throughout the Anglo-French-Spanish Caribbean basin of which Saint Domingue was the ‘crown jewel’, into the southern mainland of Iberian America shared by Portugal as well as Spain. Besides Saint Domingue, this revolutionary-challenged colonial geography brought into play the slave-holdings of Jamaica and Cuba impinging on the security interests of the metropoles – and on that of America’s southern slavocracy. This contradiction would ultimately lead to the Haitian successor republic to the former Saint Domingue becoming the hemisphere’s

the colonial powers led by the US and France, followed by its transformation into the

of African independence. The idea behind this ruthlessness was the Franco-American and wider European colonial security interest in containing the Haitian revolution’s resonance within the slavocracies of the antebellum American South, and elsewhere throughout the Caribbean. Herein, therefore, lay the early nineteenth-century roots of American and general Western foreign policy responses to the Third World anti-colonial

the Cuban revolution of 1959 would epitomise and, like revolutionary Haiti, inspire a similar ruthlessness in an attempt at isolation and containment.

This background sets the stage for Peter Hallward’s comprehensive study of Haiti’s contemporary predicament revolving around the turbulent political career of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide as Haiti’s off-and-on head of state interacting with American and French diplomatic agendas vis-à-vis one another, as well as with regard to Haiti and the Caribbean. The problem, however, is establishing the historical link between Haiti’s current predicament (as laid out by Hallward) and the antecedents of today’s politics in the complicated socio-racial class dynamics which animated the Haitian revolution and

when it comes to what Hallward depicts as the Franco-American-backed elite compulsions to dominate Haiti’s political and economic agenda residing in a collection of social

industrialists, professionals, intellectuals, academics and journalists – how do they relate to the old colonial racial–class/caste structure which confronted Toussaint with a very complicated terrain for managing while balancing an equally challenging diplomacy

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involving France, the US, Britain and Spain? And how did, in class terms, the beheading of the revolution in Toussaint’s capture set Haiti upon the ill-fated historical course it has pursued up to the present, under its current peacekeeping occupation by MINUSTAH,

among between blacks and whites, complicated further by a buffering mulatto-cum-coloured ‘middle class’ or by Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon, 2007) is particularly informative in surveying this terrain and how it interacted in the unfolding of the revolution on Saint Domingue. Toussaint, himself an had to navigate intra-black class differences between established black freedmen like himself and the so-called and masses of black slaves and peasants who, in turn, were further broken down into creolised slaves born on Saint

structure were the loyalists to the monarchy and the sympathisers

among blacks and coloureds. The type of authoritarian presidency that Toussaint would have wanted to install (and

which was actually contemplated in the young American republic on the mainland) as

republic, was not to be with his demise. And, as seems clear from Bell’s account, Toussaint was in class of his own in being able to manage and navigate these inter- and intra-racial

historical evolution of Haiti’s complicated socio-racial class structure into its current socio-political terrain at the root of the country’s endemic instability and chronic vulnerability to

history is much too brief (in summarised form) to shed any light on how the island’s socio-racial class dynamics inform the turbulence of the Aristide era, resulting in the

politics of containment’ says it all in terms of the historical and contemporary continuity,

transatlantic power politics of the US and France. Here, represents

up,Haiti’s post-Duvalierist status quo; one that stood America’s Cold War regional interests in the Caribbean in good stead as a bulwark against the kind of anti-imperialist nationalist radicalism epitomised by Cuban Fidelismo and later transformative bids such as that of

intervention under the Ronald Reagan administration. Clearly, Washington’s prevention of yet another revolutionary regime coming to power

in the Caribbean, alongside its Cuban nemesis, seems reason enough for the manner in which both Democratic as well as Republican Party administrations have sought to contain and stir political developments in Haiti. This is made all the more apparent

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116 Francis Kornegay

by the rise of Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian revolutionary bid in Venezuela and the

and, indeed, to prevent its post-coup electoral victory in 2006. Hallward’s authoritative account chronicles this saga, which is as much about the political trials and tribulations

Toussaint. The problem is that Haiti seems far from escaping the burdens of its unfortunate history as the step-child of the transatlantic Age of Revolution. If the Democratic Clinton administration was ambivalent about Aristide – in spite of Congressional Black Caucus support via former D.C. Delegate Walter Fauntroy – to the point of hobbling his regime

under the black face of Secretary of State Colin Powell, was openly hostile. The failure of the anti-Chavista coup in Venezuela was not to be replicated in Haiti, as all options

to Aristide’s abduction and banishment to the Central African Republic toward the end of February 2004. Apart from the Bush administration’s hostility, Aristide’s sin in the eyes of Washington’s nemesis on Iraq, French President Jacques Chirac, stemmed from

modest amount of annual interest which amounted to $21 billion. This is said to have clearly rankled the Chirac government, which also had its hands full with the implosion of its west African jewel in Côte d’Ivoire, for which it also needed US support in the UN Security Council (where France had brought Washington up short on Iraq).

imposed on Haiti as the price for France’s recognition – a vindictive burden which arguably has to feature as a chief factor in Haiti’s post-independence underdevelopment

of the World Conference on Racism and Xenophobia (WCAR) and its upcoming review conference in 2009, French reparations to Haiti on the basis of this debt imposed on it

An intriguing question that begins to surface as another US presidential election cycle

promised opening to the successor Castro regime of Raul Castro will be accompanied by

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This is by no means an inconsequential question, in as much as Washington has lost

fact that any continuation of a posture of containment or consideration of a ‘rollback’ strategy regarding Hugo Chavez’s Bolivian diplomacy will only further alienate the rest of the Americas from the US, as South America, in particular, further consolidates its regional identity under Unasur (the South American Union of Nations). Thus far, apart

former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the current incumbent, Condoleezza Rice, has not given much reason for hope.

Franco-American narrative contained in the report to the UN on Haiti comes under question as well. Hence, beyond Bell’s biography of Toussaint, and Hallward’s biography of the politics of containment surrounding Aristide, there is yet another chapter to be written in Haiti’s troubled history as a nation and in its relations with its giant neighbour to the north. And here, it is instructive to ponder the ‘what ifs’ and ‘what might have beens’ in appreciating the historical legacy of America’s indebtedness to the success of the abolitionist social revolution heading to Haiti’s independence. In comparative terms, Haiti’s anti-slave rebellion turned out to be more of an authentic revolution in overturning a socio-racial class order than the American independence war. The latter, in real terms, was an essentially transatlantic English civil war featuring a ‘unilateral declaration of independence’ for white male settler-propertied liberation against the British crown. More than that, Haiti’s black revolution proved pivotal in shaping the geopolitical and cultural

Napoleon had chosen to accommodate Toussaint’s bid for an autonomous self-governing

had succeeded in his military conquest? Either way, a much different scenario would have unfolded on an American mainland divided between American and French spheres of

and the future of its plantation-slave economy. Thus, does American history and the inter-American history of the Caribbean need to be thoroughly revisited in understanding the contemporary dynamics of this region and the role played by Haiti in shaping it, as well as why Haiti has remained a political backwater as it struggles to overcome a legacy that, in different ways, the books by Bell and Hallward so authoritatively chronicle. Perhaps a future work combining the historical and contemporary perspectives of both works will answer some of these pregnant questions while, in the meantime, American policy

the disastrous consequences of containment.

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