Haiti and the Dilemma of Afrikan Sovereignty in the Americas

Haiti and the Dilemma of Afrikan Sovereignty in the Americas
Wednesday, 07 January 2009
by Ahati N. N. Toure

The Haitian Revolution was but one of many Afrikan rebellions against "European dictatorship" in the Americas. "Afrikan revolutionary struggles convulsed nearly all areas of what was or was to become the United States from 1619 to the end of the American civil war in 1865." Haiti was at one point central to the success of Bolivar's revolution on the mainland of South American. "Haiti posed a strategic threat to North American empire by introducing the specter of spreading Afrikan revolution that could potentially dethrone European settler hegemony not only within itself but throughout the larger Americas."

"Haiti must reclaim its place as an exemplar of Afrikan sovereignty in the history of Afrikan world developments."

Two hundred and four years ago, Afrikan people in the French colonial prison territory called Saint Dominique achieved a great revolution. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), in some sense singular in terms of the magnificence of its success, was merely one in a surfeit of revolutionary struggles Afrikans launched during the better part of four centuries all over the Americas against European totalitarian dictatorship, commonly called slavery.

Unlike other areas of the Americas, however, the Afrikan revolution in Haiti garnered a level of international attention by European states not typical of other Afrikan states created in the Americas. This rare notoriety was due not so much to the idea that the Haitian Revolution wrested from European totalitarianism the first independent Afrikan state created in the Americas, but rather to the fact that European imperialism could not ignore it.

The Afrikan revolutionaries of Haiti decisively and irrevocably defeated three of the most formidable militaries of late 18th and early 19th century Europe-those of France, Britain, and Spain Thus, the imperialist states suffered an open humiliation. The Haitians' effectiveness in permanently neutralizing enslaver efforts to contain the Afrikan quest for sovereignty simply could not be hidden or obscured.

As in Haiti, the revolutionary struggle to restore Afrikan sovereignty all across the Americas-in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean islands-erupted immediately upon embarkation in the Americas because Afrikans were never, in reality, slaves. Rather, they came from areas of West, West Central, Central, Southern, and East Afrika as free and sovereign peoples exiled from their homelands and held captive in European totalitarian dictatorships in the Americas.

Logically, then, as free and sovereign peoples they instantly fought to reinstate what they had known and enjoyed in Afrika. Forcibly brought to, and incarcerated in, Saint Dominique, Jamaica, Brazil, Surinam, Guyana, Panama, St. Vincent, Mexico, the United States, the Danish-controlled Caribbean islands, among numerous other places, they commenced revolutionary struggles wherever they landed, effectively challenging, frustrating, and frequently defeating enslaver military forces so as to restore to themselves their accustomed exercise of personal, collective, and state power.

"The Afrikan revolutionaries of Haiti decisively and irrevocably defeated three of the most formidable militaries of late 18th and early 19th century Europe."

Accordingly, Afrikans enslaved in Mexico City sought to overthrow the Spaniard dictatorship in 1537 by killing the Spanish crown's representative in Mexico, freeing themselves, and replacing the colonial regime "with an African king of their own."

Although Spaniard counterintelligence discovered and repressed this revolutionary effort, numerous other initiatives between 1540 and 1580 succeeded, sometimes involving "substantial cooperation between black and indigenous populations."

Perhaps the most successful revolutionary campaign was led by the redoubtable Yanga, who from 1570 to 1609 governed a sovereign Afrikan state that directly and devastatingly engaged Spaniard military forces from his stronghold in the Orizaba Mountains, eventually defeating them and forcing the Spaniards to sue for peace. Although he had been enslaved in Mexico, Yanga asserted he had been a state ruler in Afrika.

Despite widespread misconceptions regarding conditions in North America, Afrikan revolutionary struggles convulsed nearly all areas of what was or was to become the United States from 1619 to the end of the American civil war in 1865.

Tolagbe Ogunleye, for example, has uncovered that from the mid 1600s through the mid 1800s, Afrikans who escaped to Spaniard-held Florida from plantations in Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana of the United States established for more than 150 years "autonomous African settlements" and "were involved in a formalized Pan-African nationalist movement." They "lived autonomously in Florida, ostensibly using discrete African art forms, traditions, and sensibilities in their modes of communications, rituals, subsistence strategies, and battle plans to attain and sustain freedom and autonomy."

In fact, some members of "these settlements had never been enslaved. They were born, reared, and died at a ripe old age within these communities."

Moreover, these communities successfully resisted North American military forces in their quest to remain sovereign. "For more than a century," she writes, "southern militiamen, mercenaries, and military forces from the United States routinely invaded ... Florida and completely destroyed the self-emancipated Africans' homes, plundered their livestock, and waged war against these Africans and their offspring in an attempt to conquer and reenslave them.

" Although the North Americans never succeeded in reenslaving them, they did manage to treat with them for their removal to the U.S.-controlled Oklahoma territory. This North American achievement came, however, at great cost, both in terms of military expenditures and humiliating defeats. Afrikans had established a formidable military presence in Florida in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and prosecuted a relentless guerrilla war of liberation against North American forces that, in its final phases, lasted for more than four decades.

"Afrikans had established a formidable military presence in Florida in the late 18th and early 19th centuries."

Before its capture by a North American military incursion, Fort Ashila, about 60 miles south of the U.S. border, stood as a symbol of Afrikan military defiance of the enslaver dictatorship.

The British, to spite the North Americans after their withdrawal at the conclusion of the War of 1812, had handed the fort over to Afrikan freedom fighters. According to Ogunleye, when U.S. forces bombed and captured the fort on 27 July 1816, they sent some $200,000 in seized armaments and other materiel to New Orleans, Louisiana, including 2,500 stands of musketry, 500 carbines, 500 steel scabbard swords, four cases containing 200 pairs of pistols, 300 quarter casks of rifle powder, 162 barrels of cannon powder, and other military clothing and supplies.

Revolutionary feeling was at such strength that many Afrikans enslaved in the United States escaped to Florida to join the war of liberation. In addition, the revolutionaries in Florida enlisted enslaved Afrikans in the United States as double agents who led North American military forces into fatal ambushes, supplied North American weapons to the Afrikan liberation army, and provided critical intelligence on North American movements and intentions.

In fact, anthropological and linguistic research by Joseph E. Holloway and Winifred K. Vass reveals that Afrikans enslaved in the United States assessed the North American dictatorship in their own indigenous languages. They gave at least 270 Bantu language names to localities in which they were held captive in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Louisiana. A small sampling of these names include Abita Springs, Louisiana, from a bita, meaning "of handcuffs, manacles"; Ambato, Alabama, from ambata, meaning "lie on top of each other, be piled up, packed on top of the other, bodies crowded together (as in the hold of a slave ship)"; Benaja, North Carolina, from benzaja, meaning "made to work, forced to labor"; Kiowa, Alabama, from kuyowa, meaning "to be famished, weakened with hunger, exhausted"; Lula, Mississippi, from lula, meaning "be bitter, refuse to obey, be refractory"; Tahoka, Texas, from tauka, meaning "be cast off, shed, as leaves off a tree"; and Wataccoo, South Carolina, from wataku, meaning "be naked, without clothing." These names powerfully demonstrate the Afrikan aspiration for sovereignty and their keen awareness of its absence in the United States.

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While the Afrikan struggle for sovereignty met with varying degrees of success throughout the Americas, the assault against Haiti's victorious revolution, which was the immediate reaction of France (its successful extortion of some $30 million in reparations, despite the fact it lost the war, in exchange for diplomatic recognition of the Afrikan state and other exploitative treaty concessions) and the United States (its collaboration with France in initiating, temporarily, an economic embargo against the country and its refusal to extend formal diplomatic recognition until the 1860s), has not been accidental.

Indeed, the United States intensified its war against Afrikan sovereignty in Haiti during the early 20th century-particularly after its 1915 invasion and occupation of the country through to 1934. The successive crises that have weakened the nation since then, including various brazen foreign and foreign-controlled interventions; reigns of police, military, and political terror; economic exploitation, destabilization, and destruction; and environmental devastation, have all been aimed precisely at aborting the viability, integrity, and potentiality of the incontestable triumph of the Afrikan revolution.

To the North American and other European states-beginning in the 19th century-the example of Afrikan sovereignty in the Americas evoked a literal and figurative gnashing of teeth. It proved an abomination, an abhorrent affront to European power and its racialist supremacist pretensions. Haiti, however, also posed a strategic threat to North American empire by introducing the specter of spreading Afrikan revolution that could potentially dethrone European settler hegemony not only within itself but throughout the larger Americas.

"To the North American and other European states, the example of Afrikan sovereignty in the Americas evoked a literal and figurative gnashing of teeth."

Such fear was not farfetched. In addition to its considerable inspiration to renewed Afrikan revolutionary struggle in the United States, as well as to its role in 1824-1825 as a Pan Afrikanist haven for 6,000 to 13,000 non-enslaved Afrikans to escape U.S. totalitarianism and to participate in the economic reconstruction of Afrikan sovereignty, Haiti's historic revolution also supported the Afrikan liberation struggle in Jamaica and extended the achievement of anticolonial revolution and Afrikan freedom to Spaniard imperial territories in South America.

Haitian President Alexandre Petion, in exchange for his considerable support of Simon Bolivar's revolutionary struggle, persuaded the South American leader to abolish the enslavement of Afrikans in the territories (Venezuela, Colombia, including what later became Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) Bolivar liberated from Spain's imperial rule.

What is happening to Haiti, therefore, and what has been happening to Haiti, was and remains to make Haiti an object lesson to all would-be revolutionaries fighting for a sovereign Afrikan present and future. It springs from a determination to expunge the revolution from human memory by rendering the grandeur of its achievement irrelevant.

Haiti's unrelenting torment is informed by nothing less than revenge. It emerges from a resolve to ensure that Afrikans in the Americas never again raise themselves to seriously challenge or destroy the power of the enslavers over their lives.

This explains why Haiti is currently suffering from a 60 percent unemployment rate, why 8 of every 10 Haitians (or approximately 6.4 million of 8 million) live below the poverty level, why more than 3 million Haitians have fled the island nation to escape extreme poverty, violence, and political repression, why life expectancy has fallen below 50 years, and why the infant mortality rate is 80 per 1,000, compared to a mere 7 per 1,000 in the neighboring island of Cuba and 4 per 1,000 in France.

The hemorrhaging under these conditions of the equivalent of $1 million a week to pay an external debt ($58.2 million in 2008 and $50.9 million in 2009) incurred by U.S.-backed or -appointed heads of state who personally enriched themselves and terrorized the people; the imposition of 9,000 UN troops, a foreign army of occupation called MINUSTAH equally guilty of brutalizing and terrorizing the people and of mocking Haiti's independence; the pillaging of the nation's resources by IMF and World Bank policies-all of these are deliberate and predictable outcomes of the 204-year-old war by the United States, France, and their allies against Afrikan sovereignty in Haiti.

Haiti's challenge-not only to defend its sovereignty, but to realize sovereignty's full and feared potential-requires a number of strategic considerations and initiatives. Among them is to make of the serious economic and political crises in the United States an opportunity to reduce its vulnerability to its North American enemy by establishing alternative international relationships that will protect it from continued enslavement.

To accomplish this Haiti must systematically disengage itself from the dynamics of dependency upon global Europe, which includes the United States. A key element of this process would rely upon Haiti's participation in progressive trends in the Americas, specifically Venezuela President Hugo Chavez's call to create and finance an alternative international economic and political block, alternative international trade and treaty relations, and alternative international financing mechanisms and institutions in the Americas as a counterforce to North American overlordship.

"Haiti must systematically disengage itself from the dynamics of dependency upon global Europe, which includes the United States."

Any new Haitian strategic approach must also include jettisoning U.S. cultural influences (especially with respect to European political theory, political structures, and political economy) in defining and constructing the Haitian state. The urgency of this cannot be overstressed.

Instead, Haitian intellectuals and authorities must creatively and paradigmatically reformulate the state, society, and economy along the lines of its own peculiar needs, interests, culture, and experience by drawing from the best of Haiti's and global Afrika's own historic initiatives in concert with Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, Cuba's social achievements, and Bolivia's spirit of integrating the indigenous people's culture into a revivified sense of nation. In fact, Haiti should look increasingly to the cultivation of the genius of its people as an indispensable element in the nation's liberation.

Training in all areas of expertise critical to the vital functioning of the nation should come not merely from the flourishing and proliferation of indigenous Haitian institutions, but also from sending out Haitians to be trained in partner nations in the Americas that have similarly committed themselves to the systematic study and elimination of North American hegemony.

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Further, the U.S. and French kidnapping of former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, to whom South Africa extended political asylum, may provide an invaluable opportunity to advance the economic viability of Haitian sovereignty through strengthened diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations with southern Afrika. The benefits could redound to Haiti's need to ensure the training of its people in areas critical to its economic development, including engineering, agriculture, veterinary medicine, mining, manufacturing, bureaucratic management, technological research and development, and related technical expertise, as well as the institutionalization of these capacities. It could also lead to expanding and diversifying markets for Haitian goods and services in the Afrikan continent.

Finally, on the level of culture, Haiti must reclaim its place as an exemplar of Afrikan sovereignty in the history of Afrikan world developments. As a diplomatic strategy, it must embrace Pan Afrikanism genuinely, not cynically, seeing this ethos of Afrikan kinship not merely as an element of its foreign policy, but also as a cultural extension and reenvisioning of its nationalism.

Haiti's authentic engagement in the burgeoning trends in Pan Afrikanist movement of the Americas and of global Afrika will yield access to Afrikan cultural and intellectual currents which liberating potential remains, as yet, virtually untapped. It would also serve as one way of mobilizing the sentiments and contributions of multiple millions of Afrikan people throughout the Americas, Afrika, Europe, and Asia to its defense against recurring threats to its sovereignty.

Properly understood, the potential economic, cultural, intellectual, and political benefits to Haiti are incalculable.


Ahati N. N. Toure is Assistant Professor of Africana History and Black Studies at Delaware State University in the United States.
He has written several articles treating various aspects of Africana history and culture in the United States and Afrika. Perhaps his best known essay is "Reflections on Paradigms in Power: Imperialism and Americanization as a Modal Relationship Explaining the Treatment of Afrikans in the United States During and After Hurricane Katrina," Thurgood Marshall Law Review 31, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 427-462.

He is also author of John Henrik Clarke and the Power of Africana History:
Africalogical Quest for Decolonization and Sovereignty (Africa World Press, 2009).
He can be contacted by writing to ilcinfo@earthlink.netThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it



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"Most commonly by dictatorship is meant the type of authority characterized by at least some of the following features:
(a) Lack of laws or customs in virtue of which the ruler (or rulers) could be called upon to account for their actions or [be] removed;
(b) lack of limitations on the scope of authority;
(c) acquisition of supreme authority by contravention of pre-existing laws; ...
(e) use of authority for a restricted group only;
(f) obedience of the subjects being due solely to fear; ...
(h) employment of terror."

In addition, "Totalitarianism is the extension of permanent governmental control over the totality of social life.

A movement or an ideology may be called totalitarian if it advocates such an extension." See Julius Gould and William L. Kolb, ed., A Dictionary of the Social Sciences (New York: UNESCO and The Free Press, 1964), 198, 719.

[ii] The revolutionaries also defeated the French colonial forces of Saint Dominique, destroying four European militaries in all.

[iii] Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 29.

[iv] See, among others, John Henrik Clarke, "African Cultural Response to Slavery and Oppression in the Americas and the Caribbean," in African Presence in the Americas, eds. Tanya R. Saunders and Shawna Moore (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995), 73-95; John Henrik Clarke, "Pan-Africanism: A Brief History of an Idea in the African World," Presence Africaine no. 145 (1st Quarterly 1988): 26-56; Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, ed., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); N. A. T. Hall, "Maritime Maroons: ‘Grand Marronage' from the Danish West Indies," William and Mary Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 1985): 476-498; Barbara Klamon Kopytoff, "Colonial Treaty as Sacred Charter of the Jamaican Maroons," Ethnohistory 26, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 45-64; James D. Lockett, "The Deportation of the Maroons of Trelawny Town to Nova Scotia, then Back to Africa," Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 1 (September 1999): 5-14; R. K. Kent, "Palmares: An African State in Brazil," Journal of African History 6, no. 2 (1965): 161-175; Irene Diggs, "Zumbi and the Republic of Os Palmares," Phylon 14, no. 1 (1st Quarter 1953): 62-70; Ernesto Ennes, "The Palmares ‘Republic' of Pernambuco Its Final Destruction, 1697," The Americas 5, no. 2 (October 1948): 200-216; Leonard Goines, "Africanisms among the Bush Negroes of Surinam," The Black Perspective in Music 3, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 40-44; Robert Nelson Anderson, "The Quilombo of Palmares: A New Overview of a Maroon State in Seventeenth-Century Brazil," Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 3 (October 1996): 545-566; Berta E. Pérez, "The Journey to Freedom: Maroon Forebears in Southern Venezuela," Ethnohistory 47, no. 3-4 (Summer 2000): 611-634; Barbara Klamon Kopytoff, "The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies," William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (April 1978): 287-307; Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Mavis Christine Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988); Richard Price, The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Silvia W. de. Groot, From Isolation Towards Integration: The Surinam Maroons and Their Colonial Rulers: Official Documents Relating to the Djukas, 1845-1863 (The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1977); Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2006).


[v] Ben Vinson III, "Fading From Memory: Historiographical Reflections on the Afro-Mexican Presence," Review of Black Political Economy 33, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 59.

[vi] Vinson, 59-60; Sagrario Cruz-Carretero, "Yanga and the Black Origins of Mexico," Review of Black Political Economy 33, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 75. Vinson says the Spaniards discovered an effort in 1611 by Afrikans to again overthrow their dictatorship and establish their own sovereign rule.


[vii] Tolagbe Ogunleye, "The Self-Emancipated Africans of Florida: Pan-African Nationalists in the ‘New World,'" Journal of Black Studies 27, no. 1 (September 1996): 24, 25, 26.

[viii] Tolagbe M. Ogunleye, "Aroko, Mmomomme Twe, Nsibidi, Ogede, and Tusona: Africanisms in Florida's Self-Emancipated Africans' Resistance to Enslavement and War Stratagems," Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 3 (January 2006): 397.


[ix] Ogunleye, "Self-Emancipated Africans," 26.


[x] Ogunleye, 32.

[xi] While the North Americans called it Fort Negro, Afrikans called it Fort Ashila. Ogunleye indicates the word ashila is a Bantu verb that means to build or construct a house for someone else. The North American term, on the other hand, is a tacit admission of the formidable character of Afrikan military resistance to North American imperialism. See Yvonne Tolagbe Ogunleye, "An African Centered Historical Analysis of the Self-Emancipated Africans of Florida, 1738 to 1838" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1995), 278.


[xii] Ogunleye, "An African Centered Historical Analysis," 1995), 285. For more extensive discussion of the Afrikan war of liberation, see her discussion on pages 260-352.


[xiii] Ogunleye, 314.


[xiv] Ogunleye, 333-335.


[xv] That Afrikans enslaved in the United States spoke their indigenous languages is well established by a number of scholars. Among them is Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 154-185. See also the pioneering work by Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949) in addition to Winifred Kellersberger Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1979).


[xvi] Joseph E. Holloway and Winifred K. Vass, The African Heritage of American English (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 107, 123-127, 131-132, 134-135.


[xvii] Segun Shabaka, "An Afrocentric Analysis of the 19th Century African American Migration to Haiti: A Quest for the Self-Determining Community" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2001), 16-19, 21-24.


[xviii] As an example, see Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 141-142. "As for the negro, he has proved as incapable in the New World as in the Old. Everywhere his presence has spelled regression, and his one New World field of triumph-Haiti-has resulted in an abysmal plunge to the jungle-level of Guinea and the Congo."


[xix] For example, American imperialists in 1854-among them former U.S. Secretary of State James Buchanan, soon to become president-argued the U.S. colonization of Cuba was an imperative of the regime's national security interests. Their concern for national security was directly related to the prospect of Afrikan revolution in the United States; the imperialists feared that Cuba, like Haiti, would become another Afrikan-ruled republic that would strengthen the Afrikan revolutionary struggle that raged, or that simmered just below the surface, in various parts of the United States. "We should ... be recreant in our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity," they declared, "should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo [Haiti], with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually consume the fair fabric of our Union." Indeed, they concluded, "We fear that the course and current of events are rapidly tending towards such a catastrophe." (emphasis added) See "The Ostend Manifesto, October 18, 1854" in American Foreign Policy: A Documentary Survey, 1776-1960, ed. Dorothy Burne Goebel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 97.


[xx] Among others, see Walter C. Rucker, "‘I Will Gather All Nations': Resistance, Culture, and Pan-African Collaboration in Denmark Vesey's South Carolina." Journal of Negro History 86, no. 2. (Spring, 2001): 132-147; James Theodore Holly, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government, and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by Historical Events of the Haitian Revolution; and the Subsequent Acts of That People Since Their National Independence in Black Separatism and the Caribbean 1860 by James Theodore Holly and J. Dennis Harris, ed. Howard H. Bell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970); William Wells Brown, The Rising Sun; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston: A.G. Brown and Company, Publishers, 1874), 140-242. See also Shabaka, "An Afrocentric Analysis," for a discussion of the 1824-1825 Afrikan immigration from the United States to Haiti.


[xxi] See Dubois and Garrigus, ed., Slave Revolution, 191; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 303; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 411; Dantes Bellegarde, "President Alexandre Petion," Phylon 2, no. 3 (3rd Quarter 1941): 205-213; John Edward Baur, "Mulatto Machiavelli, Jean Pierre Boyer, and The Haiti of His Day," Journal of Negro History 32, no. 3 (July 1947): 307-353; Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, "Leadership in the African Diaspora in the Americas Prior to 1860," Journal of Black Studies 24, no. 1 (September 1993): 45-46; Shabaka, "An Afrocentric Analysis," 15-16.


[xxii] Rosa Clemente, Colia Clark, Ed Rosario, Alberto Dos Santos, letter to UN Secretary General and to Governments with MINUSTAH Forces in Haiti, 10 October, 2008; Unions, Political and Grassroots Organizations in Haiti, open letter to Barack Obama, 31 October 2008; Association of Workers and People of the Caribbean (ATPC), "Appeal for the Third Caribbean Conference December 12-13, 2008 in Port au Prince, Haiti," no date; Fignole Saint-Cyr, letter to organizations and friends, 28 October 2008; Statement of CATH (Centrale Autonome des Travailleurs Haïtiens) by Fignole Saint-Cyr, 28 October 2008 (in French). See also "How IMF, World Bank, Failed Africa," Part 1. New African (January 2007): 14-16; "The Case Against IMF, World Bank," Part 2. New African (January 2007): 18-22.

Comments (2)Subscribe to this comment's feed
haitians in miami..
written by christianslayer1955 , January 07, 2009

Today,the descendants of the brave Afrikans who fought for the liberty of Haiti,who are living in Miami, for the most part, have returned into another form of slavery....It is a shame to see a people who came from such fierce pride reduced to washing dishes,cooking in restaurants and watching over old white folks...To make matters worse,they explain everything away with the use of european superstitious beliefs(christianity)...The prevailing attitude is that god is punishing their fellow haitians for being descendants of Africans.I have even heard educated Haitians say that Haiti's present state is to blame on the Afrikans who used Afrikan rituals(voodoo) for guidance during the revolution....This whole world just does not make sense to me any more


Breaking true the veil
written by sankofa , January 07, 2009

Brother Christianslayer1955, what you site is not new or unique to Haiti and her children. once the Caucasian man implemented the practice of social creationism, by manufacturing a knee-grow construct out of African men and women, you will have these kind of thinking.

the brother professor wrote a nice article, but his call for Haiti and all Africans to re adjust their knee-growness, is a difficult one. How can you teach a blind man to see? Especially if he believes that nothng is wrong with his sight? I am glad brother Toure put the actions of this criminal psychopath and his bastard off springs in perspective and how it is affecting what should have been a beacon of African liberation over European assualt.

Bon bagay Sasaye,

Se minisyon wi pwa lou entelektyèl sa yo ap anpile ,pou ede nou konfwonte machann peyi ayisyen yo.

Gran panafrikanis brezilyen an ,ABDIAS DA NASCIMENTO te ekri yon tèks paralèl ,pou montre enpòtans Ayiti lan panafrikanism lan Amerik lan.
Misye te ekri sa ,sa gen yon trantèn lanne konsa.
Kou mwen gen liv misye an sou men ,m ap repwodwi yon pati enteresan lan kòzman misye an.

Mwen kwè kou OBAMA prete sèman ,presyon pral lan dengonn li pou zafè Ayiti an regle!

Jowèl,
Mèsi pou reyaksyon w sou tèks saa.
Mwen tap tann ou.
Mwen te konnen ke to ou ta, ou tap li tèks saa epi bay yon opinyon.

Monchè, mwen pa kwè mwen lan milye ki kapab reyèlman etidye e analize istwa ak mach a swiv pèp ayisyen an, an kolaborasyon avèk lòt pèp ki gen menm istwa ak kilti ke nou.

Pou soti lan sitiyasyon nò/sid ke nou ye e pran plas nou lan yon monn ki pare pou resevwa e aksepte valè nou.

Pou ayisyen rekonèt ke nou gen valè pa n san nou pa bezwen èd mantal pou nou devlope peyi nou.

Men sa m wè deplizanpli, gen de konsèp ki pa enterese la plipa patisipan sou fowom saa.

Si w pa lan voye monte pou tèl ou tèl pati oubyen tèl ou tèl figi politik, lanpwen oken diskisyon serye ki ap fèt.

Keseswa sou resous, istwa Ayiti, plan developman, pwojè pou avansman, enfrastrikti, art, mizik, penti, kwizinn... tout pase san oken enterè.

Kom senp ekzanp: konbyen nèg, apa oumenm, janm reyaji sou editoryal John Maxwell ki pi gwo defansè Ayiti ak Ayisyen?

Apa kèk ekseptyon ki trè ra.

Sa grav nèt ak moun lawn peyi m yo.

Sasaye,

Mesye sa yo ki lan "Afrikana studies" lan gwo Inivèsite Ameriken yo ap fè anpil rechèch enteresan.
HENRY LOUIS GATES ki an chaj Afrikana lan Inivèsite Princeton louvri yon disiplin ki rele "African Philosophy".
mosye di jan zansèt yo te wè mond lan merute pou etidye menm jan ak filozòf Ewopeyen yo;e yo jwenn travay filozòf afriken lan Timbouktou ,Gao ak Jenna lan lang Arab.

Mwen te wè tou papye yon pwofesè ki se yon espesyalis sou panse DESSALINES ekri ,men papye yo se pou w manm "think tank" pou w aksede yo.

E gade tou ,jan pwofesè TOURE ap pase moun ki di se paske Ayisyen pratike Vodou e pa relijyon Ewopeyen yo ,lan betiz.

Tankou pwofesè an di l ,se lè nou aksepte sa nou ye e zòt pa siperyè nou lan anyen,ke nou ap asime nou.

Se sa brezilyen Dr Da Nascimento te afime tou.
Abdias Da Nascimento se te yon akademik e misye se te yon politisyen tou.
Lan ane 80s yo,misye se te sèl Senatè Nwa lan Sena Brezilyen an

Jowl, se sa mwen ta renmen konpatriyot yo ekzamine pou chanje mantalite kolonize ke nou genyen jiskounyea.

Lè na rekonèt ke genyen valè entrensek ki lan kilti nou ki gen menm enpotans ke lan kilti blan an, lè saa na gen plis respè pou valè pa nou. (sendrom vyolon lan men blan).
Youn lan konsekans mank respè pou kilti ak tradisyon lakay fè yon ayisyen aksepte tou sa ki soti lan peyi etranje e li pa rekonèt sa ki fèt lakay li.
Se sak fè gen de lè li pa rekonèt lè yap manke l dega.

En prensip travay saa te komanse avèk Price-Mars, men li pat janm kontinye paske mouvman endijenis lan te pèdi pye lè okipasyon meriken li tap konbat la ale.

Lè saa yon lòt van te vin soufle ki te fè ayisyen rapwoche yo plis de la Frans. Te gen yon pakèt ansansman lè filozof franse yo te rele Breton an te vinn an Ayiti, lan ane karant yo.

Entelektyel ayisyen tankou Roussan Camille te idol entelektyel kiben yo, lan ane senkant yo, menmjan ak
G. Garcia-Marques.

kite m retounen sou ABDIAS DA NASCIMENTO.Se yon neve m ki ban mwen liv misye an.
Neve m lan pou m di n pi fanatik ke yon nèg tankou JAF (LOL) e misye lan mid-senkantèn li.

NASCIMENTO se yon akademik (misye vivan toujou) ,misye te fèt an 1914-
Misye te pwofesè lan Inivèsite Leta Nouyòk,lan Wesleyan Inivèsite lan Inivèsite Ife lan Nijerya.
Kounye an misye se prezidan yon Enstiti sou rechèch Afriken lan Brezil.

A la papòt ,misye site yon revolisyonè Brezilyen (lan lit kont esklavaj) ki te rele LUIS GAMA.

The slave that kills his master practices an act of legitime self-defense
Nou li sa malpwopte ki ap di Dessalines se te asasen yo?

E lan optik NASCIMENTO ,Brezil genyen yon gwo wòl pou l jwe lan emansipasyon ap egalite tout bon pou tout nwa ,premyèman lan Amerik lan e pa extansyon tout nwa sou la tè.
Wòl ke Etazini jwe pou sipremasi blanch lan ,brezilyen yo ki dezyèm pi gwo popilasyon nwa lan mond lan apre Nijerya ,genyen kapasite pou l jwe l ,apre ke nwa Brezilyen yo konnen kilès yo ye e yo pran pouvwa a lan Brezil.

Sou potansyèl "panafrikanism" e misye devlope lide sa a sou tout pwen ,osi byen ke teknoloji ak syans:

All strategy,every struggle,presupposes a very clear ideology,if the actions resulting from it,from the unity of the dream,are not to be sabotaged or destroyed along the arduous road to reality,and if struggle is to be possible among brothers.

It is clear then that the building of transcultural mechanisms in the heart of the Pan-African community is the fundamental step which will garantee the realization of Pan-Africanism.
Future steps on the pragmatic path,must search for means of emphasizing and developing Pan-African culture,rather than promote Black-Brazilian,Yoruba,HAITIAN ,or any single culture.

The notion of self-reliance is implicit in the unfolding of this process.This goal of necessary unity requires us to traverse the long road of self-emancipation in our singular capacities.We must immediately begin to recognize our dependence upon ourselves,explore our potential strength,study and know our circumstances,control our energies and resources--these are the ways in which we will be able to systematically build our own unity"
(Brezil,Mixture or Massacre-Essays in the genocide of a Black People;PAJ 48)
(
Pou m fini NASCIMENTO genyen menm opinyon ak FREDERICK DOUGLASS ki te di pa vin pale l de WOM ou byen la GRES;pou mesye sayo se AYITI ki manman libète.[i]