by Cilas Kemedjio
I was struck by the massive presence of NGOs in Haiti. Shortly after the 2010 earthquake, Former Alaskan Governor and US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin visited Haiti with a delegation of preacher Franklin Graham’s charity Samaritan Purse. Hollywood’s power couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also visited, and donated $1 million for relief work. Beyoncé visited to take stock of the progress made in the rebuilding effort.
Sean Penn stayed in Haiti for months after the earthquake. He co-founded the J/P Relief Organization in 2010 in response to the earthquake and has visited several times since. Yele Haiti, the humanitarian foundation set up by Haitian-born Hip-Hop star Wyclef Jean, came under intense scrutiny at the time of the quake for what some perceived as his less than ethical management of the foundation. On the plane to and from Haiti, I noticed that an incredible number of passengers, identifiable with the logos on their t-shirts, were associated with Christian churches or charities. During a walk in Port-au-Prince, I stumbled on this massive humanitarian presence in Haiti. One sign read “Aide humanitaire et protection civile (humanitarian assistance and civil protection”, with a European Union flag indicating who was sponsoring the effort. Next was a small structure wrapped with USAID wallpaper and this unmistaken reminder: “From the American People”. On the same wallpaper, one could see the logo of GOAL, an Irish NGO dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor. If these charitable organizations cannot lead to paradise, there’s always the ubiquitous counter selling lottery tickets, even on Sunday morning. And if gambling cannot open the gates of happiness, there’s faith, there’s God as illustrated by the many churches I saw during my morning walk in this popular neighborhood. After witnessing all this misery, I came to the conclusion that writing about Haiti would be an exercise in futility because writing would never catch up with what late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call the misery of the world. Then Akosua insisted that I must write. I almost told her that it was impossible, then I waited and was finally able to see the wisdom of her intimation, or rather of her executive suggestion. I dedicate these notes to Akosua.
The founding act of the Haitian nation set itself radically against slave trade and slavery. The founding act of the Haitian nation–victory over an imperial colonial army–showed that the former slaves were indicating their intention of bursting onto the world scene on their own terms. Rastafarians refer to the Haitian Revolution of 1804 as the “Haitian awakening.” The triumphant insurrection represents the foundational act of the “African redemption” that is at work in the intellectual traditions and practices of Panafricanism.
“Haiti is the moral conscience of the Black World,” according to one participant at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Caribbean Studies Association that just took place in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Angela Davis, the iconic Black Power activist with her signature Afro, was one of the keynote speakers at the conference. Outgoing Caribbean Studies Association President Carol Boyce-Davies reported that Angela Davis, after visiting the Citadel in Cap Haïtien, suggested that sites of resistance such as the Citadel, and not only sites of mourning, should also be promoted in the remembering of the great story of Panafricanism. King Henry Christophe, Haitian revolutionary hero and monarch of the secessionist northern region, erected the Citadel to protect against potential imperial invasions. The Citadel reminds us of the glorious Haitian Revolution. This imposing structure also invites us to reflect on the reasons that may help explain the broken promises of the 1804 revolution. Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat delivers an emotionally charged closing lecture and reading. She unsuccessfully fought back tears when evoking the fate of the more than 200,000 Haitians made stateless by a 2013 ruling of the Dominican Republic Supreme Court. These Haitians are hunted down, persecuted, and deported. Danticat’s tears reminded me of her novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), where she tells the stories of Haitians hunted down and slaughtered by General Rafael Trujillo in 1937.
Since its birth in 1804, the State of Haiti has always been suspect in the eyes of the international community. When in 1801 the Haitians proclaim an anti-slavery constitution, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, while branding Toussaint Louverture and his army as cannibals, spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to stop any flow of information between Haiti and the United States. According to the authors of Africans in America, America’s Journey through Slavery (1999), Jefferson considered the Haitian revolution as an “act of banditry and its leaders as nothing more or less than ‘property that has illegally seized a freedom it does not deserve.” For Jefferson and his fellow American slave owners, Haiti’s proximity ignites the fear of a contamination of their own plantations by the freedom virus coming from Haiti–the dangerous Haitian precedent could have percussions in Virginia, Carolina, or even Georgia. The appointment of Theobald Wedgwood as Consul of the United States in Haiti played into the strategy of misunderstanding of the nascent State of Haiti. In effect, counter to diplomatic protocol, the Consul did not carry Jefferson’s personal letter to Toussaint Louverture. However, despite his diplomatic status, Jefferson’s Consul invited him to reconsider his position: “I daresay, it would have helped matters considerably if you had, in fact, written such a letter, though I understand your refusal to acknowledge in any way whatsoever (or treat as an equal head of state) St. Domingue’s governor-general and the bloody Revolution he and his cohorts Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe have created on what was once the richest European colonial possession.”
Jefferson’s strategy underlines the web of solidarities meant to maintain the slaveholding system, as witnessed by his project to help Bonaparte re-establish French control and slavery in Haiti. Late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Raplh Trouillot, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) remarks that the United States was finally to recognize Haiti’s independence “almost sixty years after the fact, in 1862, when the Civil War created an unexpected need for cotton and silenced the South in Washington.” The American occupation (1915-1934) marked the high point of American expansionism, whereas unconditional support for Duvalier’s dictatorship (1959-1971) was aimed at securing an intensely anti-Communist bastion. The second American military occupation in 1994, operated under the guise of restoring the democratic regime by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, contributed neither to establishing the credibility of the Haitian State nor to favoring the emergence of a more dynamic civil society. The United States has been busy appointing and removing Haitian presidents, from the infamous kidnapping and deportation of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Central African Republican aboard a slaver plane to the imposition of entertainer Jean Martelly after the 2010 earthquake. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck reveals in Assistance mortelle (Fatal Assistance 2013), a documentary on the humanitarian intervention after the January 12, 2010 earthquake, that the so-called international community attempted to remove and deport then President Preval, who was not even running for reelection.
In 1825, French monarch Charles X imposed an indemnity of 150 million francs (or roughly $21 billion in today’s estimates) on Haiti as a condition of its recognition. France justified this extortion–15% of the annual budget of France at the time–at gunpoint by the need to compensate former French slave owners for the loss of their plantations in the Haitian Revolution. Germany and Great Britain were to follow this French model and, through clamorous demonstrations of force, impose similar conditions upon Haiti. Haiti was thus integrated into international commerce upon the conditions of former slaveholders who withheld from her privileges generally attached to political sovereignty. In Fanonian terms, it can be argued that the Haitian revolution was a means to put an end to the History of Slavery and to inaugurate the History of the Haitian nation. The massive extortion imposed by France was thus a reversal of that move meant to re-establish slaves as subjects of their own history. The indemnity was a negation of the spirit of the Haitian Revolution, but it was to organize Haiti’s entry into the international financial arena by means of a manufactured debt.
The failure of the predator and dependent Haitian State to provide a basic social citizenship to Haitians led to a growing network of (foreign) nongovernmental associations. The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations in Haiti is marked by periods that all correspond to significant moments in the State’s decline. In 1860, the signing of the Concordance between the Haitian State and the Roman Catholic Church led to the implantation of European religious congregations in the education and health sectors. Cooperation with these religious can be read as a compensation for the void created by the absence of political cooperation between the young Haitian State and the international community. In the 1950s, the proliferation of Protestant denominations was followed by a multiplication of nongovernmental organizations linked to North American Protestant churches.
In the 1970s, through the impetus of the World Bank, a new doctrine in the so-called war on poverty privileged human development to the detriment of State-Building. If we add to this change the intensification in the campaign against the Duvalierist dictatorship, the symbol of a suspect, corrupt, and incompetent State, the nongovernmental organizations became the principal conduit in the distribution of aid. On February 7, 1986, the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier was followed by the large-scale return of exiles, among whom were numerous university professors, professionals, and business people. The returnees became engaged in the creation of associations for the defense of human rights, research and training centers devoted to development. These humanitarian undertakings led to a new increase in nongovernmental organizations. In the 1990s, thousands of Haitians use freedom boats to escape the nightmare of their country and to head for the American dream. The shipwrecks on the high seas brought about losses of human life that turned the tide of global public opinion. The closing of American borders saw an intensification of action on the part of numerous North American NGOs and the arrival of new NGOs. With the “American dream” inaccessible, NGOs were delegated to bring the much-desired Paradise into the Haitian countryside.
I attended a session at the 41st Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association that is meeting at Port-au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti. The session articulates the uneasy dynamics that may bring questions of debt, disaster, and development in the same debate. This was for me the opportunity to attend the screening of two powerful films on Haiti and Jamaica. Haitian Filmmaker Arnold Antonin’s Haïti: chronique d’une catastrophe annoncée (Haiti: chronicle of a disaster foretold), Apocalypse now (2010) is a short documentary of 18 minutes. The film chronicles how Haitian researchers and scientists predicted the coming disaster. Haitian scientists all but predicted the earthquake of 2010, wrote articles in the local press, and even took to the streets to alert the government. The shooting of this documentary started on January 12, 2010 when the earth shook and killed more than 150,000. Of course, their calls were systematically ignored just as in 1982, the calls of the Ethiopian government for the coming famine of 1984-1983 were shut down by the cartel of Western Nations, a cartel of former slaver nations. When the earth shook, the disaster business was put in full motion. When the starving bodies captured the morbid imagination of the Western imagination, the disaster industry went to work.
Antonin laments how there are sectors of Haitian and international interests that thrive on disasters. Prevention may therefore prevent maximizing shareholders’ profits, to borrow from an infamous phrase that has become the first commandment of cutthroat financial capitalism. Antonin, in his comments, stresses how the situation remains desperate more than six years after the earthquake. The General Hospital is closed down. Bridges are down and travelling around the country is a constant challenge. Stations set up to monitor seismic activity are not working because the government has not paid for Internet connections. In a sense, profiteers of the disaster industry are waiting in the wings to take advantage of further disasters. And when it comes to Haiti, Western NGOs, the biggest players in the “compassion economies,” stand to reap dividends of the ever-growing humanitarian portfolio.
A recently released report from the office of United States Senator Charles Grassley found that the American Red Cross, despite raising nearly half a billion dollars after the disaster, built only six permanent homes. The Red Cross claimed to have spent 9 percent of donations to cover management and administrative costs. Senator Grassley’s investigation—prompted by reports from ProPublica and National Public Radio– found that 25 percent of donations (about $125 million) “were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund, and a vague, catchall category the Red Cross calls “program costs.” The waste does not stop there because “on top of that 25 percent, the Red Cross sent the bulk of the donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground. Those other nonprofits then took their own cuts for overhead costs — as much as 11 percent.” I was not a math or accounting major in College; I therefore leave it to the reader to figure out who actually benefitted from the charity effort.
Humanitarian interventions in Haiti and other unfortunate parts of the world are implicitly or explicitly construed in media coverage as the modern-day version of the White Man’s Burden. In the case of Haiti, humanitarian aid or debt relief is sometimes constructed as a form of reparations for the wrongs committed during the days of slavery. The second film I watched was The Price of Memory (2014, 83 minutes) by Karen Marks Mafundikwa, a Jamaican filmmaker. The memory of Sam Sharpe (1801-1832), a National Jamaican Hero who led the rebellion of 1831, dominates the film. Fourteen whites died and more than 500 slaves were killed, mostly by white planters or after trials. Sharpe was hanged, but the rebellion ultimately played a critical role in the abolition of slavery. The film centers on claims of reparations made by Jamaican Rastafarians and since championed by CARICOM, a group of 15 Caribbean nations. In response to calls for reparations during a recent visit to Jamaica, British Premier David Cameron arrogantly asked Jamaicans to “move on,” eliciting a rebuke from former Jamaican Prime Minister David Patterson.
Aid from Western countries, in the form of development aid, humanitarian assistance, or debt relief, is sometimes implicitly or explicitly presented as a stand-in for reparations. However, the slave trade, slavery, and colonial exploitation were an orchestrated and well-thought massive stealing of labor and resources by the cartel of slaver and colonial nations. The humanitarian gesture is therefore an inadequate modality for addressing the wrongs inflicted by this stealing. In the case of Haiti, France went a step further in extorting funds after independence. The Haitian paradigm, from slavery to the emergence of the neocolonial regency crystallized in the compromise that gave birth to the debtor-State, dependent and predator, is fundamental to the analysis of the postcolonial situation. Shortly before the independence of the Congo (Kinshassa), Belgium stole most of the financial resources of the soon-to-be independent country. British journalist Ritchie Calder chronicles this massive theft in his book The Agony of the Congo (1961): « During the year preceding the granting of Independence, curious things have been happening. The gold reserve disappeared, on the excuse that it was the backing for the pensions and compensation of displaced Belgians. The treasury lost most of its liquid assets. The value of these, which had stood at over thousands million francs (over seventy million pounds) in 1957, had declined to five hundred million francs (about three and half million pounds) by the end of 1959. In the same time the Congo Treasury, from being a creditor to the Central Bank to the extent of five thousand million francs, had become its debtor for one thousand four hundred million francs, and on Independence Day 1960 the new government found itself owing this Belgian-controlled bank over two thousand million francs. This is a strange-looking ledger for a country the annual exports of which had totaled one hundred and thirty-nine thousand million francs (about one thousand million pounds), and from which twelve thousand three hundred million francs had been collected as revenue in 1959. » Haiti and the Congo, saddled with manufactured debts, are today the sites of two massive humanitarian missions led by the United Nations. Humanitarian interventions may save lives or provide relief in the short term. Inequalities manufactured by the theft would only be remedied if the full genealogies inform the actions of development actors.
Cilas Kemedjio is Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester and co-editor of the CIHA Blog.
A powerful retrospect article with contemporary effects. My question is, how can we actually be freed from this post-colonial and neo-colonial domination in the Caribbean and in Africa?