Haiti, its history, its culture and its people

By Jean H Charles

Its history

Haiti, previously called Ayiti by the Tainos who inhabited the island, was the most populous and the most organized of the chain of the territories of the Caribbean. Their days were changed on December 5, 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived in a northern bay renamed Bay of St Nicholas because of the feast of St Nicholas on that day. The Tainos received the Spanish explorers with genuine hospitality, offering gold chains to the men. Columbus returned to Spain to inform Queen Isabella of his discovery, leaving behind a crew of sailors.

Within a generation, the population of some one million Tainos was reduced to hundreds. Those who were not decimated through new disease brought by the Spanish men, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea and syphilis, were destroyed through hard labour, alcohol and plain mutilation.

Yet, the gold exploration had to continue, and a priest by the name of Las Casas, under the pretext of protecting the Taino population from oblivion, obtained from the Queen of Spain, the authorization to grant the right for merchants to seek and bring Africans into the Western hemisphere to labour in the mines.

From 1503 to 1793, almost three hundred years, the black slaves toiled the land, producing sugar, cotton and cocoa that enriched principally the French colonists, who ruled the island with an iron fist.

It was as such until a Jamaican slave by the name of Bookman organized a voodoo ceremony in the northern part of St Domingue on August 14, 1791, to energize the slaves in revolting with the slogan: Better death than return to slavery!

The destruction of the plantations followed, but Bookman was seized and killed. Toussaint Breda, who became later Toussaint Louverture, continued the movement. A well educated and profoundly religious man, Toussaint was aware of the wind of human rights brought upon St Domingue first by the American Revolution in 1776 and later by the French Revolution in 1789.

Through several battles, he defeated first the British, later the Spanish and proposed a French Commonwealth to Napoleon Bonaparte, leading the destiny of the island with prosperity and hospitality for all. His reputation as a nation builder was sterling. Indeed the second president of the United States, John Adams, already trading with the governor of the country, was contemplating advising him to become king of the island.

Bonaparte responded with an armada supported by the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Through a ruse, where family affection was at the root, two sons of Toussaint were on the boat coming from France, and he was lured into the hands of Rochambeau, Bonaparte’s brother in law, who was the commandant of the naval regiment.

Toussaint was captured, imprisoned and sent to die in a prison in France. He had predicted that the roots of freedom were strong and deep and they would not wither.

Jean Jacques Dessalines took up the revolutionary movement and, within three years, he had succeeded, with the support of other generals such as Henry Christophe and Alexander Petion, to root out all the French soldiers from the island. In a memorable battle on November 18, 1803, the ragtag army of slaves succeeded where Spartacus with his 6,000 men could not accomplish with the Roman Empire some 2,000 years earlier in 70BC.

They rang the song of freedom for all slaves on the island and foreshadowed the beginning of the end of slavery in the world.

This saga was a short glorious moment for Haiti. Two years after Independence Day, on January 1, 1804, Jean Jacques Dessalines was assassinated on October 17, 1806, by his comrades in arms. His ideas of nation building, making Haiti hospitable to all were not the vision of the majority of the other generals. They envisioned the spoils of the colony for themselves only, and their families.

Haiti has never recovered. Through internal revolts fomented by foreign powers such as France, Germany and the United States, with the assistance of, first, mulatto rulers and later poorly educated black generals, Haiti and its people descended into a spiral of ignorance, misery and environmental calamity until today.

The latest one, the earthquake of January 12, 2010, destroyed its capital Port au Prince, as well as sending to death some 300,000 people. This disaster was preceded by 150 years of neglected mulatto governments and recently 50 years of black dictatorial regimes, followed by illiberal democracy that is closer to criminality than good governance.

Its culture

The slaves that climbed the mountains of Haiti after the Independence Day became the Haitian peasants. No one has ever bothered to ask them whether they should have good institutions such as schools and hospitals or decent infrastructure such as roads, electricity and communications. They have preserved intact the African culture mixed with the century’s old acculturation taken from the remaining Tainos and French masters during slavery times. Haiti is at the same time a mosaic of purely African, Santa Fe, USA, and Provence, France, culture.

The aftershock of the Haitian revolution was varied and unnerving as a cause. The Latin American revolution with Bolivar, through the help of Alexander Petion, took place. Abraham Lincoln and Frederic Douglass, inspired by Haiti, brought about the black emancipation. As such, the nation was ostracized by the then world order of slavery.

Only the Vatican, through a Concordat in 1860, accepted to send teachers to Haiti to educate the population. The priests and the nuns did what they could, they provided the bread of good formation to the tiny elite that peopled the cities, leaving behind the masses in the rural areas uneducated and ill advised.

Haiti is today a land of two cultures, the land of Catholic, refined, French-speaking and sophisticated city dwellers, as well as the land of voodoo practitioners, dispossessed former peasants living in squalid condition in shantytowns on the outskirts of prime land near the sea or peasants still forgotten in the mountains surrounding the cities.

Desperate, some have taken the ultimate chance of seeking a more hospitable sky through leaky boats to Florida, The Bahamas and all over the Caribbean islands, in particular, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, going as far as Suriname on firm land in Latin America.

Handy in arts and in art-craft, their production under different labels can be seen in the best hotels and shops on the tourist trail of the Caribbean, except that the label made in Haiti is removed. Good agricultural workers, from a native land that has been eroded by poor soil treatment and tree cutting for charcoal, they are replenishing the landscape of the Dominican Republic, Dominica and The Bahamas with fruit trees and hard wood that could have enriched their own country.

Its people

With a population of 10 million people, Haiti is in the enviable position of Sweden, Finland, Norway or Denmark; except it is not as cold. While the Haitian population is highly creative, it is not as educated and sophisticated as those Nordic countries, as such it miss the key ingredient that could propel the country into full employment and the bliss of growth and development.

It is a young population, eager to learn and pierce the world of modernity. Its adult population is resilient and willing to work hard for its daily bread. But its lack of education will continue to hamper the optimum utilization of its natural talents and the zeal to achieve.

In spite of this deficiency, Haiti, a small island with the proportions of the State of Maryland, has a brand name that goes beyond the Western Hemisphere. It has greatly contributed to the nation building process of several countries, through the utilization of its professional citizens, including the Congo, Brazzaville and Quebec, Canada. The famous Haitians, or celebrities with Haitian origins, include a roster that spans the arts, politics, sports and music. The list includes but is not limited to: E-W Dubois, James Audubon, Pierre Toussaint, Wyclef Jean, Edwige Danticat, Michaelle Jean, Andre Michael (boxer) Jean Michel Basquiat, Garcelle Beauvais, Jimmy Jean Louis, 50 Cent, Pierre Garcon, Jonathan Vilma, Maxwell Garcon.

Haiti experienced an avalanche of help from the nonprofit organizations and from the UN after the earthquake of 2010, but donor fatigue is languishing around because of a lack of good coordination and sound vision from the government. Will this new regime of Martelly/Lamothe deliver the goods to a nation and a people, so eager for so long to enjoy the bliss of hospitality?

It is too early to label the new regime as a Teflon government or a true agent of change that will transform the nation into the Tahiti brand of the western hemisphere, because of its natural and spectacular scenery, or the Bali brand of the Caribbean, because of its many cultural and religious festivals that are the staple of everyday life.

Anyway, Haiti has been too good for the region for humanity not to come to its help with enduring and sustainable tools that will change the lives of so many enduring and eager citizens ready to enjoy the bounties of God on this land that was once called the Pearl of the Islands.

August 25, 2012

Caribbeannewsnow

Islamophobia - A brewing 'Cold War' in the US and the Caribbean

By Rebecca Theodore


Ever since the Runnymede Trust of 1997 made Islamophobia a household name, the usage of the word has spread like wildfire throughout the developed world. Cemented on the slates of history as a barbaric, primitive and sexist political ideology that supports terrorism, monolithic in origin and does not possess values common with other cultures; Islamophobia is now fulfilling the ideological role that anti-communism served in the Cold War era from which to understand the world.

Although it is the belief of political scientists and sociologists in the US that it was the 9/11 attacks that continues to confirm Islam as “enemy” with destructive clarity, the myth that perpetuate all Muslims as terrorists compressed with the hysteria and outpouring of hate for Islam and Muslims has never been more evident than by the incidence of Koran burning and the debacle over the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero.

It follows that if “nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests on public affairs” then the way in which the media continues to dehumanize Muslims not only detaches the issue away from its socio-political context, but the “CNN effect” hypothesis, which continues to imply that the media is more influential in shaping policies since the cessation of the Cold War, enforces the culture of victimhood against Muslims and vividly demonstrate that Islamophobia is a one-stop cause for the myriad of problems facing the world today, when in essence it is only a human and technological construct -- an aggressive television sound-bite, that does not exist in time and space.

It is now clear that the finalization of the Cold War now brings a greater focus upon alternative enemies and the portrayal of the binary ‘other’ as a new Cold War is not taking place with socio-economic factors, but with great partition among humankind, hence a dominating cultural conflict that now carries the potency of a blockade mentality, that fuels more antagonism and bitterness and making Muslim communities more inward looking and more open to religious extremism.

In the same way the Holocaust revealed how ferociously unchanged beneath the veneer of civilization lurks the old bête human (human beast) and how moral progress can be stamped by a Darwinian-Malthusian conflict model embedded in intellectual thinking, hostility towards Islam justifies Muslims as “Successor to the Berlin Wall”, thus the buildup hysteria against the Muslim community and their exclusion from mainstream society. On this assumption, it is impossible to encode the lives of Muslims in Darwinian-Malthusian genetics because the dogma holds no clues for human conduct, no answers to human moral dilemmas and in my view is the most potent intellectual force that is presently eroding the West’s traditional moral order by glorifying ideas of discriminatory practices towards Muslims and confers approval on discrimination as a biological necessity and in this way anti-Islamism is normalized.

As images are important in constructing the discourses of everyday life, the politics of the veil and hatred and abuse of Muslims is exaggerated to suit politicians and journalistic needs in the US and the world at large. Inflating anti-Muslim prejudice is useful for mainstream politicians to draw attention to themselves and to make monetary gains. TV personalities, intellectuals, newsworthy Islamophobes, politicians, bestsellers with melodramatic titles by unknown authors with no knowledge of Muslim history are frenziedly defining the dangerous ‘other’ in western society, with no regard to Muslim families who are presently facing a crisis of individuality and freedom in their explanation of the impasse to the younger generation.

Being sensitive to Islamophobia allows politicians to reclaim honorable high ground lost in political mauling over the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest of several controversial remarks by Nevada Republican US Senate candidate Sharron Angle that the country needs to address a "militant terrorist situation" that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in American cities like Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, strongly indicate that Islamophobia is not limited to the textual, but can be understood with reference to fields of visuality in politics and shows a terrifying lack of connection with reality and that there is big money to be made in promoting bigotry against Muslims.

In the Caribbean, Islam plays a prominent role in Caribbean history, stretching back over one thousand years and tracing its presence to the Atlantic slave trade, the influx of refugees caused by the Spanish persecution of non-Christians in Spain, resulting in Muslims fleeing a ravaged Ottoman Empire in search of opportunities, Arab refugees fleeing persecution by Jews in Palestine, and also Muslim Indians, both indentured servants and immigrants seeking a better way of life. Regardless of the origin of the Islamic presence, it has endured and is currently growing with a Caribbean Islamic Secretariat playing a prominent role in politics and education and catering to economic development within the business community.

Moreover, new research reveals evidence leading to the presence of Muslims in the ancient Americas long before Columbus’ destructive interference in the fifteenth century. What is significant about the Islamic presence in the Caribbean is that it has survived for so long. Alex Haley in his book “Roots” realistically reconstructs the story of his Muslim ancestor Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped, sold and transported to the Americas, thus showing attempts made by slaves to cling to their Islamic culture and heritage, proving that hostility towards Islam stems from the atrocities and cultural genocide perpetrated by ‘pseudo civilized’ European colonizers in their scathing mission of the cross and the sword and bringing light to the heathens.

Forthwith, in 1848, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto with the famous words: “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” Today, another specter is haunting the world. It is the specter of a brewing Cold War against Islam.

November 3, 2010

caribbeannewsnow

Bahamas Blog International

University of the West Indies (UWI) and PhDs

UWI and PhDs
By Oliver Mills

It was reported in the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper of October 14, 2010, that professor Paget Henry of Brown University in the United States, who is Antiguan born, stated that it is critical for the UWI to graduate more PhDs to teach students at degree granting colleges that are emerging throughout the Caribbean.

The professor stated that the areas should be Caribbean history, sociology, political science, economics, literature and the arts. He added that this self knowledge could only come from artists and scholars trained at the UWI.

But what is the professor really suggesting? Is he intimating that these emerging degree granting institutions lack sufficiently well qualified lecturers in these areas? Again, is he saying that a masters degree or a post graduate specialist diploma are insufficient to teach at the level of these degree granting institutions? Or, is he stating that the UWI needs to, and is not graduating sufficient PhD students, and therefore needs to increase the completion and graduation rates of PhD students?

On the surface, this suggestion appears quite straight forward, but on close examination it is highly complex, as well as quite revealing concerning not only what is being done, but what should be done. It also implies that the degree granting institutions have sufficient persons with masters degrees, but what is now badly needed is more people with PhD qualifications. This is far from being the case, since many degree granting institutions do not have every staff member with a masters qualification, even though many may be working towards achieving this credential.

The further factor is that many degree granting institutions in the Caribbean only offer first degrees. Very few offer masters qualifications, unless it is done in collaboration with institutions within or outside the Caribbean. So what seems to be initially required, is to improve the quality of the first degree, so that it articulates with the higher requirements of other institutions abroad, particularly for persons pursuing higher studies. This is very important, since many students from some Caribbean institutions who go to schools in the United States, often have to either repeat the first degree, do make up courses, or spend an additional year, and score a particular grade, before they are accepted into the programme of their choice, even if their first degree is in the particular area.

I know personally of a Caribbean student who went to a North American institution with an upper second class honours degree in library science, but was told that her course concentration was insufficient to gain direct entry. She had to do a number of undergraduate courses over the period of a year, before her first degree was recognized as equivalent to that offered by this institution. The issue seemed to be that since the first degree in the Caribbean took three years, the degree at the foreign institution was a four year programme. After completing the additional year, the Caribbean student was allowed to enter the masters programme in library science. It means that some Caribbean institutions have to examine their first degrees in terms of equivalency with that of other institutions. We live in a global society that is highly competitive and connected, and so we need our institutions to offer qualifications that are accepted globally, and not just in the island where they are, or in the region.

There are also cases where Caribbean students with masters degrees who have applied to certain North American institutions to doctoral work in the area of their masters, were required by the institution they had applied to, to redo their masters programme, because it was not regarded as being at the level acceptable by that institution. Even in a certain European university, students with a first degree from their home institution who applied to do a masters programme were told they had first to do a post graduate diploma in the area with a “B” average, before they could be accepted, and those with masters who wanted to do a doctorate were told they had to do either the M.Phil. first, or do one year of this programme, and present an acceptable research paper of a particular quality, before being considered for a doctoral programme.

The whole issue here, is that before we can talk of graduating more PhDs, we in the Caribbean have first to critically and systematically look at our first degree and masters programmes in terms of global equivalency, so that when our students apply abroad to other institutions, they would not have to spend additional time and money repeating what they thought they already had in the bag. Degree granting colleges in the Caribbean therefore need to buck up, and look not only at the commercial aspect of their programmes, but their international currency. An important feature of their programmes should be what the student, after pursuing a course of studies is capable of doing. Does the programme fit appropriately with the job market and requirement of the wider society? And, does the programme ensure that the student would have acquired entrepreneurial knowledge and skills to not only qualify for a job, but to create and innovate new products and services to the benefit of the economy and society?

When the professor used the term ‘graduating more PhDs’ it gives the impression of the UWI being a factory, which churns out products, where, irrespective of quality control, still come out with certain defects, such as the student not being equipped with the right match of performance skills, along with not being educated with respect to how to transfer knowledge fit for purpose. It is not simply a matter of graduating more PhDs, but giving students a quality education reflected in a PhD. This means that supervisors of students must be highly credentialed, and must have published widely in local, regional and international journals. It also means that the work produced must be either highly original, or there is a creative reinterpretation of work already in the market, providing a new and different perspective, which not only adds further weight to the area, but gives it a new and transformative applicability. It is not a rehash, or a commentary.

Furthermore, when professor Henry says that the areas should be Caribbean history, the social sciences, literature and the arts, and adds that self-knowledge could only come from artists and scholars trained at the UWI, he misses the point and purpose of education completely. Education aims at a transfiguration of the human personality through the quality of the subject areas. It seeks to create thinkers, open-mindedness, and a cultured and humane people. What the professor does not say is how these areas would meet the criteria just suggested. He seems to be saying that more PhDs should be awarded in these areas. But why these, as opposed to others? Is this a reflection of his bias for these areas? Of the PhDs awarded in these areas, how have they helped the Caribbean economy and society? Have they given the emerging degree granting institutions further status and pull, with respect to students’ interest and competence? What about management studies? How many persons who have already done a PhD in any of the areas mentioned by the professor, have opted to work at these institutions?

When the professor further mentions that self-knowledge can only come from artists and scholars trained at the UWI, he fails to realize that self-knowledge is personal, based on the interactions of the individual with society, how he or she interprets these, and the responses that are given. You do not acquire self-knowledge from others. It is an individual, psychological thing that emerges from our transactions within the environment and not from entities external to us who bestow it on us. Artists and scholars can provide insights, based on their own analysis, but they cannot infuse self-knowledge into us. Self-knowledge is authentic to us. To also say these have to be trained at the UWI, is the ultimate fallacy. Any genuine institution anywhere which exposes us to the best that has be thought and taught, qualifies to facilitate the development of our intuitions, but not award us self-knowledge as the professor seems to think.

I am sure after further reflection, the professor would enhance his perspective on the issues he has promulgated, and arrive at a conclusion that is more rational, informed, and objective.

October 21, 2010

caribbeannewsnow

Bahamas Blog International