Struggle for the Future

Common Sense
John Maxwell

In the heart of Africa, on November 11, 1965 the 'white' inhabitants of a vast area known as Rhodesia declared themselves an independent country.

In their 'Declaration of Independence' the tiny minority of white people (one per cent of the population) declared "That the people of Rhodesia, having demonstrated their loyalty to the Crown and to their kith and kin in the United Kingdom and elsewhere through two world wars, and having been prepared to shed their blood and give of their substance in what they believed to be the mutual interests of freedom-loving people, now see all that they have cherished about to be shattered on the rocks of expediency".

According to still loyal remnants of the so-called 'people of Rhodesia':

From the wilderness which existed at the time of Cecil John Rhodes' arrival, a vibrant new nation called Rhodesia was created. In less than 75 years this nation, created from nothing by toil and enterprise, became the jewel of Africa, the most progressive and socially evolutionary country on the African continent, until its tragic metamorphosis into the Republic of Zimbabwe in 1980. (Source)

Before the white man came, the story goes, Zimbabwe was a wilderness. It was a wilderness a little larger than Italy but smaller than Spain, with between five and 10 million people living there. These people were the descendants of an advanced civilisation which seemed to have disappeared about 1,600 years ago.

Civilisations disappear for many reasons, one of them being sudden and catastrophic climate change, as accounted for Maya kingdoms in Central America and Mohenjo Daro in what is now Pakistan. Conquest accounted for others such as the Mexican Aztecs, and disease wiped out the Taino in the Caribbean. The slave trade devastated numberless civilisations in Africa from the 15th century onward and killed millions more than were actually transported and enslaved.

In Africa, Europeans came upon what they considered virgin lands, because the people who lived there did not 'farm' like Europeans, spoke a different language and were, basically, mostly invisible except when they reverted to their native savagery.

Those who settled into places like Kenya and Ghana were blissfully ignorant that the depredations of the slave trade had destroyed and scattered the people who had lived there before - entire civilisations vanished.

While most people believe that slaves were captured only in West Africa, consider the case of a woman named Jendawi Serwah. "She is a lady from Bristol whose parents had each arrived in Britain from Jamaica as teenagers. Their ancestors had been taken from Africa as slaves to work the plantations."

Jendawi's story is told in The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes (Bantam Press, London 2001), one of the world's foremost experts on DNA. He traced Jendawi's DNA and found a "mitochondrial signature that was clearly African. When I told her of this result and also that we had found a very close DNA match with a Kenyan Kikuyu, the effect on her was overwhelming".

Mitochondrial DNA tells us some other things, among them the proof that all of us are members of the same human race. When the Rhodesians spoke of their kith and kin, hoping for special treatment from their 'white' relatives, they didn't know what they were talking about.

For instance: When Nelson's victorious fleet was paid off in England after the battle of Trafalgar, thousands of black sailors were assimilated into the English bloodstream. Who can say whether 'President Ian Smith of Rhodesia' may not have been more closely related to some carpenter in Four Paths than to Harold Wilson?

Nevertheless, the racists, bigots and religious diehards continue to beat the race drum for all they are worth.

A correspondent reports that on December 16 "I caught a report on our own Love TV. about Haiti. The report formed a segment of an American 'news programme' called The 700 Club...produced and broadcast by the Christian Broadcasting Company (CBN), owned by millionaire televangelist Pat Robertson. The 700 Club is carried in many nations and is broadcast every morning in Jamaica by Love TV.

"Yesterday's report on Haiti stated falsely that Boukman practised witchcraft and led the ceremony which dedicated Haiti to the Devil. Of course, the 'reporter' found so-called Voodoo priests in Haiti, who professed their allegiance to the Devil.

Then there were the 'brave' born again Christians of Haiti, the foot soldiers in God's war to reclaim the nation he had to curse. And not surprisingly there was the customary jab at Aristide. The 'reporter' claimed that Aristide used to practise Voodoo, that is, Devil worship in the presidential palace, so of course, since his ouster the new occupant has invited Christians to cleanse it.

The neo-Fascist fundamentalist right in American politics are a strange and dangerous breed. Testifying before Congress (February 5, 1981), President Reagan's secretary of the interior James Watt was asked if he agreed that natural resources should be preserved for future generations. His response: "I do not know how many future generations we can count of before the Lord returns." (Source)

The idea that blacks are cursed by God, and Haitians especially so, is prevalent among many of these so-called Christian sects. And their influence has spread to lots of people who should know better, among them many who wear the indelible uniform of the oppressed. But of course, who knows? Colin Powell, Kofi Annan and P J Patterson may very well be more closely related to Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun than they are to the majority of the eight million Haitians who have been relieved of their independence.

As in 1965, the putschists in Haiti are a tiny minority of the population and distinguished from them not so much by skin colour, although there is that, but by a cultivated sense of superiority born of their inheritance of the colonial burdens of the French slavemasters who were so rudely ejected from Haiti 200 years ago.

They are backed by the rednecks of France, Canada, the USA and of the Caribbean who believe, like Colin Powell and George Bush, that anything is better than Haitian independence. As Frantz Fanon said 45 years ago, the world of colonisation is a strictly compartmentalised world.

"The natives' challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of two points of view...The colonial world is a Manichean world. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values.

It is not for the colonialist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or, better still, never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represent not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is absolute evil.

He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes before him; he is the deforming element; disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depositary of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces.

All values in fact are irrevocably poisoned as soon as they are allowed in contact with the colonised race. The customs of the colonised people, their traditions, their myths - above all their myths - are the very sign of that poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity."

So you can understand why one of the first acts of the unleashed thugs of the ancien regime was the destruction of the brand new Museum of Haitian culture with its treasury of folk art, including of course, voudon images and relics.

And that, too, was why the new medical school, established by Aristide with Cuban help, became the headquarters of the US Marines. It is also precisely the reason that Field Marshal von Rumsfeld was not just unconcerned but ecstatic that 8,000 years of history and civilisation were being scattered to the four winds after the fall of Baghdad. Why do you need history when we do not know "how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns".

I don't know if P J Patterson, our prime minister, walked barefoot like me when school was not in session. His uncle was the dispenser (pharmacist) in Duncans where I grew up, and boys of my station in life know all about 'jiggers', hookworm and similar pests. We were very much like Haiti then - poor, backward, largely illiterate and unhealthy.

It was our own effort that turned us around, pulled us up. We got help, of course, and we were not subject to the unremitting institutionalised violence visited upon Haiti by the black satraps of the United States who were tolerated from time to time and went their way into exile, from time to time.

It was our own struggles and bad behaviour plus the example of Haiti which frightened the British into abolishing slavery in Jamaica, 34 years after the Haitian slaves had abolished it in Haiti. But though our stories diverge, from time to time, the parallels remain. Aristide and Manley are demonised for the same reasons. We were luckier.

American intervention in tiny Grenada produced an uproar out of all proportion to the importance of the island. Imagine what would have happened had it been Jamaica.

Haiti, on the other hand, was George Canning's gift to the US. He was an enlightened Imperialist who realised that it didn't matter which section of the Master Race governed, as long as the Master Race ruled. "I have called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old" he chortled at the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine.

His ghost must have had screaming fits when Castro sent his troops to liberate Southern Africa, fulfilling the other half of the prophecy. And it is that which may explain the American fixation on Haiti. Not only is Haiti to be punished for its temerity in destroying slavery, but its geographic position is perfect for an assault on Cuba from within the Caribbean.

Cuba has done in the 20th century what Haiti did in the 19th. It has demonstrated to the native, in Fanon's words, "that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler's skin is not of any more value than a native's skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner".

Necessary, yes, if you believe that humanity's journey has just begun, and that the road is bound to be rough and bloody, but, most important, we know that there are many future generations ahead of us, and that it is their world that we must protect and preserve.

We, at least, have a duty to all the civilisations that have risen, fallen, been created and destroyed and are yet to arise. If we do not do what our duty tells us must be done, we will live in odium in the history of our progeny and our posterity.