Lloyd Best, “Locating
"The
most important thing about the Haitian case is the very
profound
economic and social revolution made by the Haitian
people
when they repudiated the system of plantation slavery.
Everywhere else in
system of the
large plantations were preserved. Until official
abolition
in the Caribbean,
achieved
this fundamental revolution."
-Gerard Barthelmy
The
French anthropologist warns us against analysing
the
basis of schemes drawn from other societies. For him
is
unique. And that uniqueness is not due to the fact that it
was liberated
(like the 13 North American colonies) in a war
of
independence at the end of the 18th century. Nor is it an
instance
which simply pitted slaves against masters. Not when
the
upheaval involved the slaves as a mass of workers led by
free
blacks who after
Nor was it even that the
Haitian Revolution opposed blacks to
whites.
Whites were indeed eliminated; but the population
which
survived was not homogenous. Between blacks and
mulattoes
remained problems that have dogged the society for
all
of 200 years since. Moreover, at the time of
50-60 per cent of the slaves
were African-born (bossales)-the
rest
being Haitian creoles.
Freedom in the rest of the
date
with an overwhelming number of slaves creolised over
an
extended
period. In
mass
of Africans suddenly acquiring independence and creating
their
own country constitutes a very special situation which
has
existed nowhere else." It played a determining and unique
role
revolving around the African born who became creolised
only
under conditions of freedom; and who formed the core of a
peasantry
that did not consist of mere footloose cultivators,
creatures
of the plantation; but who satisfied the
Aristotelian condition of organised householders engaged on
autonomous
production for domestic consumption-and only after
that
for export trade, and international investment.
The upshot is a
two
societies. One refers to the old creole, the other to
the
new creole. This cohabitation recalls the Colony of Conquest
with
two parallel nations where the one attempts total
domination
of the other. It was perhaps the new creole culture
with
its peasant society that gave impetus to forms of armed
resistance,
to local community organization by way of lacou
(The yard), of a local
language (creole), of an indigenous
art,
of its own religion, voudou, of a system of justice
based
on
that religion, and with a peculiar set of social rules
constituting
a comprehensive civil code. All this ran parallel
to
the French language, Catholicism, the Napoleonic Code, the
Western armies with their
military hierarchy and the European
system
of jurisprudence and justice.
It is the old creole
culture, associated with the coloniser,
which
prevailed and held administrative, economic and
political
sway over the newer creole culture of the African
born.
In
itself
the rural milieu, le pays en dehors (the
out-country).
Here is a phenomenon not
wholly unique in the
have
always existed enclaves of maroons. But only in
it
developed into a coherent and integrated culture of free
Africans creating their own
society in their newly acquired
land.
Here is what Jean Casimir calls the counter-plantation,
implying
that no system of plantations and haciendas, based on
wage
labour, was ever able to install itself. This
anti-system,
based on small holdings, is what essentially
emerged
from the Revolution-on the plain as well as in the
hills,
displaying a remarkable coherence and capacity for
organisation, expansion, adaptation and viability.
The Haitian
crisis
we know today arose only when the population explosion
towards
the start of the 20th century made this dispensation
with
its enveloping arrangements a fundamentally unviable one.
This is in essence the way
the
American occupation in 1915 which effectively closed the
19th Century. Most of the
impressions by which the rest of the
world,
including the Caribbean, continues to judge
been
formed by the responses to this crisis. Barthelmy
observes
that what has been happening to
what
has been happening to
opened
up to western attempts at development. He suggests that
the
rejection of wholesale westernisation by a large part
of
the
population can be rationally explained. That rejection is
invariably
taken to reflect a congenital incapacity embrace
superior
western civilization.
However, what is called
underdevelopment is really a measure
of, and
a witness to, the coherence of a culture designed to
manage
its own conflicts-including the conflict between le
pays
en dehors and the dominant urban creole
culture centred
on
many
ways "at odds with what is considered development in an
altogether
different type of historical tradition".
Development in the 18th
Century had implied staple plantation
exports
and African slavery. Free Haitian society was
established
on the basis of a repudiation of those values. It
is
not hard to see why liberal capitalism has been
comprehensively
under suspicion by an economy set up mainly
for
subsistent production and consumption and out of which has
emerged
what, significantly, is mis-named "the informal
sector".
If traditional society in
advantage
lies in a capacity to resist the onslaught of the
last
century culminating in the most recent assault by the
Duvalier regime. What we
need, therefore, is a fresh
interpretation.
We need a hermeneutic humble enough to discard
pre-conceived
judgments and to make sense of the Haitian
experience
on its own terms. What, for example, does disguised
unemployment
mean in
an
unemployment rate of 60-80 per cent? What are we to make of
the
orthodox media report of
violence
when every responsible academic reporter in a hundred
years
has confirmed that this is the most peaceful country in
the
western hemisphere? The Duvalier dictatorship
liquidated
some
30,000 persons but the count of victims following the
fall
of the regime amounted to no more than 100 to 150-nothing
compared
to the number killed by the death squads in, say, El
It is easy to cite all this
so as to present a romantic view
of a
society at peace with itself and content with its
under-fulfillments.
a
country in the midst of an enduring and intractable crisis
of
society, economy and culture. If it is to save itself; and
if the international
community including its
neighbours, is to assist in an act of rescue, the
beginning of
wisdom
can only be a rigorous reading of reality describing
how
contemporary society was established, how it has
travelled, where it has reached and what options
present
themselves
in the current conjuncture. If such an exercise is
to
be faithfully and exactly undertaken, absolutely the first
requirement
would be to locate the original plantation society
in
the context of the
locate
that wider Caribbean in the context of the
the
last 500 years; and finally, to locate some comprehensive
concept
of
the
reinterpretation of the history of all the islands in the
Caribbean seems to demand
some such methodology of empirical
finding
out.
The
latest expansions undertaken by Caricom in recent
times
have
embraced
widening
is clearly a reading of the culture-zone into which
all
the constituent territories naturally fall. In the case of
compromises
the affinity. That country is routinely seen to
stand
alone as the poorest in the hemisphere, the best example
of
the debility of African culture in
noted
for the small number of chief executives who've ever
come
peacefully to the end of their term. What, however,
shares
with-or is distinguished from the rest of the
by-is
the legacy of social and economic organisation, the
cultural
forms and the institutions formed in the region
during
the last 500 years, notably the last 350.
The challenge of
differentiating the
from
the rest of
peopling.
It therefore turns on the part played in the
formation
of society by people organised in the primary unit
of
the household , as social concept, distinct from the
biological
concept of the family. The whole of
period
has been marked by its experience of inward migration
which,
in
South America, Colonies of
Conquest; and in the
Colonies of
Exploitation.
In the
of
voluntary migration mostly though not only for Afros. This
implies
a limited existence and a minimal autonomy of the
households.
Society emerges as the creation and creature of
its
economy, as we know only too well. The economy is
completely
specialised in staple export with little or no
production
for domestic consumption. Business is tightly
organised around self-contained "total
institutions", free
from any structural
interdependence with one another and
involving
almost no participation in the operation of
competitive
markets.
Once economy and society are
instituted on some such basis,
the
attendant culture acquires a distinctive orientation.
Because of the wide catchment of arrivants from the
continents,
the most important single feature is
fragmentation.
Society is cosmopolitan. Its main
characteristic
is not so much its smallness or openness or
islandness. Its ethos is not god-made or natural but
man-made
and
institutional.
Specifically, three cultural
factors drive behaviour. The
first
is ethnicity-often wrongly taken for race. The great
diversity
of arrivants provokes a universal yen for a
solidarity
that is almost automatic and mindless and given to
seizing
the most convenient possibilities for association-be
it
race, class, colour, clan, religion, language,
homeland of
origin,
place of settlement or even common vessel of arrival.
(Jahagi
Bai) Paradoxically, the second factor is the
naturalness
with which an option is exercised in favour of
mas-not to be confused with
Carnival although Carnival is the
festival
in which mas finds optimal occasion for display. Mas
is
the compelling necessity of the individual not only to play
him/herself
in myriad incarnations but also to play the Other
as
occasion and circumstances dictate. The essence of mas
lies
not
in the costumery and decoration but in the varieties
of
self
that exude from the person.
The third factor is the
reliance on soft rather than hardware
reflecting
its alienation from ownership of machinery and
equipment.
Stripped of the freedom to inherit the land and its
natural
resources for the purpose of negotiating opportunity,
persons
give even greater precedence to the ancestral toolkit
they
carry in their head. Often it finds itself needing to
create
something out of nothing as has been the case with pan,
metaphor
for taming the environment of new world of the
Caribbean
and with limbo. Metaphor for making space where
before
there was none.
These are the initial
conditions under which contemporary
terms
of a methodology of history, they constitute the pure
case
to which successive modifications have taken place over
the
long historical span. In terms of stages of history, then,
the
differentiating factor can only consist of the regime of
peopling,
meaning the regime of labour. This brings to the
fore
the extent to which households are permitted to, or are
prohibited
from, organising productive life under the
conditions
of free choice. It is, therefore, manifest that the
collapse
of the slave plantation economy in the
during
the first half of the 19th C amounted to a significant
threshold
of history. And again, the collapse of the
post-Emancipation
order in the middle 1930s constituted
another decisive
boundary. The islands found themselves
precipitated
into their present state of self-government and
independence
alas without the means of effective sovereignty
and
freedom and dependent on a regime of decision-making
leadership
consisting of no higher than middle management
elites
socialised neither to take responsibility nor to
assume
epistemic
sovereignty.
It is perhaps against this background
that we could best
appraise
the significance of the Haitian Revolution and the
divergence
of the Haitian case. We've already encountered
modifications
pursued in the rest of the
summarily
discontinued by this overthrow of the mercantilist
order
in 1804. In La Culturé Opprimee
and La Caraibe: Une et
Indivisible, Casimir has demonstrated how the
counter-plantation
became the pervasive form. He has suggested
that
the key to what seems like exceptional volatility of the
society and
instability of the political system lies in the
determination
to establish a society without a state. The new
peasant
creole culture of le pays en dehors
stood in mortal
fear
of the central domination that, from its fortress in
negate
gains.
In an essay published in the
T&T Review, Michel Hector and
Jean Casimir
have documented the extraordinary vigour and
vision
exhibited by the Haitian localities in establishing a
viable
system of production. Georges Anglade has described
the
great
ports of external trade that grew up to service the
requirements
of an economy that could on no account deny its
plantation
history and the seminal role played by
export-import
activity. One corollary was the running conflict
between
the old "off-shore", externally-propelled economy and
the
great "inshore" hinterlands that describe the new
dispensation.
The repeated overthrow of the central executive
in
were
neither accident, aberration nor evidence of a population
unable
to sustain a viable society and state. Quite the
contrary,
this experience probably confirms the resolve of the
counter-plantation
to defend its own integrity to the end and
to
keep at bay all those forces likely to effect a return to
the
discredited ancien regime.
The irony of all this is
that, in the end, it is doubtful
whether
the Haitian experience has effectively deviated from
that
of the rest of the
counter-plantation-and
of society without state-stands out. It
is
the absence of active government and administration willing
and
able to build-up infrastructure and to create ways and
means
for the expansion of private productivity and
production.
In a curious kind of way, there has been an
uncanny
convergence between the experience of
other
islands.
Prof Arthur Lewis has described the
adjustments that became
indispensable
to the English-speaking economy as a result of
the
failure of the colonial administration to promote land
reform,
agricultural extension, rural education, etc. The
inevitable
result was excess population on the land, a steep
drop
in average production and productivity and an incapacity
of
the economies to carry the now galloping increase in the
labour
force, owed to the proliferation of households and
families
after emancipation. Exodus from productive employment
saw
the decision of women to stay at home. There occurred much
over-employment
in domestic service and even in organised
business.
There was massive migration to the urban areas
generating
any number of low productivity, largely
merchandising,
operations. Above all, there was a flood of
migration
to neighbouring countries.
In the English-speaking case,
this external migration was
directed
to the
Rica and
the newly-expanding sugar plantations in
case
of
proved
unable to cope, the administrations turned to the
celebrated
programme of industrialisation by invitation
involving
direct foreign investment in low wage activity.
These shared characteristics
cannot be said to have eliminated
the
divergence of historical experience owed to the Revolution
of
1804. However, they provide background to the assessment of
the
forces making for integration of the
culture-zone
at the present time.