3rd
Haiti - can we at least get their history right please?
During the early days of the Haitian earthquake’s aftermath, while being horrified at the ABC’s continual reporting of missing ‘Aussies’ that seemed to ignore the 170, 000 or so local dead, I also noticed a small factoid box in The Australian newspaper. It explained away the country’s important and unique history as ‘Haiti gained independence from the French in 1804’.
This phrase also cropped up verbatim on the SBS website and in the Sydney Morning Herald. It took a few days and for Pat Robertson (who seems to have gleaned his understanding of Haiti’s history from 1950s zombie flicks, but that’s another story) to open his evangelical cakehole for a more accurate description of Haiti’s struggle for nationhood to appear in the local press. When reporting on Robertson’s tirade on Haiti doing deals with the devil, The Australian obviously felt it finally had some proper backgrounding to do: ‘Ruled for centuries by the Spanish and then the French, Haiti gained independence in 1804 through a slave-led revolution, creating the first country governed by African descendants in the Americas. The Haitian uprising is regarded as one of history’s few successful slave revolts.’
This whole business got me raving out loud; I was surprised to discover my higher-degree educated husband had no idea about the world’s first nation via slave revolt either.
While the Haitian people just need food, shelter and medical care right now, perhaps the rest of us could do with some more representations of the country’s history, surely one of the defining moments of the ‘new world’? Some years ago, I attempted to read Madison Smartt Bell’s All Soul’s Rising but found the torture porn so relentless, I binned it after a few chapters. I was pleased to hear Danny Glover’s production company Louverture Films has a feature currently in production based on the revolution and the life of Toussaint L’ouverture, for whom Glover has named his company. L’ouverture, according to Louverture, ‘led one of the only successful slave uprisings in history, successively defeated the French, Spanish and British imperial armies, followed by Napoleon Bonaparte, and established the first independent black Republic: Haiti.’
Non-fiction wise, CLR James’ The Black Jacobins (1938) is still an incredibly well-researched and argued text, even 72 years on, and whether or not its Marxist positioning chafes. It’s also worth noting the line that the Haitian revolution represents ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’ is directly attributable to James.
