The reconstruction of Haiti, funded by the West, would be a fitting memorial to the horrors of Atlantic slavery, writes TONY KINSELLA
ALTHOUGH WE regularly witness history in the making, the process is often far from evident. Sometimes it’s hesitant, as in last week’s reluctant shuffle of Europe’s leaders towards a unified response to Greece’s financial crisis. Sometimes it’s illegible, as in deciphering the impact of Viktor Yanukovich’s victory in the Ukrainian presidential elections.
And sometimes, very occasionally, the making of history is crystal clear. Twenty years ago many of us watched such a moment when a providential leader emerged from the half-light of 27 years in prison. Which of us was not moved, awed, even a little ennobled as Nelson Mandela strode into the light of freedom?
The handful of diehard racists and myopic political neanderthals (Dick Cheney opposed Mandela’s release) were irrelevant. Justice was served, democracy strengthened, and the flame of hope in humanity’s essential decency rekindled. Something good had happened, and we felt the better for it.
Manifestations of organised inhumanity conversely diminish us all, externally and internally. Externally because we wonder how the German Nazi state could have slaughtered millions of humans simply because they were Jews, gypsies, homosexuals or opponents. Internally when we ask how could those priests, brothers and nuns who professed such ardent Christianity have tortured and abused so many tens of thousands of children on our island for so many decades.
If this external interrogation is cathartic, our internal questioning is as problematic as it is necessary. What of our not very good Jewish jokes? Or the collective aversion of our gazes from Ireland’s reformatories and industrial schools? Do tiny tendrils of white superiority tenaciously persist in our subconscious depths?
Three reactions emerge from such angst: reparation, determination and commemoration.
We want reparations for the victims. We are determined that such outrages will never be repeated. We also want to create a gripping memorial to remind us, and hopefully future generations, of just how capable we are of getting things horribly wrong.
These benevolent actions can sometimes tip over, with reparations for one injustice sowing the seeds of another. The Middle East reminds us, in the words of Roger Cohen in last Friday’s New York Times, that “past persecution of the Jews cannot be a license to subjugate another people”.
Every people has its own historic memories, often little known to outsiders. Few Serbs have ever heard of the Irish triumph at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Nor will many on our island be able to place Serbia’s 1389 defeat by the Ottomans on the Field of Blackbirds into any meaningful context.
The Holocaust has an understandably global profile. Perhaps because of its very scale, almost seven million slaughtered, and the systemic dehumanising of victims by their Nazi butchers. Its very stature in western civilisation can however sometimes cast other human barbarities into shadow. The prime candidate has to be the Atlantic slave trade.
Over more than three centuries something in the region of 12 million slaves were forcibly shipped, mainly from west Africa, to the Americas. Another eight million perished in resisting capture, or while awaiting transport.
Some 20 million Africans paid with their lives for much of the wealth of the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. Africans slaves contributed enormously to the development of the USA and Brazil, until they abolished slavery in the latter half of the 19th century. A longer and a more pragmatic holocaust, but a holocaust nonetheless.
Every cataclysm has its moment of glory, its instant of affirmation which confers some dignity on survivors and their descendants. For our planet’s black population, Haiti offers such a moment.
Inspired by the French revolution, Haiti’s slaves arose to claim their freedom in 1791. After years of horrendously bloody warfare, Haiti won its independence in 1804.
A free country menacingly created by black slaves in a world built on slavery and serfdom. France exacted reparations for her lost plantations and slaves. Other European empires lent their support and the US withheld recognition until the 1860s. Yet the young state held firm. It was from Haiti that Simon Bolivar sailed in 1817 to launch South America’s independence struggles.
Haiti finished paying reparations to France in 1947, after 30 years of US occupation. There then followed the gruesome Duvalier dictatorships and their organised pillaging of the country. Haiti is still paying off the Duvalier’s international debts, although the remainder of these are now in the process of being “forgiven”. This was the country devastated by an earthquake just over a month ago. Thirteen of the country’s 15 ministries collapsed killing around 40 per cent of senior officials. Somewhere around two million people were made homeless, and around 220,000 perished.
Many more are now at risk. What are the survival chances for amputees, and those with broken limbs or other serious injuries when they leave the field hospitals to live in the street? The rainy season is beginning, and the hurricane season will follow.
Haitians and aid organisations are struggling heroically with the gargantuan task of feeding and housing the entire population of the greater Dublin area. Tens of thousands of Haitians are working for €4 per day to clear the rubble from Port-au-Prince. The UN-trained Haitian police have reported for duty, helping to provide elements of security and organisation. We are now almost managing to respond to the humanitarian disaster, but how is Haiti to be rebuilt? Are we going to ask additional generations of Haitians to pay for their existence? Or is humanity going to prove itself capable of reparative generosity?
What better memorial could we offer to the horror of slavery than to fund the reconstruction of Haiti? It could be argued that we owe it to the Haitians.
Humanity certainly owes it to itself.