I REMEMBER at the Museum of African Heritage some years ago, there was a gathering to discuss Haiti and our relationship with that sister Caribbean and CARICOM nation. It turned out that it was a group of people who were trying to establish themselves into an NGO on the Haitian situation, and required our blessing. This was during the horrific earthquake that killed so many people on the island.
I am always suspicious of NGOs, because they’re not at all accountable to anyone but themselves. Joan Cambridge was not there, but we had discussed her willingness to surrender lands to which she had access to accommodate a small Haitian community. Dr James Rose was the government representative present, so I hinted at the fact that the Haitians were an Afro-Caribbean people, and being aware of the ethnic obsessions of the PPP, I was unsure how that would be allowed. He did not respond.
What struck me was when a prominent woman activist stood up and blurted out that the earthquake occurred because of the Haitians belief in voodoo. I was in total disbelief! And furious! I remember fellow ACDA member, Clementine Marshall asking me to calm down, which I did, reluctantly.
I had encountered this incredible foolishness some days before in a minibus with a so-called Christian. This young lady boasted that her pastor had told her so. I am also aware that preaching and pastors had become a kind of escape, and that more charlatans were out there than scholarly and enlightened religious servants of the people.
But stupidity is easier to peddle than the complexities of truth, and, over the years, voodoo and zombies have been dumped on our colonial consciousness by pulp fiction, ‘B’ movies, and even award-winning and popular films like the child’s play ‘Chucky’ films.
One of the most exciting and popular TV series today, ‘The Walking Dead’ is based on the zombie genre, so the popular conditioning was well taken care of. But for those who need to really understand, CLR James’s iconic book, ‘Black Jacobins’ is always available, as is the scholarly ‘Five Thousand Days War’ by President David Granger.
Comprehending Haiti should be a cultural awareness embraced by CARICOM nations; their own efforts must go into this. From my own experience, don’t expect anything in application towards this from the CARICOM Secretariat; this has to be individual government initiatives.
Haiti’s contribution to our collective history and that of the world should be well understood, so appreciation in varied areas of that island-nation’s predicament can be understood in a context outside of the popular frivolous fictional awareness that now occupy the space when we think Haiti, and when we speak of Haiti and the Haitian people.

SAME TRIBAL ROOTS
The Haitian people came from the same tribal roots as the rest of the Afro New World population who were brought into slavery over the past 400 years. Voodoo is a belief system that originated in the West African nation of Dahomey, and in the Haitian context is a parallel fusion with Catholicism and a combination of rites, philosophies and rituals of other tribes, including the Amerindian Peoples.
To summarise what occurred in the making of the Haitian nation must extend the reader’s attention to what happened in France in the 1780s, then the most populated Western European nation and a leader in trends and ideas.
The French rose up against its monarchy and nobility due to hardships imposed on its masses, among other concerns; under the banner of ‘Liberty and equality’, something new had occurred in France. Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue, was the most productive of the slave colonies of the Caribbean, and became a champion of what we understand as the ‘French Revolution’, with its denunciation of the numerous race and class-based caste stratifications imposed by the Church and class-sensitive nobility [who at individual levels were the first to contradict this] and the merchant class who supported anything that filled their coffers.
The rage and fury of the guillotine as royal heads rolled into baskets shocked the royals of Europe, and immediately France became the enemy of all Europe. Saint-Domingue, the French colonial gem that shared island space with the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo [now the Dominican Republic], which I must insist must not be confused with the island of Dominica, demanded upon sound grounds the transference of the French revolution to address issues in that colony; this erupted in the Caribbean’s longest arena of conflict, and history’s only successful slave rebellion.
France was in constant conflict, and out of that rose Napoleon Bonaparte [who despised the revolution] as ‘First Counsel’, while in Saint-Domingue, incredible leaders, the equivalent of Napoleon, also emerged, among them Henri Christophe, Dessalines and the brilliant Toussaint L’Ouverture, whose humanity, lack of resources and management of overwhelming odds exceeded Bonaparte in many areas.
The French colony of Saint-Domingue, upon liberation from the monstrous yoke of slavery after ten years of conflict, defeated the order of genocide commanded by Napoleon in the largest military fleet to embark for the Caribbean. His misled army was deminished, as were the English before them, resulting with the birth of Haiti.
But this was the only free Afro nation in the Americas. In 1825, the French used another military fleet to force Haiti to compensate their planter tormentors, that took Haiti until 1947 to pay France a total of the modern equivalent of $21B. Indeed a sadistic revenge, this was the only successful slave revolution in history, and the only nation subjected by its enslavers to pay towards its own impoverishment.
This happened because it was free and alone between the New World twin continents of slave nations. One sensible initiative the modern CARICOM nations can employ is to encourage a contingent of teachers to allow English to become a common language in Haiti. They are, by history and culture, a Caribbean people. And this is not new. Henri Christophe, who had declared himself King of Haiti, had envisioned this as necessary almost 200 years ago.