*HAITI : Caribbean Dignity Unbowed*
Release from the University of the West Indies – Office of Professor
Hilary Beckles – Historian – Vice Chancellor
The democratic, nation-building debt the American nation owes the
Caribbean, and the Haitian nation in particular that resides at its
core, is not expected to be repaid but must be respected. Any nation
without a nominal notion of its own making can never comprehend the
forces that fashion it origins.
Haiti’s Caribbean vision illuminated America’s way out of its colonial
darkness. This is the debt President Trump’s America owes Toussaint
L’Ouverture’s Haiti. It’s a debt of philosophical clarity and political
maturity. It’s a debt of how to rise to its best human potential. It’s a
debt of exposure to higher standards. Haiti is really America’s Statue
of Liberty.
The President’s truth making troops might not know, and probably care
little for the fact that Haitian people were first in this modern world
to build a nation completely free of the human scourge of slavery and
native genocide. It might be worthless in their world view that Haiti’s
leadership made the Caribbean the first civilization in modernity to
criminalize and constitutionally uproot such crimes against humanity and
to proceed with sustainability to build a nation upon the basis of
universal freedom.
The tale of their two constitutions tells this truth. The American
Independence Declaration of 2nd July, 1776, reinforced slavery as the
national development model for the future. The Haitian Independence
Declaration, 1st January, 1804, defined slavery a crime and banished it
from its borders. Haiti, then, became the first nation in the world to
enforce a provision of personal democratic freedom for all, and did so
at a time when America was deepening its slavery roots.
The USA, therefore should daily bow before Haiti and thank it for the
lessons it taught in how to conceptualize and create a democratic
political and social order. Having built their nation on the pillars of
property rights in humans, and realizing a century later that slavery
and freedom could not coexist in the same nation, Americans returned to
the battlefield to litigate the century’s bloodiest defining and
deciding civil war.
Haiti was and will remain this hemisphere’s mother of modern democracy
and the Caribbean the cradle of the first ethical civilization. For
President Trump, therefore, to define the Caribbean’s noble heroes of
human freedom, whose sacrifice was to empower and enlighten his nation
in its darkest days as a site of human degradation, is beyond
comprehension. It is a brutal bashing of basic truths that are in need,
not of violation, but celebration.
Haiti, then, is mankind’s monument to its triumphant rise from the
demonic descent into despair to the forging of its first democratic
dispensation. It is home to humanity’s most resilient people who are the
persistent proof of the unrelenting intent of the species to let freedom
rain and reign.
Thankfully, many fine souls dedicated to social justice have risen to
‘write this wrong’ into the public record. Let’s take comfort in
recalling one such line drawn on the highway of history. In this 2018
White House attempt to diminish Caribbean Civilization let’s read aloud
a part of William Wordsworth’s 1802 celebratory sonnet to Toussaint
L’Ouverture of Haiti, the greatest democracy mind of modernity:
"…though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live and take comfort. Thou have left behind
Powers that will work for thee,
Air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
that will forget thee; thou have
great allies;
thy friends are exultation, agonies, and love,
and man’s unconquerable mind."
Professor Hilary Beckles,
Vice Chancellor,
University of the West Indies.
|