Haiti : Toussaint L'Overture Haiti's Pride

AACOOLDRE

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WHY I LOVE HAITI???
By Andre Austin

Contents

1. Excerpt from The Suppression of African Slave trade By Dubois
2. Pat Moynihan Crisis of the Negro Family. Pat praises the Catholics slavery in Brazil and says they didn’t create Sambos like America did. Failed to mention Catholics in Haiti
3. Pat Robertson Curses Haiti
4. Report from Tobias Lear
5. The Negro in Our History By Carter G. Woodson.
6. “Haiti on my Mind” poem by Andre Austin


Toussaint Louverture a black Solider made an alliance with Mulattoes in Haiti to take their freedom from the Catholic French and their King Napoleon. Toussaint used his indigenous culture and religion to serve the people of Haiti. The Romans used roads to keep their empire and the British used ships to prevent the sun from setting on her empire, Hitler used race purity. Toussaint used black pride and voodism to use as psychological warfare. However, the main thing that brought down the French was weak immunize system to yellow fever was their curse and price for lowering the humanity of a people.

Haiti was not a curse to itself but a blessing for itself and a blessing for America. Toussaint encouragers black Americans to revolt and force Napoleon to sell the Louisiana terroirty , in 1803, which consisted of forming an additional 13 states for America. By fighting Toussaint Napoleon went broke and had to sell a vast land about 25% of the land that makes up America today. America wouldn’t be the almighty nation it is without this additional land lost to a fight with black people over slavery. Now in Haiti before the earthquake hit them the Mulattoes rule over the majority black population of Haiti. They had an alliance together when it was convenient and to their advantage. Now they are in the same boat but only temporarily then the caste system will return in full effect. No permanent friends just permanent interest.

Here is a brief outline of Haiti taken from giants like Dubois and Carter to shine light on Haiti’s past to get a grip on their future.

1. The Suppression of the Slave Trade By Dubois:

Influence of the Haytian Revolution.~ The role which the great
Negro Toussaint, called L'Ouverture, played in the history of the United
States has seldom been fully appreciated. Representing the age of
revolution in America, he rose to leadership through a bloody terror,
which contrived a Negro "problem" for the Western Hemisphere,
intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the
causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana
for a song, and finally, through the interworking of all these effects,
rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the
United States in 1807“. The US also freezed emigration of slaves from Haiti due to fear they would infect their homegrown slaves with lofty ideas of liberty.


Toussaint as quiet indirectly caused lawmakers and slave owners to get more tough on teaching slaves to read and write. Slavery and letters didn’t mix no more than electronics and water do. The more alarming insurrections of the first quarter of the nineteenth century were the immediate cause of the most reactionary measures. It was easily observed that these movements were due to the mental improvement of the colored people during the struggle for the rights of man. Gabriel Prosser (1800) Denmark Vessey (1822) and Nat Turner (1831) were all influenced by Toussaint, they all could read and all of them used culture and religion to serve as vehicles to revolt against slavery and kill for their freedom. From then on 1791-1865 southerners of all types thereafter attacked the policy of educating Negroes. You can’t control a man who can read and write. Even a man in prison you can contain his body behind bars but his soul and mind can travel anywhere the imagination and the exposure of wisdom through letters can offer.

2. Pat Moynihan Chapter III The Roots of the Problem:
Slavery
The most perplexing question abut American slavery, which has never been altogether explained, and which indeed most Americans hardly know exists, has been stated by Nathan Glazer as follows: "Why was American slavery the most awful the world has ever known?" The only thing that can be said with certainty is that this is true: it was.
American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than, any recorded servitude, ancient or modern. The peculiar nature of American slavery was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville and others, but it was not until 1948 that Frank Tannenbaum, a South American specialist, pointed to the striking differences between Brazilian and American slavery. The feudal, Catholic society of Brazil had a legal and religious tradition which accorded the slave a place as a human being in the hierarchy of society -- a luckless, miserable place, to be sure, but a place withal. In contrast, there was nothing in the tradition of English law or Protestant theology which could accommodate to the fact of human bondage -- the slaves were therefore reduced to the status of chattels -- often, no doubt, well cared for, even privileged chattels, but chattels nevertheless.
Glazer, also focusing on the Brazil-United States comparison, continues.
"In Brazil, the slave had many more rights than in the United States: he could legally marry, he could, indeed had to, be baptized and become a member of the Catholic Church, his family could not be broken up for sale, and he had many days on which he could either rest or earn money to buy his freedom. The Government encouraged manumission, and the freedom of infants could often be purchased for a small sum at the baptismal font. In short: the Brazilian slave knew he was a man, and that he differed in degree, not in kind, from his master."
"[In the United States,] the slave was totally removed from the protection of organized society (compare the elaborate provisions for the protection of slaves in the Bible), his existence as a human being was given no recognition by any religious or secular agency, he was totally ignorant of and completely cut off from his past, and he was offered absolutely no hope for the future. His children could be sold, his marriage was not recognized, his wife could be violated or sold (there was something comic about calling the woman with whom the master permitted him to live a 'wife'), and he could also be subject, without redress, to frightful barbarities -- there were presumably as many sadists among slave-owners, men and women, as there are in other groups. The slave could not, by law, be taught to read or write; he could not practice any religion without the permission of his master, and could never meet with his fellows, for religious or any other purposes, except in the presence of a white; and finally, if a master wished to free him, every legal obstacle was used to thwart such action. This was not what slavery meant in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, or in Brazil and the West Indies, which included Haiti.
"More important, American slavery was also awful in its effects. If we compared the present situation of the American Negro with that of, let us say, Brazilian Negroes (who were slaves 20 years longer), we begin to suspect that the differences are the result of very different patterns of slavery. Today the Brazilian Negroes are Brazilians; though most are poor and do the hard and dirty work of the country, as Negroes do in the United States, they are not cut off from society. They reach into its highest strata, merging there -- in smaller and smaller numbers, it is true, but with complete acceptance -- with other Brazilians of all kinds. The relations between Negroes and whites in Brazil show nothing of the mass irrationality that prevails in this country."
Stanley M. Elkins, drawing on the aberrant behavior of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, drew an elaborate parallel between the two institutions. This thesis has been summarized as follows by Thomas Pettigrew:
"Both were closed systems, with little chance of manumission, emphasis on survival, and a single, omnipresent authority. The profound personality change created by Nazi internment, as independently reported by a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who survived, was toward childishness and total acceptance of the SS guards as father-figures -- a syndrome strikingly similar to the 'Sambo' caricature of the Southern slave. Nineteenth-century racists readily believed that the 'Sambo' personality was simply an inborn racial type. Yet no African anthropological data have ever shown any personality type resembling Sambo; and the concentration camps molded the equivalent personality pattern in a wide variety of Caucasian prisoners. Nor was Sambo merely a product of 'slavery' in the abstract, for the less devastating Latin American system never developed such a type.
"Extending this line of reasoning, psychologists point out that slavery in all its forms sharply lowered the need for achievement in slaves... Negroes in bondage, stripped of their African heritage, were placed in a completely dependent role. All of their rewards came, not from individual initiative and enterprise, but from absolute obedience [see Titus 2:9] a situation that severely depresses the need for achievement among all peoples. Most important of all, slavery vitiated family life... Since many slave-owners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern." .

Moynihan failed to mention that the Sambo character was an invention of whites, an antidote to the fear they had of Sambo alter ego of Nat Turner, Prosser and Vessey who all could read and write and knew about Toussaint. I wonder why Moynihan failed to talk about the Catholics who controlled the Louisiana Territory until it was sold to America. The Catholic Spanish and French owned slaves in America. They generally liberated their mulatto offspring and sometimes recognized them as their equals. The Spanish and French Catholics did more than the English to enlighten their slaves. The code Noir said every Negroe be baptized, keep old slaves, rest on all Sundays, on paper it outlawed corrupting female slaves. However by 1900 “The wrong which these gentelemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of 2 million mulattoes, and written in effaceable blood” (Souls of Black Folk p.82). And lastly the Mulatto’s in Brazil now practice a color caste system on the dark-skinned blacks. Some legacy the Catholics left there.

3. Pat Roberts Cursed Haiti for using voodoo on the Catholic French for their quest for freedom. The curse wasn’t Voodoo but yellow fever. Pat wanted the blacks in Haiti to wake for white people to unilaterally decide to grant freedom to whites and that’s why he wants God to curse the people. The Hebrews wanted to curse Black people in the Noah and Ham story in the Bible. I reject the use of Egyptian mythology of Noah and Ham and then turn it around and use it against or culture, religion and history. The Minstrel show of the hip hop rappers can go all the way back to the Babylonian Talmud and Genesis.

4. A REPORT FROM ST. DOMINGUE By Tobias Lear

Lear was an assistant to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson sent him to Haiti to chat with Toussaint

Nothing compared to the fear. To a man, the natives of St Domingue believe in voodoo. During the nights of sweltering heat, when one’s bed sheets are soaked before dawn, we can hear from our lodgings in the capital the endless drums-the same tom-toms that one heard on august 22, 1791, when the voodoo priest Toussaint and the blacks rioted, torching and killing every white man, woman, and child they saw. Yes it is true that the insurrection hoisted on high dead white babies impaled on their swords, but as to the report of cannibalism, I have yet to receive information. The smell of that white massacre lingers on the air. it’s a chilling sound, these drums. Three are employed: the natives call them the mamma drum, papa drum, and baby drum, and while they are played the blacks perform a wild dance called the meringue. I have personally witnessed voodoo rites, where witch doctors transmogrify the dead and sometimes living men into zombies.

I believe , when in your notes (Notes on the state of Virginia) you observe the inferiority of pure-bred blacks at Monticello, their childlike nature (Sambo), their physical proximity to the apes, and their inability to grasp the arts and science.

This is the first all black nation in the Western hemisphere, living free from whites for the first time since 1512. I believe Tossaisant deliberately seated me in a chair shorter than others at the table. You (Thomas Jefferson) consider its leaders to be property that has illegally seized a freedom it does not deserve and that their successful examples of insurrection sends a dangerous message to our negroes on our shores

I saw it for a moment he held a clay white doll of me, one with a pin stuck in its belly.

My family and I have encountered enough and repeal my appointment. If you do not, I fear this may well be the last communication from (Africans in America) By Charles Johnson p.259-263
Truly yours,
Tobias Lear



5. The Negro in our History By Carter G. Woodson

The story of Toussaint (Saint) Louverture made a deep impression on the minds of a few negro leaders. The situation in Santo Domingo was a complication. The eastern end of the island was Spanish and western , French. Further difficulty resulted from having in this French portion 50,000 creoles, an equal number of mulattoes and about a half-million negroes of pure African blood. All elements desired to avail themselves of the equality guaranteed French citizens by the general assembly of the French revolution. The mulattoes first asked for the extension of these rights to them. After being baffled by grant ambigusly phrased, they finally heard the decree extending to the people of color of free ancestry the rights and privileges.

The slaves struck for freedom on August 23, 1791, and killed off their masters in large numbers. Hoping to undo this work, the conventional assembly of France abrogated the order extending the rights of citizens and sent troops to put down the insurrection. At this juncture there forged ahead an unusual character. This was Toussaint, an experienced soldier 48 years old. The triumph of Toussaint upset the dreams of napoleon Bonaparte. The French army was decimated not only by guerilla warfare but the yellow fever”.

Haiti culture has retained more of its Africaness more than the souls of black folk in America. The religion called Vodun returns the dead to heaven or homebound in Africa.

Notes:

Gabriel Prosser exempted Methodist, Quakers and Frenchmen from being killed. He was a literate blacksmith. Pardoned by Governor Tim Kaine in 2007. Big admirer of Toussaint.

Demark Vessey name was used by Frederick Douglass during the Civil War. Inspired by Haiti revolution

Nat Turner a light skinned but not mulatto. A man of letters inspired by Haiti revolution.



HAITI ON MY MIND
By Andre Austin

I tell you Haiti they both will die, (Pat & Rush)
Each one at the hand of his own brother. Their
Deaths are near. There will be corpses everywhere,
Corpses piled on corpses, men struck down
By earthquake and concrete falling, and there will be mourning
And wailing in the land of Haiti.

Poorest city of Haiti, will be buried with them
if no one heeds my words. Far better for Haiti
That none of the brood of the Doc’s should live either
In this land as citizens, let alone as kings and princes
A father’s sacred curse possesses them;
They will not destroy this city either, neither words of bigots.

But because
The good here outweighs the evil, one way out not between light man v dark man
One way only, remain to us. What that
Way is, it is not safe for me to say (pure love)
And it will be bitter to those whom fate gives no heart
The power to preserve the city of Haiti
Comes from love from below and above.

I’am in a rage.
 

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