|
Books by Clarence J. Munford
Production relations, class and Black liberation: A
Marxist perspective in Afro-American studies
(1978)
The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the
French West Indies 1625-1715
(1991)
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century (1996) /
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality
(2003)
* * * *
*
Boukman
and His Comrades
Haiti Becomes Pariah of Western Powers
By Clarence J. Munford The run-up to the great blow struck by
Boukman and his comrades still provides the best and most
detailed example of a revolutionary situation in the Black
race's lengthy history. By 1789 Black Haiti had readied both the
ideological and the human raw material. And Boukman and his
maroons were the vanguard organizers of the great slave
insurrection of 1791,
and even after Boukman's untimely death in battle his followers
continued as the source of the main leadership cadre.
Rank-and-file fighters were permeated with ideas that were
revolutionary under the circumstances, an ideology consisting of
firm belief in divination, trances and possession, and
prophecy.
Above all, there was fervid faith that
those leading the fight for freedom were instilled with cosmic
energy and could not err, the whole backed with the "Raynalism"
outlined earlier. The revolutionary situation was compounded by
a severe provisions crisis spreading a famine that helped to
mobilize the slaves, and by the deep division among the whites.
Separatism caused friction between wealthy slaveholders who
wanted to break free from colonial overlord France, on one side,
and high crown officials whose jobs depended on the imperial
ties, on the other.
 |
But both wings of the white slaveholding
aristocracy regarded the poor whites with cold contempt. Poor
whites hated and envied the white aristocrats above them. To a
man, though, they despised slaves, mulattos, and free Blacks.
Poor whites chafed with frustrated desire to own slaves and lord
it over Black people. The pivotal notion of their racist
superiority complex was an unshakeable belief in white skin
privilege, no matter how poor and low-down the white man. These
poor whites were the most ferocious defenders of what they
considered the ennobling quality of whiteness.
In short, these cleavages among the
island's white inhabitants prevented a united front against the
Black insurgents until it was too late.
|
Lastly, an essential ingredient in the
revolutionary situation was the happenstance that the Black
slaves---the sole revolutionary class in the country---were
suffering worsening working conditions precisely at the moment
when individual manumission was being closed down, and runaways
were even being shipped forcibly to the plantations from as far
away as France.
The Haitians waged a long and bitter
guerrilla war and took exacting revenge on their white
oppressors. Eventually the Black freedom fighters were left to
themselves without an international ally, as revolutionary
France succumbed to Napoleonic despotism. Terrified, the forces
of white supremacy rallied together internationally, ringing the
revolutionary infestation in the Caribbean with a grim embargo.
Having suppressed its own domestic class-revolutionaries, France
led the way. Britain, accumulating seed-capital for its
industrialization from the enslavement of Blacks and bent on
consolidating the empire upon which "the sun never
set", cooperated.
Newly-independent America, the young United
States of slaveholder Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Monroe,
anxious to protect Southern plantations, jumped in with obscene
enthusiasm. These white powers ganged up to choke Haitian
liberation in the bud. The revolutionary spark was doused before
it could ignite the Black slaves of the West Indies, USA and the
Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Haiti was isolated
diplomatically and prevented from setting off further
conflagrations, as the white "Great Powers" of the
time slapped a ban on the infant Black state as pitiless as the
one the United States maintains against revolutionary Cuba
today.
Haiti became a pariah, and by the early
19th century had been driven into dire poverty. A series of
corrupt puppet regimes were foisted on the people, culminating
in the Ton-Ton Macoute, the Duvaliers and military junta terror.
Such was revolutionary Haiti's punishment for having dared to
challenge white supremacy.
Source: Dr. Munford's series --
TO CHANGE
OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD * * * *
*
updated 12 April
2008 |
