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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Christmas in Hell
Or A
Dread of Black Freedom
By John Maxwell
Christmas in Jamaica is bad enough. One good thing about
Christmas Day is that it means the end of weeks of aural
assaults by mindless rhymesters perverting songs of
worship to paeans of praise for hucksters of all kinds,
from shopkeepers to banks, from autoparts dealers to
purveyors of cheap, non-returnable, eminently breakable,
non-biodegradable trash tricked out in plastic, tinsel
and lead paint to lure innocent children and entrap
their parents. And, as a bonus, there are the
sound-system parties, which allow you to dance in your
own home to music played two miles away.
An Alternative Scenario
If you
think this is bad, consider another scenario.
Consider that you are a citizen of another land, one
steeped in history—a history of resistance to
oppression, a history which includes the first
proclamation on Earth that all people were equal,
including women and children.
This land, which for convenience we'll call Ayiti, was
introduced to Christianity by a bunch of marauding
savages bearing swords and caparisoned in the fierce
colours of their leader, a Genoese adventurer named
Cristobal Colon, aka Christopher Columbus. This
character had induced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand,
the monarchs of two Spanish kingdoms—Aragon and
Castile—to bet their farms on the discovery of a new
route to China, then as now, the fabulous land of
magical herbs, spices, and other goods which would make
life bearable for the inhabitants of Europe, just
emerging from the Dark Ages.
Our hero had managed to convince Ferdinand and Isabella
on the basis of a map obtained from an African who
claimed to know the way to China aka Cipangu. If the
Spanish got to Cipangu before their European cousins,
great wealth and power would be theirs; all the tea in
China would be theirs for the asking, in addition to
carpets, silks and luxuries only dreamt of in Europe.
When Columbus' "doom burdened caravels" hove to in Ayiti,
the million or so people who welcomed him could never
have guessed that they would soon be history. Within
thirty years the populations of the West Indies had been
so reduced that in the four larger islands now
re-christened the Greater Antilles) less than a thousand
remained alive in 1519. This is according to the
testimony of Bartolomeo de las Casas, a Spanish monk who
came with the conquistadors and was an eyewitness to the
Conquest. Another historian, Gonzalo Oviedo, estimated
that of the one million Indians on Ayiti when the
Spaniards arrived, less than five hundred remained half
a century later– the "natives and … the progeny and
lineage " of those who first occupied the land.
‘They died in heaps, like bedbugs …’
In the Caribbean and in Mexico, Peru and Colombia
smallpox and other diseases introduced by the Spaniards
killed the 'Indians' by the million. Relatively small
Spanish expeditions were able to conquer huge empires
because the native populations were swept away by
diseases to which they had never been exposed and for
which they had no immunity.
Toribio Motolina, another Spanish priest, wrote that in
most provinces in Mexico "more than one half the
population died; in others the proportion was a little
less; they died in heaps, like bedbugs."
More than a hundred years after Motolina, a German
missionary writing in 1699, said the so-called Indians
"die so easily that the bare look and smell of a
Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost."
The destruction of the 'American Indian' populations and
cultures has meant an incalculable loss to human ethnic
and cultural diversity. It was they who gave us words
like barbecue, canoe, hammock and hurricane and crops
like corn, potatoes, cassava and tomatoes. The people
of ancient Egypt, the pyramid builders seem very far
away in time; the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and Incas, who
also built pyramids and played games very much like
basketball, soccer and Jai alai, seem much closer.
To Jamaicans and people of the Caribbean, the sense of
loss is almost palpable in relation to the lost
civilisations of Africa, destroyed by the slave trade,
which, like globalisation, set brother against brother,
tribe against tribe and nation against nation.
Africa was targeted because the Europeans knew that
their own people could not survive for long in the hot,
humid, mosquito-ridden Indies and that sugar, replacing
gold, as the commodity most likely to make men rich, was
too hard a work for them.
Turning to Africa meant the devastation of many ancient
civilisations – many disappearing almost without trace,
further impoverishing mankind's cultural diversity and
robbing Africa of the populations and skills it needed
for its own development.
Although the Europeans found large quantities of gold,
silver and copper in the "New World’, gold was never as
lucrative as sugar and the cotton and rubber extracted
from the plantations of the Americas. And nothing was as
lucrative as the slave trade
As Sybille Fischer remarks in her book Modernity
Disavowed: “Colonialism in the Caribbean had
produced societies where brutality combined with
licentiousness in ways unknown in Europe. The sugar
plantations in the new World were expanding rapidly and
had an apparently limitless hunger for slaves.”
'A
wretch like me!'
One of the modern Jamaicans' favourite hymns at funerals
is 'Amazing Grace' penned by a slave trader after he
retired from the trade, rich and comfortable. It was his
way of atoning for his crimes, and perhaps, of saying
thanks to God.
Nothing can atone for the misery and degradation imposed
on the 25 million or more people transported into
slavery or the millions more slaughtered when they
fought to avoid capture. Nothing can atone for five
hundred years of racist victimisation, nor the five
hundred years of brutality and dangerous behaviours,
beaten, inculcated and burned into the psyches of the
enslaved and their descendants.
The inhabitants of Ayiti, now almost all African, like
the people of all the enslaved islands and lands of the
Americas, were engaged in an unending struggle to
destroy slavery. In Surinam, in Barbados, and Grenada in
the United States of America, in Nicaragua and in the
Caribbean the slaves rose time after time to break their
chains. In Jamaica they had some success. The Maroons
fought the much better armed British to a standstill and
wrested from them a treaty of non-aggression and
non-interference in 1739. It was a treaty soon broken by
the British.
Desperation and the will to be free fuelled the Tacky
rebellion of 1760. This rebellion dwarfed the Maroon
Wars and was an islandwide conspiracy, which lasted six
months. The aims of the leaders included driving out the
white population, and partitioning Jamaica into
principalities in the tradition of the Akan-speaking
Koromanti who were at the heart of the rebellion. One of
them, a man called Bouckman, fled to Ayiti when the
rebellion was finally crushed.
There, in Ayiti, he ignited a struggle for freedom,
which ended with the expulsion of the last foreign
soldiers from Ayisien soil.
In 1804, after ten years of warfare, the rebel slaves
and their free allies defeated the armies of Napoleon
(twice), and of Britain and Spain. Dessalines declared
Ayiti independent and free and declared the country a
refuge from slavery anywhere.
He also pronounced the first known declaration of
universal human rights, giving legal equality to all
human beings, men, women and children.
It was a hundred and forty four years later, in 1948
that the world caught up with Ayiti in producing the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Next December 10, almost exactly a year from now, the
world will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the
United Nation's proclamation of the Universal
Declaration.
The
preamble to the Declaration is not very well known. It
goes like this:
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Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity
and of the equal and inalienable rights of
all members of the human family is the
foundation of freedom, justice and peace in
the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human
rights have resulted in barbarous acts,
which have outraged the conscience of
mankind;
And the advent of a world, in which human
beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and
belief and freedom from fear and want has
been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of
the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be
compelled to have recourse, as a last
resort, to rebellion against tyranny and
oppression, that human rights should be
protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the
development of friendly relations between
nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations
have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith
in fundamental human rights, in the dignity
and worth of the human person and in the
equal rights of men and women and have
determined to promote social progress and
better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged
themselves to achieve, in co-operation with
the United Nations, the promotion of
universal respect for and observance of
human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these
rights and freedoms is of the greatest
importance for the full realization of this
pledge,
"Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF
HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of
achievement for all peoples and all nations,
to the end that every individual and every
organ of society, keeping this Declaration
constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching
and education to promote respect for these
rights and freedoms and by progressive
measures, national and international, to
secure their universal and effective
recognition and observance, both among the
peoples of Member States themselves and
among the peoples of territories under their
jurisdiction. |
The
declaration then proceeds to list the basic principles
of the declaration beginning with Article 1.which says
that
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All human beings are born
free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and
should act towards one another in a spirit
of brotherhood. |
And it
continues to explain in Article 2 that
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Everyone is entitled to all the rights
and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as
race, colour, sex, language, religion,
political or other opinion, national or
social origin, property, birth or other
status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be
made on the basis of the political,
jurisdictional or international status of
the country or territory to which a person
belongs, whether it be independent, trust,
non-self-governing or under any other
limitation of sovereignty. |
The declaration is intended to be universal, as was
Dessalines’ declaration in 1804. Unfortunately for us
there are billions of people in this world including
many in this country, who do not enjoy all the benefits
of this universal declaration. But some are much worse
off than others. Among those are the people of Iraq, of
Palestine and right next door to us, the people of Ayiti,
that imaginary place where slavery was abolished by the
slaves themselves.
In
Ayiti, aka Haiti, these rights and the Universal
Declaration do not apply.
Rather
like the captured Islamists in neighbouring Guantanamo
Bay, a little to their northwest, the Haitians all 8
million of them, live in a concentration camp. The
Haitian version is designed to stifle their freedoms and
liberties and engineered to prevent them from being led
by leaders of their own choice.
Nearly
four years after US Marine were landed there for the
third time in a hundred years, the freely elected
president of Ayiti is an exile in South Africa. He was
kidnapped from the presidential palace by US Marines led
by the US Ambassador to Haiti and transported, as
"cargo" with his family to the Central African
Republic – the American idea of hell on earth. From
there he was rescued in a mission led by the black US
congresswoman Maxine Waters and TransAfrica founder
Randall Robinson. They chartered a plane and headed off
to the Central African Republic themselves to bring
President Aristide and his wife Mildred and their two
daughters back to the Caribbean. It took them hours of
negotiating with the country’s dictator to get him to
release the Aristides.
President Aristide came to Jamaica where the government
felt constrained by tradition and popular sentiment, to
welcome him, but found itself unable to resist US
pressure to get him out of the Caribbean.
Aristide's sin was to want to fulfill the mission of his
ancestors, to build a paradise on the dungheap left
behind by Haiti’s colonisers and exploiters.
Nearly
four years later a Haitian president is in office but
Aristide's and his people’s enemies are in power.
The
country is ruled by the US Ambassador, and is policed by
a so-called United Nations force – MINUSTAH whose second
commander, a Brazilian General killed himself after a
friendly chat with leaders of the Haitian elite.
MINUSTAH’s only distinctions are killing a large number
of women and children in their pursuit of so-called
bandits who seem to be mainly pro-Aristide youth, and
the rape and other sexual abuse of young Haitian
children, some as young as ten.
A
Dread of Black Freedom
From
the earliest days as an independent nation the Americans
have feared and dreaded Haiti. As an asylum for escaped
slaves, it threatened the slave system in the American
south. And after France extorted billions of dollars in
gold from Haiti in 'compensation' for the loss of
capital (slaves) and land, in Haiti, the US lent money
to the Haitians to pay the debt and ruined them with the
interest.
As I
have said before: while arms never subdued Haiti, it was
defeated by the power of financiers in a sinister
preview of the modern tactics of the IMF and the World
Bank.
Despite all the harassment, the 10,000 murders of
activists and leaders, the Haitian people, united in the
Fanmi Lavalas, have continued to support their leaders
and their culture. A few months ago one of their
leaders, Dr. Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, was kidnapped
after a meeting with some Americans. He has not been
heard from since. A few weeks later another leader, Dr
Marlyse Narcisse, was kidnapped but released when there
was a tremendous howl of Haitian and international
outrage that apparently embarrassed the powers that rule
Haiti.
And so
the Haitians survive, without rights, at the mercy of a
United Nations corrupted and intimidated by the power of
the United States, Canada and France acting in concert.
The
United States, Canada, France and Haiti all signed the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
They
all agreed that “. . . disregard and contempt for human
rights have resulted in barbarous acts, which have
outraged the conscience of mankind and they promised
to make the world a more civilized place.
The
spectacle of these three self-styled democracies
combining to crush the rights and hopes of 8 million
poor people is obscene, but perhaps not as revolting as
the fact that Haiti's relatives and friends in the
Caribbean, Jamaica and the others, but especially
Jamaica, can sit and watch the Haitians’ sojourn in Hell
as if they were watching a Disney fantasia or a
Christmas Pantomime.
Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Related
link:
A Conversation with Randall Robinson
(video)
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
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1965
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 30 December 2007
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