Haiti’s Need for a Great South

The island of Ayiti, as it was named by its original inhabitants, was captured by Europeans in 1492. The conquerors enslaved and decimated its population and re-peopled it with indentured servants from their own country and captives from the African continent. As the French government could not effectively control the conditions of the new comers from Africa who were brought in en masse at the end of the 18th century, the captives found themselves in a position to ensure that the imposed conditions of living did not affect significantly their inherited identity and their locally accumulated experience. Over the years, they mustered sufficient know-how to build an autonomous sovereign space in the heart of the European exploitive system. They brought the colonial society to an unmanageable crisis, and the island, renamed Haiti, severed its links with its captors. The successors of the European colonial world had then to negotiate a modus vivendi with the descendants of the enslaved captives whose society flourished during the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, the United States reinstated the descendants of the Europeans in power and took steps to annihilate the knowledge and experience accumulated by the bulk of the population. As a result, the limitations which triggered the destructive crisis at the end of the 18th century are presently forcing the international community to take charge of the sinking Haitian political system they connived with the local oligarchies. The paper concludes proposing a linkage of the local search for identity and self-expression to the effort of people pursuing similar objectives worldwide, in order to salvage the wealth of knowledge accumulated in the two centuries of struggle for national sovereignty.