-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Durban: Understanding Haiti (analysis of Patrick Verteuil)
Date: 2020-10-10 17:07
From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Moderator <moderator@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Dear Corbetters,
Here is a cut and paste of an old piece by Patrick de Verteuil, a
gentleman I met in Jeremie, shortly after my arrival in Haiti back in
1979. I was a consultant on a UNDP housing project in Port-au-Prince,
but there had been a fire in one of the bidonvilles of Jeremie, and the
head of the Office National de Logement asked our team of 5 to go out
and see what could be done.... with the possibility of a $25,000
emergency grant from USAID. Well, nothing ever came of the grant, but
Patrick de Verteuil, living in Abricot with his Haitian wife heard that
there were 5 "blan" in town, and decided to hike in to meet us. A very
interesting fellow, who died unexpectedly probably 20 years ago. In any
event, I came across this while cleaning out some old files. Can't
recall if it ever posted on the Corbett Group, but thought some of you
might find it interesting, and I attach a pdf file which may print out
if our Corbett Group attachs pdf files.
Take care, stay safe, and let us know what you think of Patrick's
analysis here.
Cheers,
Lance Durban
Understanding Haiti
By Patrick de Verteuil
Most of the posts on this list are concerned with the recent past, the
present and the future. It may help put these in perspective to look at
the distant past. It is pretty obvious that Haiti is different. But why
and how is it different?
Much of Haiti¹s history deals with color conflicts; black versus
mulatto. There certainly has been a great deal of tension along color
lines but I believe that this is a red herring in that most of the color
conflicts have been between members of the same clan. The real,
important conflict lies elsewhere. Let me explain.
There are basically two ways to run a slave economy:
1.) You buy an initial group of slaves, work them hard but not too hard
so that they reproduce and create a self-perpetuating machine. You only
buy new slaves when your plantation expands and you need a lot more than
you have.
2.) You buy an initial group of slaves and work them to death. You then
buy new, replacement slaves.
Slave based economies in the new world operated on variations on these
two basic models. It would appear that the planters in St Domingue by
and large favored model number two. Plantations were expanding all the
way to the official end of slavery in 1793. Very few new slaves were
imported from Africa after this date but the end result was that when
Haiti became independent it had a far larger proportion of ³Bossales²
(born in Africa) to creoles (born in the islands) than was common in the
rest of the western world. By the time slavery was abolished everywhere
else in the Americas (except in Haiti) the slave trade was long dead and
nearly everybody was a Creole.
This is where Haiti is unique. It started out in 1804 as an independent
state with two separate and distinct societies on one small piece of
land.
The creoles had been brought up in a French colonial environment and
whether slave owners, (near white or black) overseers, foremen, artisans
or field hands they had all been raised speaking Creole and to some
extent indoctrinated into the French colonial model.
When the French in France cried “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,”
the creoles at the top of the pile in St Domingue (mostly mulattoes)
said “How about us.” And were rebuffed. The revolution that followed
was more about taking over the privileged place of the French than about
freeing the slaves.
The slaves were officially freed (and armed to fight the Spaniards, the
English and eventually the French) but all the Creole leaders:
Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Petion, Boyer and Christophe wrote one
or another version of a ³Code Rural² that attempted to tie the rural
masses (mostly Bossales) to the land.
When Independence came in 1804 and the dust settled the Bossales refused
to play the game. They moved away from the plantations into the hills
and set up as independent farmers mostly interested in producing for
their own consumption. The creoles were too few to impose their will and
as the plantations died they recycled into commerce or politics.
There were a few hiccups along the way; the Piquet rebellion for
instance, but by and large each group accepted its place. To the creoles
and their descendants went the urban landscape which includes politics,
government, commerce and the army (The village of Abricots where I live
sees itself as urban, merely on the frontier with the rural world). The
Bossales and their descendants were left the rural environment, with
each generation moving further up the mountain to clear new land.
The urban Creole society developed as a somewhat poor copy of
Judeo/Christian European society. The Bossales and their descendants
created a new and very different society.
The rural masses (half the population) are highly individualized. Their
low, if not non-existent community feeling is replaced by an
all-embracing family feeling. (Your family is your thing and you are
your family¹s thing!) Profoundly attached to the land they revere the
elderly, the old and more particularly their dead. Whilst above average
in honesty they have little regard for truth. Paradoxically they are
extraordinarily credulous and great believers in magic. They live
entirely in the present for tomorrow may never come!
I refer interested readers to the work of Gérard Barthélémy:
particularly Créoles Bossales: Conflit en Haiti. Barthélémy was
one of the first researchers to write on the Bossale question.
For at least one hundred years these two societies lived side by side
with very limited interaction.
The women took the farm surplus to market whilst the men stayed home for
fear that the urban world would dragoon them into a rebel or a
government army.
From generation to generation, as the population expanded and the thin
topsoil of the hills wore out or was eroded, the peasantry moved up the
mountain. Around 1900 the rural world ran out of new land to deforest
and cultivate and began a forced exodus to the towns (and to the sugar
cane fields of Cuba and the Dominican republic). The City culture did
not colonize the country; the country colonized the town and brought it
its peculiar mores and customs, which have gradually filtered, into the
life of the poorer city dwellers.
In addition the middle class and the elite adopted a policy of assigning
one maid to each child. These maids, present 100% of the time in the
child¹s life (as opposed to the 1% presence of the mother) tended to be
country girls, considered more reliable and serious than the urban poor.
From birth to the age of five (when the good ³Frères de
l¹Instruction Chrétienne² took over in their elite schools to teach
the primacy of French and the inferiority of Creole (and Creole
speakers), the future leaders, deciders and managers of Haiti were
raised by illiterate peasant girls steeped in Voodoo, superstition and
the very different ideas of the Bossales. By the time the Brothers took
over it was too late for the mindsets of a lifetime were already
established.
Attachment:
Understanding Haiti.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
