- 97 The
effects of the Atlantic slave trade on African life are still visible as
we come to the end of the twentieth century.
100 Paul Lovejoy's estimate of some twelve million persons loaded on ships at the African coastline is one most would accept.
102 The long experience of the slave trade must have had a profound effect on the thinking of Africans. . . . Slavery and the slave trade . . . brought dreams of wealth and power, as seen in . . . the golden regalia of Asante . . . On the other hand it brought the rejection of hierarchy and a strong desire for independence and equality. This egalitarian ideal is evident in the willingness of people to live in isolated villages to avoid submitting to slave raiders, and in the development of an artistic tradition, abstract in form, that emphasized ties to the ancestors and to such basic life forces as the earth. The position of women in African society today reflects both sides of the earlier choice: women play full and independent social roles, especially in commerce; yet the majority of slaves in Africa were women, and all women have suffered some oppression as a result.
-
Miami Herald, The (FL)
BLACK HISTORY IS EVERYONE'S HISTORY
December 3, 1998
LEONARD PITTS JR., Herald Staff Writer
This is a column about hating black history. It's occasioned by a question I've heard more often than I'd like: What do you want from me?
Happens every time I write about the harsh days of slavery or Jim Crow. Some white reader will pick up the phone or dash off an e-mail asking the same thing: Why are you telling me this? What do you want from me?The last person to ask was a 17-year-old girl. I've often been asked that question by older people, the implication being that I sought to bludgeon them with guilt so they might . . . I don't know, support affirmative action or something. They are terribly, tellingly defensive about the guilt they don't feel. I've learned to shine such people on.
That's not so easy with a teenager. It's her youth that gets to me, that requires an answer.
She's not alone in being discomfited by black history. Sometimes blacks are, too. I once asked an elderly black lady about a lynching she saw when she was young. She wondered why I would want to know about such a thing, kept insisting she had put that terrible night out of her mind. Her eyes were furtive, her voice trembling, and I knew she had done no such thing.
What's telling is that she felt the need to try, the fact that she did not want to deal with the pain.
It is, perhaps, also difficult to deal with if you are white. Indeed, it's not hard to see how a recitation of black history might leave you feeling indicted and accused. And resentful because of it.
I think that's what the girl was getting at when she asked her question. You could sense the walls being raised, the bridges drawn, the defenses set in place. And God, she's only 17.
Too young to be that cynical and defensive. Too young to be like the dozens of others I've met who struggle with this thing, the ones who deny, who obfuscate, who raise emotional barriers. The ones who sometimes just cry in shame.
Each response seems to spring from the same gaping irresolution, the same untreated wound. Trouble is, as a nation, we've never even acknowledged that wound exists. Black people have spent generations trying to come to grips with their passages and have done, at best, an imperfect job. Yet that process has scarcely even been contemplated for whites who, after all, went through the same passage, albeit from the other side.
We have yet to grapple, or even truly pose, the questions arising from that fact. What do you do, if you're a person of conscience, faced with a history that damns much of what your forebears did, believed and were? How do you find a comfort place with that, a space to simply be?
Which makes the girl's question -- What do you want from me? -- seem vital. Because you sense that what's being touched on here is not government programs or public policy -- she has no power over those things. Rather it's a simpler, more profound question of our ability to coexist, to be Americans, together.
I spent some time pondering what she asked me. Here's my answer:
Don't hate black history, if only because it's your history, too. It exists not to accuse you or to shame you. It simply exists. And you, every bit as much as I, have to make peace with it.
Understand that this is sacred ground and it hurts to walk here. But at the same time, I need to walk here, need the strength, the sense of purpose, the knowledge of self, that walking here imparts. And I'm obliged to witness here on behalf of those who can no longer witness for themselves, no longer say the things they saw and felt.
So please, don't tell me how to walk this ground. Don't tell me when you think I've walked it long enough. And don't think every silence needs a voice to fill it. Sometimes, silence is an opportune place to ponder and to pray.
What do I want from you?
I want you to be my sister and to walk here with me. I know it's a hard walk. I know it causes you pain.
But this much I also know: If ever we learn to tread this ground together, there's no place we can't go.
Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column runs in Living & Arts every Thursday and Saturday. To call Pitts, dial 1-800-457-3881. Please dial 1-800 even if you live in South Florida.
All content © 1998- Miami Herald, The (FL) and may not be republished without permission.
- From: BjorgP@aol.com
Subject: Re: Hating Black History
Please reply directly to Bjorg at his address, above.
I sincerely agree that Leonard Pitts' "comments" to the 17 year old are both poignant and touching. The fact that so many people respond with comments such as "what do you want from me", only illustrates the need for an honest dialog and the recognition that slavery is also a white issue. It is a human issue.
When I came to this country, nearly 10 years ago, as a white woman from the most homogeneous country you can imagine, I suddenly found myself being identified with the dominant culture, a culture that had committed atrocities that I certainly didn't want to be associated with. I resented it deeply. I had a liberal upbringing. As a child my father read to me about "the dream" of Martin Luther King. I had no white guilt, my ancestors had nothing to do with this horrible crime. Hey, my ancestors had taken white slaves and given up slavery in the year 1000.
However, I have come to realize, after years in America and a year working in Africa that this concerns me, like all human rights issues should do. Just because I happen to be born in country where we have few "others" to discriminate against, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have been just as bad if we had been in the same situation.
As much as I would like to think otherwise, there are no indications that we are any "better" than anyone else. Disassociating ourselves from crimes against humanity such as slavery, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda or the current conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, using time, place, citizenship or any other excuse, makes us passive accomplices to these act of inhumanity. It is much easier to distance ourselves or be overwhelmed, but if we remain passive such atrocities will continue to happen.
With these unsolicited thoughts I'll go back to my paper on UN reforms. Now there's a challenge.
Wishing you all peace and happiness for the holidays
Bjorg
BjorgP@aol.com
- Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis by Tunde Obadina
- http://www.afbis.com/analysis/slave.htm
"The past is what makes the present coherent," said Afro-American writer James Baldwin, and the past "will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."
Why go back five centuries to start an explanation of Africa's crisis in the late 1990s? Must every story of Africa's political and economic under-development begin with the contact with Europe? The intention is not to produce another nationalist tract on how whites, driven by lust for material possession and armed with firearms, gin and a bag full of tricks, subjugated innocent Africans who were living blissfully close to nature. The reason for looking back is that the root of the crisis facing African societies is their failure to come to terms with the consequences of that contact.
Portuguese seamen first landed in Africa in the fourth decade of the fifteenth century. From the outset they seized Africans and shipped them to Europe. In 1441 ten Africans were kidnapped from the Guinea coast and taken to Portugal as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. In subsequent expeditions to the West African coast, inhabitants were taken and shipped to Portugal to be sold as servants and objects of curiosity to households. In the Portuguese port of Lagos, where the first African slaves landed in 1442, the old slave market now serves as an art gallery.
Portuguese adventurers who sailed southeast along the Gulf of Guinea in 1472 landed on the coast of what became Nigeria. Others followed. They found people of varying cultures. Some lived in towns ruled by kings with nobility and courtiers, very much like the medieval societies they left behind them. A Dutch visitor to Benin City wrote in around 1600: "As you enter it, the town appears very great. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam...The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand..." More than a century earlier Benin exchanged ambassadors with Portugal. But not all African societies were as developed. Some enjoyed village existence in primeval forests remote from outside influences.
Economics was the driving force
From the outset, relations between Europe and Africa were economic. Portuguese merchants traded with Africans from trading posts they set up along the coast. They exchanged items like brass and copper bracelets for such products as pepper, cloth, beads and slaves - all part of an existing internal African trade. Domestic slavery was common in Africa and well before European slave buyers arrived, there was trading in humans. Black slaves were captured or bought by Arabs and exported across the Saharan desert to the Mediterranean and Near East.
In 1492, the Spaniard Christopher Columbus discovered for Europe a 'New World'. The find proved disastrous not only for the 'discovered' people but also for Africans. It marked the beginning of a triangular trade between Africa, Europe and the New World. European slave ships, mainly British and French, took people from Africa to the New World. They were initially taken to the West Indies to supplement local Indians decimated by the Spanish Conquistadors. The slave trade grew from a trickle to a flood, particularly from the seventeenth century onwards.
Portugal's monopoly in the obnoxious trade was broken in the sixteenth century when England followed by France and other European nations entered the trade. The English led in the business of transporting young Africans from their homeland to work in mines and till lands in the Americas.
Most slaves sold by Africans
Estimates of the total human loss to Africa over the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade range from 30 million to 200 million. At the initial stage of the trade parties of Europeans captured Africans in raids on communities in the coastal areas. But this soon gave way to buying slaves from African rulers and traders. The vast majority of slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and a military aristocracy who all grew wealthy from the business. Most slaves were acquired through wars or by kidnapping. The Portuguese Duatre Pacheco Pereire wrote in the early sixteenth century after a visit to Benin that the kingdom "is usually at war with its neighbours and takes many captives, whom we buy at twelve or fifteen brass bracelets each, or for copper bracelets, which they prize more." Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave, described in his memoirs published in 1789 how African rulers carried out raids to capture slaves. "When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares. It is not extraordinary, if on this occasion he yields to the temptation with as little firmness, and accepts the price of his fellow creature's liberty with as little reluctance, as the enlightened merchant. Accordingly, he falls upon his neighbours, and a desperate battle ensues...if he prevails, and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them." Equiano was born in 1745 in an area under the kingdom of Benin. At the age of ten he was kidnapped by slave hunters who also took his sister. He was more fortunate than most other slaves. After serving in America, the West Indies and England he was able to save for and buy his freedom in 1756 at the age of twenty-one.
Ottobah Cugoano, who was about 13 years old when he was kidnapped in 1770 in Ajumako in today's Ghana, had no doubt the shared responsibility of Africans for the horrid business. Referring to his own capture Cugoano wrote after he regained his freedom "I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery." But he added, "If there were no buyers there would be no sellers." By the same token, if there were no sellers there would be no buyers.
A profitable trade
European slave buyers made the greater profit from the despicable trade, but their African partners also prospered. Many grew strong and fat on profits made from selling their brethren. Tinubu square, commercial centre of today's Lagos and home to Nigeria's Central Bank, is named after a major nineteenth century slave trader. Madam Tinubu was born in Egbaland and rose from rags to riches by trading in slaves , salt and tobacco in Badagry. She later became one of Nigeria's pioneering nationalists.
Africa's rulers, traders and military aristocracy protected their interest in the slave trade. They discouraged Europeans from leaving the coastal areas to venture into the interior of the continent. European trading companies realised the benefit of dealing with African suppliers and not unnecessarily antagonising them. The companies could not have mustered the resources it would have taken to directly capture the tens of millions of people shipped out of Africa. It was far more sensible and safer to give Africans guns to fight the many wars that yielded captives for the trade. The slave trading network stretched deep into the Africa's interior. Slave trading firms were aware of their dependency on African suppliers. The Royal African Company, for instance, instructed its agents on the West coast "if any differences happen, to endeavour an amicable accommodation rather than use force." They were "to endeavour to live in all friendship with them" and "to hold frequent palavers with the Kings and the Great Men of the Country, and keep up a good correspondent with them, ingratiating yourself by such prudent methods" as may be deemed appropriate.
Africans faced with a new world
Contact with Europe opened new images of the world for the African elite and presented them with products of a civilisation which as the centuries passed became more technologically differentiated from their own. The slave trade whetted their appetite for the products of a changing world. Sadly it was not only tinpot rulers who were mesmerised by the glitters of western artefacts. An African slave in Cuba in the nineteenth century recalled how his people were captivated by the bright colour of European manufacturers. "It was the scarlet which did for the Africans: both the kings and the rest surrendered without a struggle. When the kings saw that the whites were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if they were waving, they told the blacks, "Go on then, go get a scarlet handkerchief" and the blacks were so excited by the scarlet they ran down to the ships, like sheep and there were captured."
European traders saw the advantages of helping African kings and chiefs realise their desire to acquire western culture, if not for themselves then for their children. Hugh Crow, who commanded the last British slave ship to leave a British port, wrote "It has always been the practice of merchants and commanders of ships to Africa, to encourage the natives to send their children to England as it not only conciliates their friendship, and softens their manner, but adds greatly to the security of the traders." With their children in Europe, African chiefs were likely to be more accommodating, knowing full well their offspring could be held as ransom.
European powers also hoped that by entertaining African princes in Europe to win the friendship of their fathers. By far the most important reason why African rulers and traders participated in the slave trade was their desire for its material rewards and the power it brought. They were obsessed with the variety of goods available through the trade. Locally produced equivalents of some merchandise, like cloth and jewellery, existed but greater satisfaction and prestige was got from having imported varieties. The man with a warehouse full with goods from abroad was a powerful figure in the community, able to buy favours and influence with his ill-gotten wealth.
African traders resist abolition of obnoxious trade
When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 it not only had to contend with opposition from white slavers but also from African rulers who had become accustomed to wealth gained from selling slaves or from taxes collected on slaves passed through their domain. African slave-trading classes were greatly distressed by the news that legislators sitting in parliament in London had decided to end their source of livelihood. But for as long as there was demand from the Americas for slaves, the lucrative business continued.
English missionary and abolitionist Thomas Buxton wrote in 1840 that the best way to suppress the slave trade was to offer Africa's slaving elites legitimate business that would give them means to satisfy their hunger for Western goods. "The African has acquired a taste for the civilised world. They have become essential to his. To say that the African, under present circumstances, shall not deal in man, is to say he shall long in vain for his accustomed gratification." This was the crux of the African condition.
The slave trade business continued in many parts of Africa for many decades after the British abolished it. For as long as there was demand for slave labour in the Americas, the supply was available. The British set up a naval blockade to stop ships carrying slaves from West Africa, but it was not very effective in suppressing the trade. Thousands of slave ships were detained during the decades the blockade was in operation. One Lieutenant Patrick Forbes, a British naval officer, estimated in 1849 that during a period of 26 years 103,000 slaves were emancipated by the warships of the naval blockade while ships carrying 1,795,000 slaves managed to slip past the blockage and land their cargo in the Americas.
British efforts to suppress the trade made it even more profitable because the price of slaves rose in the Americas. The numerous wars that plagued Yorubaland for half a century following the fall of the Oyo empire was largely driven by demand for slaves. Reverend Samuel Johnson wrote of the subjugation of neighbouring Yoruba kingdoms by Ibadan war-chiefs in the 1850s: "Slave-raiding now became a trade to many who would get rich speedily." It took the intervention of British colonialism to impose peace in Yorubaland in 1893. Slave trading for export ended in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa after slavery ended in the Spanish colonies of Brazil and Cuba in 1880. A consequence of the ending of the slave trade was the expansion of domestic slavery as African businessmen replaced trade in human chattel with increased export of primary commodities. Labour was needed to cultivate the new source of wealth for the African elites.
What if the West not abolish slavery?
Had Europe not decided to end the slave trade and the New World ceased demanding chattel labour, the transatlantic trade might still be rolling today. The ending of the obnoxious business had nothing to do with events in Africa. Rulers and traders there would have happily continued to sell humans for as long as there was demand for them. One can only imagine how more determinedly African merchants would have clung on to the business as goods offered by European buyers became more attractive with changes in Western technology. How many souls would African chiefs have been prepared to trade for a television or a car? It is a disturbing thought.
To highlight the role of the African elites in the slave trade is not to argue the obvious that they were morally depraved like the Europeans who bought slaves from them. It is to show that the corrupt leadership that undermines democracy and economic development in African countries today has a long history. The selfishness and disregard for the welfare of fellow humans manifest in the sacking of national resources by modern African leaders also motivated the pillaging of the human resources of the continent in times past.
A long history of corrupt African rulng classes
Some African writers, seeking to maximise the culpability of Europe in the slave trade, minimise the part played by African rulers and traders or explain it as the result of white trickery. Such distortion of history may make the moral case against European imperialism seem sharper, but it does nothing to aid the understanding by Africans of a critical period of their history. African slavers acted out of their own volition and for their self interest. They took advantage of the opportunity provided by Europe to consume the products of its civilisation. The triangular slave trade was a major part in the early stages of the emergence of the international market. The role of slave-trading African ruling classes in this market is not radically different from the position of the African elite in today's global economy. They both traded the resources of their people for their own gratification and prosperity. In the process they helped to weaken their nations and dim their prospects for economic and social development.
The slave trade had a profound economic, social, cultural and psychological impact on African societies and peoples. It did more to undermine African development than the colonialism that followed it. Through the trade the continent lost a large proportion of its young and able bodied population. Guyanese historian Walter Rodney cites in his book 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' one estimate showing that while Europe's population more than quadruped between 1650 and 1900, Africa's population rose only by 20 per cent during the same period. The loss of work-force was not more serious than the damage to the social and economic fabric of the society and the undermining of the confidence of Africans in their historical evolution.
The transatlantic slave trade and slavery were major elements in the emergence of capitalism in the West. As Karl Marx noted, they were as pivotal to western industrialisation as the new machinery and financial systems. Slavery gave value to the colonies in the New World which were crucial in the development of international trade. Trinidadian historian Eric Williams showed in his well-researched book Capitalism and Slavery, that the slave trade and slavery helped to make England the workshop of the world. Profit from slave-worked colonies and the slave trade were major sources of capital accumulation which helped finance the industrial revolution. The transportation of slave transformed British seaport areas into booming centres. One Englishman calling himself 'A Genuine "Dicky Sam", had no doubt about the link between the slave trade and prosperity of seaport city of Liverpool. "Like the magical wand, the traffic worked wonders; once poor, now rich; once ignoble, now great. Churches have been built and grand legacies bequeathed to all sorts of charities."
Europeans built empires, Africans drunk gin
While Europe invested profits from the trade in laying the foundation of a powerful economic empire, African kings and traders were content with wearing used caps and admiring themselves in worthless mirrors while swigging adulterated brandy bought with the freedom of their kinsmen. Virtually all the items imported during the nefarious business were for consumption or weapons for waging wars. A slave ship's manifest published in 1665 listed items carried for sale to Africans as old hats, caps, salt, swords, knives, axe-heads, hammers, belts, sheepskin gloves, bracelets, iron jugs and even "cats to catch their mice." One African trader calling himself Grandy King George was quite specific in his demand. He wrote to a slave captain: "send me one lucking-glass, six foot long by six foot wide." He also asked for an armchair, a gold mounted cane and a stool." The more common imports were alcohol, guns and gunpowder , salt and textiles. The quality of the items shipped to Africa was inferior - the spirits were adulterated and the guns designed for the African market.
Africa's contemporary history may have been different had its rulers and traders demanded capital goods for use in building the economy rather than trinkets and booze. As it was, the slave trade arrested economic development in Africa. The loss in human resources had dire consequences for labour dependent agricultural economies. Any possibility that the internal dynamics of African society could have led to the development of capitalism and industrialisation was blocked by the slave trade. The few existing manufacturing activities were either destroyed or denied conditions for growth. Cheap European textiles, for instance, undermined local cloth production. Samuel Johnson wrote in the late nineteenth century about Yorubaland: "Before the period of intercourse with Europeans, all articles made of iron and steel, from weapons of war to pins and needles, were of home manufacture; but the cheaper and more finished articles of European make, especially cutlery, though less durable are fast displacing home-made wares." The predominance of the slave trade prevented the emergence of business classes that could have spearheaded the internal exploitation of the resources of their societies. The slave trade drew African societies into the international economy but as fodder for western economic development.
Africa devastated by slave trade wars
Inter-communal wars waged to procure slaves were intensely destructive of human lives. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in a single skirmish. The wars and rampant kidnappings fuelled hostility and suspicion between communities. Distrust was a basic requirement for individual and communal survival. The slave trade arrested and distorted the cultural development of African societies. It affected the meaning people gave to the world and their place within it. Increased uncertainty of life gave added force to superstitious beliefs and customs. People sought salvation and protection from the spiritual world. They paid homage to gods to safeguard themselves and their families from misfortune. The psychological impact of the dehumanising trade was crippling. There was constant anxiety caused by perpetual fear of being captured and herded away like common animals to a place of no return. Some Africans believed that whites took slaves to eat them.
Whites assert racial superiority
It was during the slave trade and slavery that white people affirmed their superiority over blacks. It is not difficult to understand why white traders who bought black people for price of adulterated brandy and packed them onto slave ships like cattle could consider themselves to be superior. Though most were illiterate, crude and drunken, white slave traders were free men herding flocks of human cattle. As the centuries passed Europeans became more and more scornful of black people. By the nineteenth century various theories of black inferiority were developed and used to justify the colonisation of Africa. During the slave trade Africans came to believe themselves to be inferior. They lost confidence in themselves, their culture and their ability to development. The late Afro-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King's comment that few people realise the extent that slavery had "scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man," holds true not only with respect to the descendants of the Africans who arrived in the New World but also the descendants of those left behind. "The backwardness of black Africa," said the late Senegalese president Leopold Senghor, "...has been caused less by colonialism than by the Slave Trade."
Would the history of Africa have been turned out differently had it's leaders taken the advice of eighteenth century French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau. He said: "If I were chief of one of the African peoples, I declare that I would have a gallows set up at the frontier, on which I would hang, without mercy, the first European who dared enter the country, and the first citizen who tried to leave it." Perhaps if more African rulers had militarily resisted the design of the better armed Europeans their peoples might have paid a bloody price, as did the Indians in the Americas who fought to keep their lands and expel the white intruders. Before Columbus arrived in Hispanoila in 1492, the native population of North America was perhaps 40 million. By 1900, in the U.S. less than quarter of a million remained, scattered among 1,500 remote reservations.
Africa's underdevelopment was not inevitable
Would Africans have suffered the same genocide had they tried to end the slave trade? Unlikely. It is doubtful that the human cost of resistance would have been greater than the many millions of Africans killed in slave producing wars as well as those eaten by sharks after being jettisoned during the Atlantic crossings. We cannot know for certain. It seems more likely that Europe would have had to look elsewhere for cheap labour. It was one thing for European nations to use military might to protect their coastal trading posts and subdue disgruntled local chiefs, it would have been an entirely different matter for them to penetrate the interior of the continent and fight the hundreds of war that fed the slave trade.
The cost of such ventures would have made the price of slaves unattractive to the plantation owners in the Americas. As the historian Philip Curtin noted " If the prices of African-born slaves had not been competitive with those of labour from other sources - native born or European - the slave trade could never have come into existence, no matter what the epidemiological consequences of movement across the Atlantic."
Had cheap Africans not been available to work the land and mines of the 'New World', white planters and landowners would have sought other sources of cheap labour. They would have made more use of the native population and also turned more to Europe for labour. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries large numbers of poor whites were shipped to the 'New World', most involuntarily, to work on plantations, mines and as servants. Some poor whites kidnapped on European streets were sold in the West Indies much in the same way as Africans were. Indentured servants, convicts and deportees from Europe were often treated not much better than black slaves. But as the transatlantic slave trade boomed, the number of whites in forced labour decreased. It was because of the relative cheapness of African slave labour, and therefore the plantation owners' preference for them, that the trade in white labour ended. This gave rise to what Afro-American writer William DuBois described as the replacement of "a caste of condition by a caste of race." Had the costs of black slaves been much dearer, Europe might have become a major source of unfree labour.
© Copyright Africa Economic Analysis
- Organization of Africans
in the Americas
1234 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite C-1007
Washington DC, 20005
Tel: 202.638.1662 Fax: 202.638.1667
E-mail: oaa@oaanet.org
Garifuna Community, Honduras,C.A. Photo: Jonathan French - STATUS AND
CONDITIONS OF BLACKS IN LATIN AMERICA
Population
Numerical estimates regarding the volume of the population with African ancestry in Latin America, are as high as 150 million people, or about one third of the total population. A low estimate of the number of people with very visible African ancestry is approximately 90 million. This group suffers the most strongly from discrimination and poverty and represents 40% of the poor in Latin America.
Dom. Republic. Photo: Jonathan French
People of African descent are well established throughout Latin America. The majority of the African communities are located along the Atlantic coast in Central America, Colombia and Venezuela, and the Pacific Coast in South America. Rural communities arose from maroon settlements in colonial times, which have endured and preserved many aspects of African culture. There are also large numbers of Blacks that have migrated throughout generations from the rural areas to the cities, living in the capital cities in South American countries, particularly in Peru, Uruguay and Argentina.
In Central America there were several different waves of African migration: (1) Spanish-speaking Blacks, who were brought to do forced labor on the Pacific Coast and central regions in the colonial period; (2) the English-speaking "creole" Blacks of the Atlantic coast who were brought by the English, but remained after Independence. These live in the Bay Islands in Honduras and the Southern Autonomous Atlantic Region (RAAS) in Nicaragua, Livingstone in Guatemala, and in the San Andres and Providence Islands (now part of Colombia). The third group consists of West Indian Blacks, mainly from Jamaica and some from other islands, who migrated as fishermen and later as workers for railroad construction and the banana plantations. They live on the Atlantic coast of Honduras, throughout Panama and in the Province of Limon in Costa Rica. Finally, there are those that identify strongly with the indigenous peoples: the Zambo-Miskito descendants of the indigenous Miskito and Blacks, who speak Miskito and inhabit the Atlantic coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua in the Northern Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN); and the Garifuna, or Black Caribs, who arrived from the Island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean, speak their own language and live mainly in the northern coast of Honduras, in Livingstone, Guatemala, in Pearl Lagoon in Nicaragua, and in Belize.
Dom.Republic.Photo: Jonathan French - Migration
Millions of Afro-Latin Americans migrate to the main cities and other countries from rural zones affected by violence and economic crisis. In Venezuela, for example, the largest group of undocumented workers is made up of Afro-Colombians from the Atlantic Coast of Colombia who are essential workers in the agricultural and livestock sector in the department of Zulia, Venezuela. In Caracas, thousands of Afro-Dominicans sell fruit and ices or work in domestic service in peoples houses.
Afro-Dominicans have reached even further south to Buenos Aires, where they constitute the most recent migratory wave, working as domestics, living in small slum rooms and paying very high rents. The Afro-Peruvians migrate to the Southern Cone, mainly Argentina and Chile, where they are undocumented workers and suffer from severe discrimination and harsh living conditions. Afro-Ecuadorians typically migrate to Colombia. The United States has been the destination of Afro-Central Americans and their remittances continue to form part of the survival mechanism of these populations. - Socio-economic Conditions
On the Atlantic coast of Central America, Black communities were able to isolate themselves in areas where they developed a self-sufficient way of life with little integration into the economies of their countries. Presently they are losing their lands to rural colonization or to large companies in the lumber, fishing, or tourist sector. Legally they have no rights with which to defend the traditionally used, natural resources because the laws promote rural colonization, companies and tourism.
Honduras. Photo: Jonathan French. - Rural communities in most countries live in relative isolation, reached by water or very poor or non-existent roads, they have few, if any, medical services, no running water or means of sanitation, few primary schools and most have no access to secondary education. Telecommunications reaches only those communities that are very close to large cities. To improve economically, people have to leave their communities when they enter secondary school.
- The segment of the
population that has attempted to integrate themselves into the society
has done so through education at high costs and much sacrifice. In the
working world they have adapted themselves by emulating whiteness in
their appearance, dress and manners in order to minimize discrimination
when they apply for jobs or try to attain higher income levels. Those
who can, migrate to the United States and once abroad, send money to
their families. Black rural communities have maintained their cultural
identity in spite of the strong migration of young people into the
cities where they have become modernized.
In the Andean countries, large numbers of Blacks have settled along the Pacific Coast, close to indigenous groups, utilizing the resources of the forest, sea, and rivers in a subsistence economy. They sell part of the resources to companies in exchange for very little money. There are also instances of violence as companies and landowners try to appropriate land from the traditional residents. Consequently the lands traditionally inhabited by Black communities have become dangerous zones where violence reigns unchecked.
The level of poverty is so grave that some resort to prostitution, drugs and delinquency. In Colombia there is a high death rate among young men due to ethnic cleansing, as is seen in Buenaventura and Cali.
Venezuela has integrated most Blacks into their society. Their culture, way of speaking, and forms of entertainment reflect their African roots. Venezuela, however, also practices a lot of endoracism and "emblanquecimiento" which are the result of government policy to create a "white" race and culture.
Argentina, Venezuela, Peru and Uruguay encouraged the immigration of Europeans to whiten their culture and their people. Uruguay and Argentina have experienced the most negative effects of these policies: the numbers of Blacks have diminished, and since the colonial period they have not been able to excel economically or socially. In those two countries, as well as in Peru, they tend to make themselves inconspicuous, both where they work and where they live. - Defining Racism in a Latin American Context
Latin American countries do not limit the movement or choices of Blacks through overt means backed by legal instruments, instead they promote the idea of racial democracy or that harmony exists by definition. However there are no effective forms of legal protection, no recourse in the legislation, nor any institution that can uphold that constitutional right. Latin American racism functions by means of: -
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• pre-existing historical bias: Latin America's racial philosophies were defined by several nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers who considered Blacks an inferior species that needed to be eradicated if possible through miscegenation. -
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• invisibility: the advocacy of the use of miscegenation as a means of mimicking white features and erasing the African physiognomy and cultural traits.
-
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• economic disenfranchisement by means of national policies that limit investment for social or economic infrastructure in geographic zones with Black or predominantly Black communities; -
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• dislocation or displacement of Blacks from their African past by ignoring the topic in formal education, and avoiding positive references that link Blacks to Africa. -
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• subtle expressions of discriminatory social behavior, the so-called "solapado" complex.
Costa Chica, México.
Photo:Jonathan French
For example, often in Peru, Blacks visiting restaurants and other entertainment establishments are refused entry or are not provided prompt or respectful service so that they decide to leave on their own accord. In Ecuador, Black parents are told that school spaces for their children are filled when, in fact, they are being reserved for non-Blacks.All over Latin America, society refers to citizens of African ancestry as "negritos" or "negros." While they suggest that these are endearing terms they are actually a way of calling attention to a "negative" attribute. There are also countless negative references to various aspects of Black physiognomy, as well as a plethora of legends about Black supersexual prowess and physical abilities. These are used in newspaper cartoons, television programs, and in the course of daily conversation, to create merriment.- Conclusion
The outcome of these mechanisms is a Black population, bound by its racial ancestry, that is socially and economically marginalized, and that internalizes and reinforces its mistreatment by reproducing discriminatory behaviors against itself. This population has lived in chronic poverty, and very few members have been able to successfully improve their situation through their own efforts. When they do succeed, it is mainly through education, emblanquecimiento, and Europeanization.
México. Photo: Jonathan French
In Latin America the system of monocultural integration and the desire to consolidate power for European creoles in an alien continent, continues to exclude ethnocultural minorities and only benefits the privileged group that can fit this Eurocentric mold. The pattern of racism in the region is based on the devaluation of the non-European and an extreme loathing of the African. It is subtle and invisible, making it difficult both to establish as a concrete and real socio- economic problem, and to solve.
The beneficiaries of these systems are an elite at the top of a population pyramid. In modern times this system is an anachronism that fails to maximize talent and hard work; needlessly expends scarce human and other resources; stifles creativity; and hampers diversity at a time when these characteristics ought to be highly valued tools for competing with the rest of the world.
2001 Organization of Africans in the Americas, 1234 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite C-1007, Washington DC 20005. All Rights Reserved.
The Chronicle the quarterly magazine on Black issues - Educational, Historical and Political - in Britain and around the world
From issue 7
Afro-Latin Americans
One-third of a continent breaking free
After centuries of doubt, fear and silence, Afro-Latin Americans have found a collective voice. Heeding the call for black cultural unity and economic development, representatives of 150 million Afro Latin Americans - from Puerto Rico down to Argentina - gathered in Barlovento, Venezuela in July.Largely invisible
Unnoticed and unheard in the corridors of Latin American power debates, Black Latins comprise an estimated African ethnic minority of 90 million and at least an additional 60 million of mixed African ancestry, according to the organisers. They constitute one third of the continent's 450 million people.
Two groups have sparked the initiative. The charitable Organisation of Africans in the Americas (OAA) works for the social, political and economic empowerment of communities. The ad hoc group Afroamerica XXI represents communities and leaders in 9 countries and has lobbied major finance and assistance agencies for development funding.
Strengths and needs
OAA director, Jamaican-born Michael Franklin is clear about one essential goal. He says the Barlovento reunion in a region with strong African influences "will contribute to the spiritual and familial strengthening of the Black community in Latin America and the Caribbean".
But the poverty of millions of Afro-Latin Americans will also be highlighted. National and inter-governmental organisations, like the Inter-American Development Bank based in Washington D.C., will be urged to invest in projects beneficial to and determined by Afro Latin American communities.
Black communities exist in all Latin America countries as a result of the slave trade and imigration. Significant groupings are found in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico. Black populations range in size from less than 1% to as high as 30% in Colombia and 46% in Brazil. They are majorities in some Spanish speaking Caribbean nations: Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
Social limits
Though Blacks have gained education, social status and high office in their countries most endure lives of persistent poverty and disenfranchisement on the basis of their colour and ancestry. Some live on the edge of poverty as manual factory, plantation and mine workers and rural peasantry; others eke out a meagre existence as petty traders and live on the streets or in shanty towns.
Blacks remain victims of a history of what can be called "skin-colour apartheid". According to the authors of No Longer Invisible, a survey of Afro-Latin Americans today: "Colonial and postcolonial society partitioned off people, classifying and categorizing skin pigmentation with a bewildering array of legal codes and linguistic terms".
New goalsOvercoming this legacy of uprooting and separation is a fundamental goal of the Barlovento reunion, say Franklin and his associates. The organisers highlight the affinity of Afro-Latin Americans and their life styles. They call for a Declaration of Rights of Peoples of African Descent in the Americas.
The reunion echoes the historic heritage of black rebellion against slavery. It will sing the praises of the Black Family and thereby reject the degrading belief that embranquecimento (whitening) offers the only route to improvement and social mobility.
Crisis of choice
Equipping Afro-Latin Americans to tackle the social institutions that make "black" synonymous with poverty must also be an important goal. The central challenge will be achieving beneficial change for Afro-Latin Americans as global and technological forces emanating from the USA and Europe engulf the continent.
Notwithstanding, there are pervasive problems of racial exclusion, governmental violence and societal repression of black traditions of African origins. The remedy may require specific legislation, never forthcoming after slavery's abolition, that identifies and manages contemporary race relations.
The crisis of choice facing Franklin and his associates is fundamental. Can blacks gain common, valued nationality with all other citizens and also obtain public legitimacy for their Afro-identity? This set of issues, with their human rights implications, resonate in all parts of the world where blacks are minorities in majority white or ex-colonial societies.
(See No Longer Invisible: Black Latin Americans Today (1995), reviewed in The Chronicle Black Books section, and Afro-Central America: Rediscovering the African Heritage (1996), both published by the Minority Rights Group, London; NACLA Report on the Americas, The Black Americas; Britannica Yearbook; and Leslie Rout, The Black Experience in Hispanic America: 1502 to the Present.
Copyright (c) 1999 The Chronicle
Source: The .Chronicleworld at www.chronicleworld.org
- worker-brc-news@lists.tao.ca
October 7, 1999
A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF HAITI
By Stan Goff <stangoff@all4democracy.org>
In the latter decade of the 18th Century, the British attempted to wrest
control from the French of the richest colony in the Americas, Hispanola.
The French Revolution was considered a window of opportunity by the
British. The Revolution and the British incursion combined to destabilize
Saint Domingue-the French half of the island. This created the conditions
necessary for the only successful slave revolt in modern times, and the
only successful slave-led revolution in history, the Haitian Revolution.
Haiti was only the second independent nation in the Americas-after the
United States-and the first independent modern African state.
The Revolution was complex and turbulent, and characterized by a series of
shifting alliances. The bourgeoisie in France was wrestling the feudal
aristocracy overboard, and that struggle was reflected paradoxically in
the colony, with feudal Loyalists supporting slave rebellion.
Both the French maritime bourgeoisie and the plantation-based colonial
bourgeoisie had powerful vested interests in the institution of
slavery-the former in the actual slave trade and the latter in the profit
margin they sweat out of free labor. Loyalists of the French monarchy in
the colony formed an alliance of convenience first with free blacks and
"mulattos", and finally with rebel slaves, for added strength to resist
the rebellious bourgeoisie.
It should not surprise anyone who understands history that the
revolutionaries of France and America fought for their economic
emancipation from feudal monarchs at the same time the clung ferociously
to the institution of slavery on which they had built the very fortunes
and power they needed to overthrow feudalism.
The former slaves who fought for their freedom in St. Domingue were not
historical materialists, and the question of whether capitalism was
progress over feudalism did not enter their thinking. They knew who
supported them-even for cynical purposes-and who tried to put them back in
chains. Consequently, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines lashed the revolution
forward to independence, he declared a kingdom, and a semi-feudal economic
system was adopted. This system has been internally responsible for the
persistently backward development in Haiti.
The terrifying example-from the point of view of slave holders from the
United States to Brazil-of a slave revolution, and the dismemberment of
slavery's supporting ideology by this dazzling display of African
brilliance in the systematic defeat of three powerful white European
nations, led slave-dependent Britain, France, and the United States to
economically isolate Haiti. This further stifled Haiti's economic
development, and rendered Haiti vulnerable to a variety of forms of
economic blackmail that continually drained her treasury. This was the
first in a series of external factors contributing to backward development
in Haiti.
Haiti's post-revolutionary economic system placed a vast number of
peasants on land owned by gentry. Landowners collected a share of the
land's produce in exchange for tenancy-a sharecropping system. In many
respects, it was a system like that in the Southern United States.
To understand political forces in Haiti today, it will be helpful to draw
some further comparisons to the history of the Southern United States.
Former slaves in the South who adopted sharecropping were beholden to a
land-holding class in a relationship that was feudal in the sense of the
tenant proffering "a share". Wage labor was not employed in the
production process. The instruments of production were simple, and the
rate of accumulation remained slow to stagnant.
As industrial production was more rapidly introduced into the South, a
conflict developed between the up-and-coming industrial bourgeoisie and
the planter class over access to labor. There was a period of
rapprochement in which planters were ceded black labor on tenant farms and
poor whites were the province of industrial capital. But industrial
capital is restless. Like a shark, if it stops it expires, and eventually
industrial capital needed to reach into a new pool of black labor.
This struggle took on a political character and two "tendencies" developed
in Southern politics-what Paul Leubke, in Tar Heel Politics, has called
the "modernizers and the traditionalists." The former sought to develop
the instruments of production for industry and to modernize agriculture,
and the latter sought to protect the traditional privileges of the planter
class. The latter tendency has also waged a fierce battle for the social
norms that were rooted in the planter economy-especially racism, sexism,
and a general cultural conservatism. Those tendencies are still visible
in the South, with the struggle only lately asserting itself in two
separate political parties instead of one political party with two
factions.
In that political struggle, the capitalist-modernizer tendency has
steadily gained supremacy over the semi-feudal-reactionary one. In the
specific competition for black labor, the industrial capitalists had a
dilemma with both sharecroppers and black landowners. Mechanized industry
requires wage labor. People who have the option of returning to some form
of subsistence farming have proven reluctant to submit to the rigors of
industrial production. So over time, through variety of political
initiatives, black workers were driven off the land to force them into the
mills. South Africa used the same tactic to force workers into the gold
mines. And Haiti, likewise, was subjected to American industrial capital
at the turn of the century, whereupon peasants were separated from their
ability to subsist on the land.
Pan-Africanist assertions of a shared history between Africans in a great
diaspora are more than merely an emotional appeal for solidarity. Since
the advent of colonialism, capitalist development has had a profoundly
racial character. Racism and capitalism are bound together inextricably.
African peoples have been subjected to a distinct form of oppression
within that development that has remarkably similar economic, social,
ideological, and political characteristics throughout the diaspora. One of
the points we want to make here is that, contrary to popular notions
purveyed by news and entertainment media, Haiti is not unique.
With the introduction of industrial sugar and sisal production in Haiti by
giant American companies like the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO),
peasants were driven off their land and forced to work in the fields and
factories of the American companies-for a wage. Haiti had made the
transition from a semi-feudal to a semi-capitalist system.
A rebellion against the conditions imposed by American companies led to a
Marine Corps invasion and occupation that lasted 19 years, from 1915 to
1934. In that period, the Marines oversaw the reintroduction of a form of
unpaid labor-slavery, renamed the courvier system-which was used to
develop infrastructure for American companies, including roads, bridges,
and electrical grids.
The Marine Corps put down the nationalist rebellion by the Cacos, an
insurgency led by Charlemagne Peralte, who they eventually captured and
killed. The defeat of the rebellion was brutal, led by openly racist
Marine officers who only after a public outcry over reports of Marine
massacres led initiatives to inhibit the widespread and gratuitous killing
of Haitians for little more than sport by marines.
Smedley Butler, a marine major in the Caco counterinsurgency, who won the
Congressional Medal of Honor twice, once for the anti-Caco campaign,
eventually became a general. When he retired, he became openly critical of
the U.S. intervention in Haiti and other countries as well, saying: "War
is a racket. Our stake in that racket has never been greater in all out
peace-time history. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such
a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months
in active service as a member of our country's most agile military
force--the Marine Corps.... I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico
safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I
helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the
benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped
purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in
1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit
companies in 1903... Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al
Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in
three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents. "
This passage has particular significance for me, since I retired from
active duty with Special Forces in February 1996, after "serving" in
Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia,
Peru, Somalia, and of course Haiti. Reflection on my own experience had
begun to crystallize with a vengeance by the time I was assigned as a
member of the invasion task force in Haiti in 1994. My shifting political
sympathies got me a ticket home and made me the subject of a punitive and
sometimes bizarre investigation where I was interrogated about whether I
had perhaps (1) become "too pro-Haitian", or (2) had "become Haitian". In
fact, what I had become was anti-capitalist.
One of the reasons I am taking the trouble to write this is that I have a
unique perspective from inside the "belly of the beast" so to speak. I
feel it is important to take away one of the key weapons of "the beast",
the exoticization of Haiti that lends credence to the notion that Haitian
society and politics are perverse and unknowable and essentially cultural.
By extension, this means that Haitians are perverse, unknowable, and
trapped in "culture".
I found nothing in my experience during the invasion of 1994, or on
subsequent visits to Haiti, that was either exotic or incomprehensible.
The U. S. was behaving in a manner consistent with an imperialist power,
and Haitians were behaving in a manner consistent with subjugated,
exploited, and colonized peoples.
This implicitly racist exoticizing serves capital by encouraging potential
anti-imperialist allies in the U.S.-especially African-Americans-to turn
their backs on what appears to be an intractably exasperating and
impenetrable situation. Pan-African solidarity has always alarmed capital.
Capital spares no effort in subverting it. The systematic effort to
de-couple issue of race from economic exploitation at home and abroad was
begun in conjunction with McCarthyism, when the U.S. government was in the
process of silencing people like DuBois, Robeson, and Hunton, with the
Committee on African Affairs. Unfortunately, that effort was largely
successful, helped along in part by opportunism in the Civil Rights
movement.
Haitian society has been shaped by development of productive systems and
instruments. Every society is. So don't look to this account for lurid
and false descriptions of African religion (voudon) as what is essentially
Haitian - the counter-revolutionary analysis from the right - or for
accounts of Haitian cultural simplicity, charm, and victim-hood - a
counter-revolutionary caricature from the infantile left. Haiti, like all
societies, must be understood first by its economy.
Just as the introduction of more modern methods of production in the U.S.
South created friction between landed semi-feudals and industrial
capitalists, a contest for political power developed in Haiti between
grandons-or planters-and compradors-the Haitian middle-men who profited
from the export of commodities. The key difference, of course, is in the
global status of the respective ruling classes. American capitalists lead
a regional imperialist combine, and Haitian compradors constitute only a
kind of colonial surrogate class.
These axes of economic interest-with grandon xenophobia and comprador
dependence-account for the frequent flare-ups of "nationalism" among the
grandons who have identified their future security with an element of
insularity from international economic forces which they rightly fear will
displace them.
This begins to clarify the antecedents of the current relationship between
the U.S. and Haiti.
Popular accounts of the Francois Duvalier regime-the only regime most
Americans are aware of in Haiti-have tended to commit the error of the
right, in simply calling Papa Doc anti-Communist, or the error of the
left, dismissing Papa Doc as some kind of mad dog on the right's leash.
Duvalier was problematic to the United States, because he was a grandon
nationalist. The CIA attempted to organize a coup against him shortly
after he took office.
Anything but mad, Duvalier was masterful at tapping into an emerging black
consciousness movement to build support among the masses, based on long
standing resentment against white and light-skinned Haitian privilege, and
fear and loathing for blanc, the foreigner. He deployed that sentiment as
a form of nationalism on behalf of the grandons, who have consistently
opposed further U.S. interference in Haitian economic life.
The famed Ton Ton Macoutes were in fact a palace guard and secret police.
Duvalier had studied his Machiavelli well, and needed a force personally
accountable to him to offset possible comprador loyalties in the army. He
was also shaken by the U.S. attempt to instigate a coup. It was in the
wake of that botched coup conspiracy that the Macoutes drastically
increased the level of repression.
Under relentless pressure from the U.S., Papa Doc finally cried uncle and
opened the door to increased U.S. economic activity in Haiti. He sealed an
agreement with emissary and Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, in
1969, then died less than two years later. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier,
hardly more than an adolescent at the time, succeeded him as President.
Jean-Claude was not the political operator that his father was. He liked
fast cars, women, and bundles of money to indulge his interests in both.
Nor did he share his father's loyalty to the grandons. So when the U.S.
began to offer assistance with the bothersome business of governance, and
sweetened the deal with money, Baby Doc quickly acquiesced to the demands
of U.S. capital. One of those demands was the appointment as Finance
Minister of a very smooth, very articulate Haitian technocrat who worked
with the World Bank, Marc Bazin. We shall see Mr. Bazin again... and
again.
What neither Baby Doc nor the U.S. had counted on was the continued class
loyalty of the Macoutes to the grandons. The Macoutes remained a
formidable force, who might be reasonably compared to the militias used on
behalf of the caudillos in other parts of Latin America.
They attempted to whisper in Baby Doc's ear about minimizing the influence
of Americans in Haitian economic life. When Baby Doc demonstrated a
hearing deficit, Marc Bazin left his office one day to find his limousine
completely covered with human feces-a crude but clear missive from the
Macoutes that they intended to be heard. Bazin resigned "for health
reasons", and Baby Doc began to waver in his commitment to the U.S.
When popular discontent with repression from both the Army and the
Macoutes, and with Baby Doc's venality and incompetence, and with
deepening poverty, gave rise to a popular insurrection in 1986, the U.S.
opted to stand back and let the dust settle before deciding their next
move. They graciously assisted Baby Doc in his departure from Haiti.
What followed was a dechoukage, an uprooting, of the Macoutes, who had
become the focal point for popular rage. The People's Justice was allowed
for a short time by the Army. Much of the Army's leadership was more than
willing to be relieved of the counter-weight the Macoutes represented to
their own power. When it had gone far enough, the military re-introduced
control.
It's time to digress again, lest we get caught up in the palace intrigues
and lose sight of the further evolution of class relations, both in Haiti
and abroad.
Bazin's appearance on the scene not only represented a change in the power
structure of Haiti, but a change in the structure of capital worldwide.
Bipolar alliances growing out of the Cold War that had led to an embrace
between the U.S. State Department and any number of crony capitalists,
kleptocrats, and aspiring fascists. But consistent with Lenin's prescient
thesis on imperialism, international financial oligarchies (now the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) were consolidating power
at a remarkable pace, and an element of consistency was being imposed by
the lenders on capitalist development globally, as economies were further
and further integrated. A more urbane, more cunning, and more technocratic
class of rulers were shouldering aside the culture of the maverick robber
barons and industrial capitalists.
That tendency has been reflected in Haiti, where the Macoutes-who have
degenerated more and more into an organized crime syndicate as their
grandon patrons have lost ground-and their traditional antagonists, the
compradors, are suddenly finding that they might both be irrelevant.
Haitian radicals for several years have been referring to them both as
dinosaurs, an epithet formerly reserved for the grandons and Macoutes.
The brightest and most ambitious opportunists in Haiti have seen the
handwriting on the wall, and they are aligning with the financial
technocrats... like Marc Bazin. This technocratic, transnational, economic
managerial class is often referred to popularly as neo-liberal. It will
resort to the gun, but its weapons of choice are debt and economic
blackmail.
Once the military re-asserted control after the ouster of Baby Doc, under
General Henri Namphy, a succession of leaders found themselves caught
between the demands of the Northern big brother and the nativist Macoutes.
Each time they wavered against the U.S., the U.S. used professional
coup-maker Prosper Anvril to unseat them. One of the key bones of
contention between the U.S. technocrats and the Macoutes was the issue of
elections.
The U.S., then and now, felt that it could exercise control of both
politics and public perceptions more effectively under cover of elections.
The Macoutes, citing nationalism and fearing still further incursions
against their native power, adamantly opposed elections. Resources matter,
however, and the U.S. had vastly more than the Macoutes. The U.S. finally
compelled the Haitian government to schedule elections for 1990.
The U.S. was casting around for a good leader, someone who could manage
the transition to an elected government of technocrats, and bring Haiti on
line with the rapidly globalizing economy. The State Department decided
that Marc Bazin, World Bank technocrat extraodinaire, should become the
first "democratically elected president of Haiti." During the preceding
four years of relative instability, as they crisis-managed their way
through one coup after another, the State Department was spending an
enormous sum through various proxies to extol the "savior" status of Marc
Bazin to the Haitian masses.
To further ensure the palatability of Bazin, the State Department quietly
supported the opposition candidacy of a widely loathed organized crime
boss named Roger Lafontant. The U.S. wanted Bazin to be as obvious a
choice as possible on a deliberately limited list.
The Macoutes were no longer the only dissatisfied sector with the
imposition of the New World Order. A developing petit bourgeois strata who
were being subjected to extortion schemes from the Macoutes also felt
uneasy with the implications for their own futures of a national economy
that exported the majority of its capital in the service of massive
external debt. Progressive elements within that strata, epitomized by
Antoine Izmery, had begun to propose social democratic solutions to the
persistent poverty, and articulate resistance to IMF-World Bank mandates.
Relationships were established with the Ti Eglise, or Little Church, as
the social gospel tendency of the Catholic Church had come to be called,
particularly with an energetic and charismatic priest named Jean-Bertrand
Aristide.
Discussion among peasant organizations, progressive among the petit
bourgeoisie, and leadership in the Ti Eglise, led to the last minute
decision to offer an electoral alternative.
In 1804, Haiti had shocked the world by triumphing in a slave-led
revolution.
Haiti shocked the New World Order neo-liberals in 1990. Aristide was
offered up as a candidate for president under the banner of the Lavalas
Movement-meaning The Flood. Lavalas was a potent coalition between the
peasants and the petit bourgeoisie. Aristide won with such overwhelming
numbers, and with such a late candidacy, that the U.S. Embassy was
helpless to "adjust" the results. Aritside was a liberation theologian. He
was a populist. And he was a nationalist. No combination of tendencies
could have alarmed the U.S. more-unless Aristide had declared himself a
Marxist in the bargain... which he is not.
A thoroughly chagrined U.S. delegation, including neo-liberal messiah
Jimmy Carter, stalked away from the elections and began busily plotting.
In December, after the election, but before Aristide was to take office
(in February), Roger Lafontant led an aborted coup and landed in jail.
During the successful coup less than a year later, he was killed in his
cell. Anti-Aristide demagogues try to blame it on Aristide loyalists, but
the fact is that Lafontant had such a checkered past and so many enemies
that solving his murder could be the stuff of an Agatha Christie novel.
There are questions, however, about whether the ubiquitous CIA might not
have put Lafonant up to the klutzy coup plot, figuring they had nothing to
lose. Lafontant was a perfect fall guy.
But Aristide did take office. He held it for eight months, and in that
time he said two things that sealed his fate. He demanded land reform,
alienating the weakening but still powerful grandons, and he demanded that
corporations pay their back taxes, thereby igniting the wrath of the
bourgeoisie.
Though the U.S. had repeatedly denied having taken any part in the coup
d'etat of September 30, 1991 against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the
Lavalas Movement, Defense Intelligence Agency representatives were
reported to have been in Army Headquarters at the time of the coup. The
DIA and the CIA maintained close relations with the Haitian Army before,
during, and after the coup-even as President George Bush (former director
of the CIA) was energetically denouncing the coup for the benefit of the
American public.
One of the coup's principle beneficiaries was a crack head on the CIA
payroll, named Emmanuel "Toto" Constant. He led a "political" network of
death squads called FRAPH, which ended up doing a good deal of the dirty
work for the coup government. Constant is currently being protected from
extradition by the U.S. government, presumably to keep his mouth shut, and
lives in Queens, New York.
Constant emerged as a public figure around 1993. His successful
incorporation of many former Macoutes into the network, and his diligent
bending of the organization to the needs of the de facto government, along
with his status as a CIA employee, caused his star to ascend rapidly.
The oppression of Raoul Cedras' de facto regime differed markedly from
that of Papa Doc. It was fiercer, more systematic, and more widespread.
While Duvalier's knockout punch was delivered in the massacre of the
Haitian Communist Party leadership at Nazon in 1969, Cedras and the FRAPH,
with substantial help from the Army, killed over 5,000 people in the three
years from 1991-1994. Petit bourgeois Aristide confidentes, brothers
George and Antoine Izmery, were felled in the streets in highly publicized
assassinations, but the leadership of every popular and peasant
organization was killed as well-or driven deeply underground.
In June, 1992, the coup government invested Marc Bazin with the title of
"prime minister". He accepted. In June, 1993, just four days after the
U.S. announced sanctions against coup supporters, Bazin resigned.
When Clinton inherited the American presidency, he had already suffered
one foreign policy embarrassment on Haiti. Originally declaring his
opposition to the Bush policy of concentration camps and forced
repatriation, Clinton was confronted with a powerful combination of
corporate pressure and racist xenophobia, and he signed onto continuation
of the Bush policy.
Ever the neo-liberal technocrat non pariel, Clinton began studying ways to
bring an election to Haiti. A deal was struck between the Clinton
Administration, Aristide (whose arm was mightily twisted), and the Haitian
de facto government in June, 1993 at Governor's Island, New York. It was a
masterpiece of neo-liberal sophistry. It called for reinstatement of
Aristide, but also called for a number of questionable parliamentary
reforms and blanket amnesty for the military. Cedras was offered a golden
parachute. Aristide was required to be reinstated by October, 1993.
Ben Dupuy, Ambassador-at-Large for Aristide and Secretary General of the
APN (National Popular Assembly) warned Aristide that the agreement was a
trap. This was the first time Aristide openly and unequivocally consented
to the idea of U.S. military intervention in Haiti.
The conflict between the "technocrats and dinosaurs" that had so affected
the political dynamic of Haiti, remember, had its own reflection in the
United States. If Clinton is the emblem of the technocrats, Senator Jesse
Helms is emblematic of the reactionaries. Paradoxically, as the U.S. set
the stage for it's "triumph" against socialism at the beginning of this
decade, the intelligence community and the military, formerly controlled
by a technocratic faction, committed more of their budgets to covert
operations in the intelligence community, and "special" operations in the
military. The experienced operatives in both fields tended to be red-meat
Cold Warrior reactionaries who identify with Helms and despise Clinton. As
covert and special operations budgets increased, so did the reactionary
domination of the U.S. intelligence and military apparatus.
When the "gay-loving, draft-dodger," Clinton, began to talk about the
reintroduction of Aristide, there was a strident reaction from Helms,
publicly, and from the CIA, privately. The notion of an Aristide return,
even a co-opted Aristide, who they considered a communist, was absolutely
unacceptable. A drumbeat of anti-Aristide propaganda was begun. Helms was
in the forefront, and the CIA leaked disinformation to the press about
Aristide's "mental illness." The CIA actually briefed Congress in a
special closed session, in 1993, on Aristide's "mental illness."
The CIA thirsted to hand the "liberal" Clinton another foreign policy
embarrassment. They got their chance on October 13, 1993, in what has come
to be known as the "Harlan County Incident."
Clinton had dispatched a number of military and police advisors, called
"monitors", to Haiti, to prepare Haiti for "democratization." They were
aboard the USS Harlan County. In a surreal interlude, the ship was met at
the dock in Port-au-Prince by a group of theatrical, lightly armed
FRAPHists, some too skinny and old to be reasonably referred to as thugs,
but trying to appear thuggish nonetheless.
After a puzzling standoff of less than four hours, the U.S. Embassy
ordered the USS Harlan County to steam back to the United States.
In the middle of the whole peculiar melodrama, calm and half-smiling, sat
John Kambourian, the CIA chief of station for the U.S. Embassy. When one
journalist asked Kambourian why he didn't seem alarmed, with the deputy
chief of mission sitting in her limo in the middle of the "danger", he
said simply, "Ahh, they don't mean any harm." Remember, now, that the
FRAPH chief was then on the CIA payroll.
At around the same time, I was still on active duty with the Army, still a
member in good standing of the "Special Operations community," and we had
been briefed that we were preparing to invade Haiti. This was 1993. The
Harlan County incident might have tipped the scales for an invasion that
year, but another operation I was involved with gave the President pause.
We had attempted to capture Mohammed Farrah Aidid, the Somali strongman,
and his militia had handed the U.S. military a crushing defeat in the
streets of Mogadishu. Clinton wasn't about to get too adventuresome too
fast with the military again that year.
Somalia and Harlan County had combined to highlight Clinton's
inadequacies. This stung particularly in Haiti, because U.S. presidents
before him had all managed to keep the backyard tidy.
Haiti presented Clinton with more than an embarrassment, however. It
presented him with an interlocking set of dilemmas.
Aristide was overwhelmingly identified by the Haitian masses with the dual
aspirations of popular democracy and sovereignty. His ouster and the
subsequent brutality of the Cedras regime had only magnified Aristide's
standing as the embodiment of Haitian popular aspirations.
The Clinton Adminstration was desperate for a military success, and it was
coming under increasing pressure at home from members of the Congressional
Black Caucus, Haitian-Americans, and groups like Trans-Africa, to do
something about the situation in Haiti and about restoring Aristide's
presidency. Clinton's principle patrons, however, the transnational
corporations, were not the least bit comfortable with Aristide.
Behind the scenes, there was frenetic haggling with Aristide.
Not an experience political operative, he paused in a conversation with
his Ambassador-at-Large at the time, Ben Dupuy, and asked Dupuy if he
thought the CIA might have been involved in the coup. Dupuy responded that
the reason there had never been a coup in the United States was that there
was no U.S. Embassy there. Aristide would later, after gaining more
experience in his "negotiations" with the Clinton Adminsitration, repeat
Dupuy's quip publicly and again knit the eyebrows of the neo-liberal
establishment with consternation.
Clinton knew that there was no option to intervene militarily without
Aristide on his arm. A violent intervention without Aristide might not
only clear away the Cedras clique, it might inflame barely suppressed
Haitian anti-imperialist passions against the United States. The very
nationalism that had gone underground with the Cedras onslaught against
Lavalas might resurface against American occupation troops and hang
Clinton with another grotesque foreign policy mess.
Even as neo-liberals worked tirelessly in the U.S. to co-opt Aristide,
American reactionaries worked tirelessly to undercut both Clinton and
Aristide. The U.S. press was thoroughly taken in by the reactionary
propaganda, and began to uncritically regurgitate lurid tales of Lavalas
murders by "necklacing" and other diabolical excesses. Many of these
stories were planted by the CIA.
The U. S. military, in particular, picked up the reactionary rhetoric.
Virtually every intelligence summary I was privy to on Haiti, prior to and
during the invasion, emphasized stories of "voodoo and powders" and even
that old racist standby of "intrinsic African deviancy", cannibalism. For
anyone who had ever been there, or even who had a little common sense, it
was of course the most contemptible nonsense. But it was designed to fan
racist stereotypes and ensure a lack of identification between American
soldiers and the Haitian masses.
Military reluctance to reinstate Aristide was open. When we received our
pre-mission briefing at Guantanamo Bay in September, 1994, just two days
before the actual invasion, General Potter, commander of the Special
Operations contingent, told all of us, "I don't like it any better than
you do-pulling another weak president's cookies out of the fire. But we're
gonna follow orders and perform like good soldiers."
It's important to reiterate, however, that neither the Clinton technocrats
nor the Helms reactionaries had any interest in the welfare of the Haitian
masses.
The multiple dilemmas which plagued Clinton, then, were: The question of
support at home in the face of an onslaught of right-wing propaganda; the
pressure from the Black Caucus and others to rectify what appeared to be
(and was) a racist immigration policy; the question of how to conduct a
military operation that could certainly succeed at getting in, but may
evolve into a struggle directly against Haitian popular resistance; and
the question of how to include Aristide-the key to resolution of at least
two of the preceding questions-but defang his ability to sway the masses
in an anti-neoliberal direction on economic questions.
The last issue was particularly important to many members of the Black
Caucus, a predominantly bourgeois gathering that largely supported an
Aristide-legitimized technocratic (read: neoliberal) solution. Jesse
Jackson Jr.. while on tour in Haiti, had opined that Haiti needed
McDonalds to provide jobs there.
Clinton's navigation of the situation was masterful.
We (the military) spent months allegedly preparing for a full-blown,
direct military intervention. Aristide had finally consented to the
Faustian deal. When "the balloon went up," in military parlance, the 82nd
Airborne had taken off from Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina,
preparing to leap out over the tarmac at Port-au-Prince International and
start a shooting war with Cedras' forces.
Miraculously, a delegation consisting of Jimmy Carter (again), Sam Nunn,
and Colin Powell secured the rather mysterious last minute capitulation
that "authorized" the "permissive" entry of U.S. troops with the signature
of an illegitimate Haitian President, Emile Jonaissant. The credulous U.S.
press never questioned the "miraculous-ness" of this whole episode.
Having written almost an entire book on the actual occupation, I will
spare readers that account here.
The critical point is that now, in 1999, with the alleged departure of
U.S. troops (I just came back from Haiti this September after the
announcement of troop withdrawal, and can assure readers that the 82nd
Airborne is still flying its colors at Port-au-Prince Airport, and the
country is riddled with Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological
Operations teams.), the U.S. has recently succeeded, for the second time,
in gerrymandering the upcoming Haitian elections.
U.S. pressure to prevent Aristide's candidacy in 1995, along with an
election supervised by an invading nation, led to a massive boycott of the
election. Only five percent of the eligible voting population went to the
polls for the election of President Rene Preval, and only 15 percent went
to the next round to vote for members of parliament.
The Lavalas movement fractured along class lines. The peasant majority
leaned toward Aristide's Famni Lavalas (the Lavalas Family), and the petit
bourgeoisie threw in the towel and supported the OPL (Lavalas Political
Organization) in its acceptance of the neo-liberal mandate to privatize,
shift taxes onto the poor, quash labor unrest, and shred social
services-all to service the external debt.
Opportunism is the order of the day, and many of the petit bourgeois are
now aiming to become technocrats.
While factionalism has led to maneuvering from above, and the press had
dutifully reported that the government is paralyzed by these maneuvers,
the fact is that the stalemate in the government is directly attributable
to popular pressure from below. Much of the leadership may be confused,
but the masses are still violently opposed to neo-liberal policies, which
are referred to euphemistically as "structural adjustment." The masses not
only correctly perceive it to be a formula for further worsening their
poverty, but as a direct attack on Haitian national sovereignty and
self-determination.
In the upcoming elections, the U.S., fearful of an Aristide-led government
that might buck the neo-liberal orthodoxy (which may be an unfounded fear,
given Aristide's waffling of late), has initiated a new tactic. Through
backchannel funding for the notorious Reaganite National Endowment for
Democracy, the U.S. is spending money like a drunken sailor to cobble
together a "coalition" that enough of the Haitian bourgeoisie can get
behind to win a US-designed election.
This is important because assassination of either Aristide or Preval (both
of which could disqualify Aristide, due to peculiarities in Haitian
election law) constitutes an extremely risky maneuver at this juncture.
The suffering of the majority of Haitians has slowly deepened, and the
economic, social, and political situation is like an open container of gas
in a very small room. One match-like an assassination-could blow up
everyone in the room.
The U.S., in particular, must tread very lightly. Neo-liberals will resort
to the gun, as we saw in Iraq and the Balkans, but they prefer to fight
with money and elections.
The latest tactic, which appears to be a fait accompli, is the
simultaneous development of Esapce de Concertacion, the aforementioned
bourgeois "coalition"-funded and developed by an alphabet soup of front
foundations associated with the National Endowment for Democracy-and the
introduction of a new rule: Picture ID cards for every eligible voter,
made and distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
It is next to impossible, of course, to ensure the distribution of these
voter ID's to every adult in the country. The vast majority of the
population is peasantry, widely distributed, in often remote areas,
frequently inaccessible by vehicle, and without electricity. Vast numbers
of Haitians lack even a birth certificate.
Accessible areas have been heavily targeted by the NED and AID front
organizations for candidate recruitment under a baffling array of
political banners. These phony political organizations are being built up
alongside a tidal wave of disinformation designed to mislead or at least
bewilder Haitians. It combines inaccurate news, exploitation of local
controversies, and incessant rumor-mongering.
The hope is that the Esapce "coalition" can gain enough seats for a
parliamentary majority.
An anti-neoliberal president can exercise a mandate with a solid
parliamentary block, but the president it required to select the Prime
Minister from the majority party in Parliament. If that is not his or her
Party, the president becomes a figurehead, since the real executive power
is vested in the Prime Minister. An Espace majority could nullify any
chance an Aristide might have to exercise power against neoliberalism.
The reason this tactic is proving successful is threefold. First, of
course, there is the level of monetary commitment to Espace-who some
observers expect to nominate none other than Marc Bazin for the
Presidential race. Secondly, a number of the formerly militant popular
organizations, like Tet Kole and the MPP (Papay Peasant's Movement) have
been slowly co-opted by the steady trickle of project dollars flowing
through the almost interminable list of non-governmental organizations
(NGO's) infesting every corner of Haiti. But finally, there are the flawed
organizational structures of larger organizations, particularly Fanmi
Lavalas, which have no reliable mechanisms for developing and then
following a clear, principled political line.
Fanmi is essentially horizontal. It consists of "chapters" called Ti Fanmi
(Little Families), each of which is in fact a local clique. There are no
intermediate structures that allow for systematic discussion of positions
or agendas, and so that responsibility devolves solely on the leader-in
this case, Aristide. Aristide's Foundation for Democracy constitutes a
kind of resource distribution point around Port-au-Prince-one carrot he
has to offer loyal subjects-and the other, bigger carrot is the
possibility of jobs to hand out if he is elected. So the organization is
riddled with factionalism and backbiting to win the favor of the "great
man."
This clientelle-ism gives rise to extraordinary aberrations. It is now
common to listen to the radio and hear one Fanmi representative declaring
on a position one day, and being contradicted by another Fanmi
representative from somewhere else two days later. The Ti Fanmi leader in
Jacmel today is a former Macoute.
Fanmi is highlighted here because it claims the largest following. But
this rudderless patron-client structure is widespread in popular
organizations, and is often wrongly believed to be somehow democratic,
simply because it is "non-hierarchical".
The purpose of the PPN (National Popular Party), formerly the APN
(National Popular Assembly), for the last decade, has been to remedy
exactly that problem. Secretary General of the PPN, Ben Dupuy, describes
the PPN's agenda simply. "We say no to foreign occupation, no to
neoliberalism, and no to U.S. engineered elections."
What makes the PPN unique on the Haitian political scene is that it is
making this fight for political and economic sovereignty with a
disciplined and accountable structure. It's "assemblies" are organized
within and corresponding to existing political subdivisions, from ville,
to communal section, to commune, to department, to the national level.
They exercise assessment periods for the study of changes in the political
conditions, then carry evaluations through each level via delegates who
gather regularly. This process is followed by a similar series of meetings
to approve resolutions for PPN's work. Resolutions approved at the
national level are referred to an executive committee, who then does the
grunt work to ensure that assemblies at every level can carry out their
work plans consistent with democratically determined positions and goals.
The PPN led the successful boycott of the 1995 elections (then as the
APN), and they are calling for a boycott again.
Says communal delegate, Janelle Cheri, who hid for three months in
sugarcane fields during the coup to escape assassination, "It is absurd to
ask the Haitian people to yet again validate this so-called process. They
want us to accept economic blackmail and call it development, and now they
want us to accept a receipt from a thief so he can claim nothing was
stolen."
Asked what the alternative is to voting, Cheri says "The PPN will continue
to spend our limited time and resources to take the issues where the
people are. The people are not in the Parliament. They are in the
mountains and the streets." Asked what the issues are, the response is
simply: "Self-determination."
PPN's counterpart in the United States is the Haiti Support Network. HSN
spokesperson and U.S. editor of the trilingual Kreyol-French-English
newspaper, Haiti Progres, Kim Ives says with regard to the current
situation in Haiti, "In this one superpower age, it's important to
identify those struggles which have the most capacity for effective
resistance. Haiti is one of those places. Not only because it is the home
of the world's first successful slave-led revolution, but because today
the Haitian people have been able to maintain the will to resist on every
level, politically, culturally, and economically. Through a combination of
both high-intensity and low-intensity warfare, the will to resist has been
diffused for the time being throughout most of the Americas. But in Haiti,
despite the intervention of the world's most powerful military, the U.S.
has still failed to impose and implant the neo-liberal agenda."
Stan Goff is retired from the army. He writes and speaks about U.S.
foreign policy, and lives in Raleigh, NC.
-30-
Contact Information for the Haiti Support Network:
The Haiti Support Network is a coalition of Haitian and North American
groups and individuals which raises political and material support for
democratic and popular forces in Haiti. For more information, contact the
HSN at the International Action Center, 39 West 14th St., Room 206, New
York, NY 10011, Tel: 212-633-6646, Fax: 212-633-2889, E-Mail:
haiticom@nyxfer.blythe.org
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Wayne S. Smith reports a 1999 conference on "Afro-Cubans in Cuban Society: Past, Present and Future."
- Center for
International Policy (CIP)
http://www.ciponline.org/afrocuba.htm
December 1999
Afro-Cubans in Cuban Society
By Wayne S. Smith
On September 16-17, 1999, the Center for International
Policy, the Cuba Exchange Program of the Johns Hopkins
University and Havana's Fundacion Fernando Ortiz jointly
hosted a conference in Washington, D.C. entitled
"Afro-Cubans in Cuban Society: Past, Present and Future."
Summary
Conference participants were in agreement on a number of
points:
1.) Although Afro-Cubans had made up the bulk of the
Liberation Army's struggle for independence, the more
egalitarian society promised by Jose Marti was not realized.
Their efforts to participate fully in the political process
were cut short by the massacre of 1912.
2.) Although the Cuban Revolution had, after 1959, done much
to reduce racial discrimination and bring about a more just
society, as of 1999, much remains to be done. Indeed,
because of the present economic crisis, racism is on the
rise in Cuba and blacks are disadvantaged in a number of
ways.
3.) The Cuban government needs to do much more to address
the problem. Perhaps the best way to begin would be to
openly acknowledge its existence and initiate a national
dialogue as to how best to solve it.
4.) The Afro-Cuban majority would not accept the return of
the white economic elites to rule the country. That option
cannot even be on the table.
5.) Santeria has profound roots in the Afro-Cuban
experience. This merits respect and understanding not
rejection and isolation. Dialogue with the Catholic
hierarchy would be of great importance as most practitioners
of Santeria are baptized Catholics.
The Past: 1886-1959
Like their brothers and sisters in the United States, blacks
were brought to Cuba from Africa as slaves. For almost four
centuries, they struggled to survive, to be free and to hold
to their cultural and ethnical heritage. Santeria and other
African-derived religions were key forces. They enabled the
blacks to maintain a certain cultural and social cohesion
during the years of slavery despite the deliberate efforts
of the slaveowners to scatter families and ethinc groups and
to erase their ethnic traditions.
In his presentation, Pedro Pablo Rodriguez reminded the
audience that especially into the nineteenth century, not
all blacks were slaves. On the contrary, an increasing
number were freemen and they strove mightily to raise not
only their own station in life but also the possibilities
for their race. There were setbacks to be sure, most notably
the massacres of Aponte in 1812 and La Escalera in 1844.
Still, over the century, free blacks helped prepare the way.
Perhaps the most important was Antonio Maceo, who played a
fundamental role in mobilizing Afro-Cubans against slavery
and Spanish colonialism. Emancipation came in 1886 as an
outgrowth of the wars of independence. Jose Marti's call for
a society in which there would be no blacks or whites but
simply Cubans kindled hopes for a truly egalitarian society.
Blacks flocked to Maceo's and Marti's banners during the
last war of independence, 1895-98, and made up the bulk of
the Army of Liberation. After independence, in the 1900s,
many of them formed a Colored Independence Party (Partido
Independiente de Color) and took other steps to participate
in the political process as equals. But tragically, Marti
had been killed in the first battle of the war. And as Aline
Helg pointed out, his thesis that all were simply Cubans was
often used by white leaders who followed him to marginalize
the issue of race, or even to suggest that the problem did
not exist, and take no measures to address it.
Meanwhile, whites tended to see efforts by blacks to
participate in the political process as unwanted and
dangerous. There was ominous talk of a coming black
rebellion. This building white resentment and reaction led
to the massacre of 1912, when the Cuban army slaughtered
thousands of blacks, especially in Oriente province,
supposedly to put down a rebellion. It was a traumatic blow.
Although there were some advances in the years after 1912,
blacks remained second-class citizens until the triumph of
the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
Robin Moore traced the evolution of Afro-Cuban music as a
reflection of the acceptance (or rejection) of Afro-Cubans
by the society around them. During most of the nineteenth
century and certainly in the centuries before, i.e., in the
heyday of slavery, Afro-Cuban music was virtually banned.
Carnivals were wholly segregated until emancipation and the
Afro-Cuban musical groups, the comparsas, were not allowed
to participate. With the participation of so many blacks in
the struggle for national independence, the turn of the
century saw some openings. Blacks were ostensibly accepted
as citizens, but at the same time there were calls for the
suppression of "atavistic art forms." Technically, comparsas
were not banned from the carnival celebrations, but more
often than not they were prevented, in one way or another,
from participating. Not until the 1940s did the barriers
begin truly to come down. From that point forward,
Afro-Cuban music in comparsas and general flourished. Given
its tremendous popularity today -- in Cuba and throughout
the world -- it is difficult to remember that it was once
banned in Cuba. What was once banned is now Cuba's pride and
glory. Music fans all over the world can be happy that
Afro-Cubans persevered!
The Present: 1959 Until Today
The Cuban Revolution, which triumphed on January 1, 1959,
promised to end discrimination and provide equal
opportunities for blacks. Without question, tremendous
strides were made. Blacks were indeed given equal access to
education through the postgraduate level. Discrimination in
the workplace was greatly reduced. However, as Tato Qui ones
pointed out, official policy was one thing, what happened
was another. Some managers and officials simply didn't agree
that blacks should be treated equally and their personal
prejudices led them to give preference to whites.
Nor were blacks proportionately represented in the
government. They still are not. At first this could be
explained as a matter of cultural or educational lag. Forty
years after the triumph of the revolution, however, that
explanation has worn thin.
Still, by the end of the eighties blacks had made
significant gains. An increasing percentage had become
professionals, rising to the top in the military and winning
great prestige in sports, the arts, music, dance, the
cinema, and poetry. Santeria, while at first treated as a
folkloric expression by the Cuban government, had come to be
fully accepted as a religion. The way seemed open for new
gains in the years that were to follow. Though
underrepresented in the senior organs of the
party-state-government triad, blacks had grounds for
optimism that progress could be made there as well.
Certainly, Rigoberto Lopez emphasized, Afro-Cubans always
felt that the goals of the revolution were their goals as
well: equality and social justice for all.
But economic crises do not usually bring out the best in
people and the current Cuban crisis is no exception. The
resulting competition for jobs, dollars and status since
1991 has resulted in something of a resurgence of racism,
and led to increased disparities. For example, because they
benefited from the revolution, few blacks went into exile.
Yet, the largest source of hard currency is family
remittances from the exiles in the United States. As there
are few blacks among them, very little of that money comes
to Afro-Cubans on the island. And today, one's economic
status depends largely on access to dollars. In this and in
many other ways, blacks face new disadvantages.
Still, as Ana Cairo pointed out, the problems of racism,
discrimination and racial inequalities were all inherited by
the revolution. It didn't invent them. The revolution hasn't
been able to solve them, but it has made a creditable
effort. And she agreed with Rigoberto Lopez that Afro-Cubans
tend to see the revolution's goals as their own. The most
basic was to bring social justice to the poor and
downtrodden. Whether they were black or white did not
matter. She noted too that the U.S. had not played a helpful
role. Racist attitudes in Cuba had been given new strength
during the U.S. occupations -- 1898-1902 and 1906-08. The
forty-year-old U.S. embargo had also been harmful to blacks
perhaps more than whites -- since it did most harm to the
more vulnerable elements of Cuban society.
Rigoberto Lopez agreed and noted that one could not
understand anything about the past forty years in Cuba
without factoring in the all-pervasive U.S. embargo. It had
made progress difficult on many fronts. It still does.
Further, all agreed that the last thing Afro-Cubans wanted
to see was the return of the white elitist exiles thinking
they were going to turn the clock back and rule over the
island as they had before the revolution. That was totally
unacceptable.
Interestingly, panelists representing Afro-Cubans living
abroad emphasized their continuing identification with the
community still on the island. They still feel themselves to
be a part of it and consider the goals and problems of
Afro-Cubans on the island to be theirs. They are dedicated
to the cause of racial as well as social justice -- in the
diaspora and back home.
In sum, all panelists were in agreement that while progress
has been made under the revolution, much more remains to be
done. Meanwhile, there are worrisome signs that racism and
discrimination may again be on the rise in Cuba, even though
officially condemned.
The Role of Santeria
Santeria, as Lazara Menendez noted, is so deeply woven into
Cuban culture as to be a part of Cuban identity, i.e., what
it means to be Cuban. One can hardly imagine Cuban music,
literature, or even thought patterns without the influence
of Santeria. Further, it is the most numerous and most
powerful religion in Cuba and is growing rapidly. This is
not simply because there is an Afro-Cuban majority. On the
contrary, many whites as well practice Santeria.
Santeria is a syncretic religion. When the enslaved blacks
were first brought in from Africa, they were forbidden from
worshipping their traditional gods. Instead, they had to
adopt the Catholic faith. They did, but with an imaginative
wrinkle. They simply fused the one with the other. Thus,
Chango became Santa Barbara, Eleggua became St. Anthony, St.
Lazarus was Babalu Aye, etc. They saw no inherent
contradiction between the two belief systems and still do
not. Most santeros are baptized Catholics. Santeria simply
adds another but profoundly important dimension. As Miguel
Barnet pointed out, its importance as a means of
communication cannot be exaggerated. In many ways it
represents a sociological key to Cuban society.
This is in some ways surprising, given that, as Eugenio
Matibag noted, Santeria is not really an organized church;
rather, it represents a system of beliefs and of individual
worship within that system, guided perhaps by a local
babalao. But there is no hierarchy -- no system as in the
Catholic Church of bishops responsible to a cardinal and all
responsible to the pope as the head of the church. Despite
that, Santeria has, over the centuries, been a powerful
unifying force.
Natalia Bolivar pointed out that while initially shunned by
whites, Santeria had come to permeate the whole society.
Presidents Mario Menocal, Carlos Prio Socarras and Fulgencio
Batista, for example, had all been santeros and it had been
Batista, in the forties, who brought down most of the
remaining restrictions on the practice of Santeria and on
the participation of comparsas in carnival. And then came
the revolution. Given its ideological position with respect
to religions, the socialist government had at first been
somewhat restrictive toward Santeria. But that has now been
overcome. The spiritualism of the Cuban people endured and
the government now allows the practice of Santeria as well
as other faiths.
Unfortunately, all panelists noted, that openness toward the
practice of Santeria is not evident in the Catholic Church.
Santeros had looked forward enthusiastically to the pope's
visit in January, 1998. Most, after all, are baptized
Catholics. They had expected his visit to be an expression
of brotherhood and that it would mark the beginning of a new
spirit of cooperation among all religions. They had been
stunned when Cardinal Jaime Ortega, in his televised address
to the nation before the visit, had condemned syncretic
religions described by him as "simply folkloric rites."
There was no question as to whom he referred. And then,
although the pope had received representatives of all other
religions on the island, including Dr. Jose Miller, the
president of the small Jewish community (only some 1,500
strong), he had shunned any contact with representatives of
the Santeria faith. This had been deeply resented by
Afro-Cubans in general and most especially by santeros. It
had exacerbated a sense of exclusion and separation. Many
who had planned to attend the mass in Havana that was the
centerpiece of the pope's visit boycotted it instead. Nor
have the divisions and resentments been healed. On the
contrary, the cardinal continues to deny the importance and
authenticity of Santeria. As one panelist put it, "It is as
though he does not wish to share with us any of the greater
space for the practice of religion."
In the final analysis, panelists agreed, this growing
estrangement and resentment between the Catholic Church and
Santeria is likely to hurt the church more. What the
hierarchy of the church doesn't seem to realize, but the
parish priests do, is that 80 percent of the people in the
masses on Sunday are santeros. If they stopped going, there
wouldn't be much church left.
Panelists noted that relations with the Protestant churches
tend to be good. And they expressed hope for reconciliation
with the Catholic hierarchy -- once the latter had
"reflected further on the issue."
The Future
Gisela Arandia and Graciella Chailloux joined in
acknowledging the long way yet to go to attain racial
equality. There was no shame in acknowledging this. No other
country has succeeded in solving the problem either. Cuba
has made a better effort than most, and, both agreed, may
now be in position to undertake a more comprehensive
solution. The National Assembly, the universities, and other
institutions are even now considering new steps. One measure
being considered, for example, is the inclusion of
Afro-Cuban studies in the regular curriculum of Cuban
primary and secondary schools -- a step which would
emphasize the important role played by Afro-Cubans in Cuban
history and society.
Chailloux concluded that the atmosphere now favors positive
change and that Cuba's intellectuals are capable of moving
toward definitive solutions. A society without
discrimination and in which all can live together
harmoniously -- a society in which the cultural heritage of
all is respected -- is attainable. The most important thing
is that an honest dialogue begin.
Carlos Moore took strong exception to the optimistic views
of the previous two speakers. Cuba is not a multicultural
country, he maintained; rather there were two distinct
cultures in Cuba -- African and Spanish -- which have been
and still are in conflict with one another. Discrimination
and racism of course persist. He did not believe the
revolution had made a serious effort to get rid of them, and
Afro-Cubans clearly remain disadvantaged. Still, there is a
growing consciousness among Afro-Cubans of who they are,
despite forty years of having the whole issue of race
downplayed. They have held to their cultural and ethnic
roots. And they are now the majority. Justice must be done.
A new, more equitable socio-political model must be
developed. Moore believes there are five possible options.
The first was to maintain the current status quo, i.e. a
white-led communist state. But that would not be acceptable
to the majority and would not work for long anyway.
The second was a return to the status quo ante, i.e., a
white-led capitalist model. That, as earlier speakers had
made clear, was totally unacceptable.
There was also the possibility of partition, i.e. the island
divided between a white and black Cuba. That had been
suggested in the past and could not be discarded as a
possible option even now, despite all the difficulties it
would create.
The fourth option was black-majority rule.
And, finally, there was the possibility of condominial rule,
i.e., of power shared equally between blacks and whites.
Moore left it to the audience to consider which option might
be the most suitable. Despite his earlier criticisms of the
government for the way it has handled the racial issue,
Moore concluded by saying that he credited the revolution
with bringing about the conditions in which the issue can
now be discussed and, hopefully, solved. He agreed with
Chailloux and Arandia that the most important thing is that
the problem be openly acknowledged and that a national
dialogue begin.
Moore's remarks sparked a heated three-hour discussion that
made it clear that the overwhelming majority rejected
partition and most of the other options. By inference, the
only one that seemed feasible was condominial rule. They
also felt strongly that there were not two altogether
distinct, warring cultures that could never be joined;
rather, Cuba was developing a distinct identity which was a
blend of African, Spanish and various other cultures. It was
toward this vision that Cuba should be moving.
Concluding Remarks
Pablo Armando Fernandez
"At times, still, I ask myself: what is Cuba? What is it to
be Cuban? The answer, I believe, is that it is to have
participated in a history without parallel in our
hemisphere. A history that has forged us into what we are. A
history of continued struggle to make of Cuba a fully
independent, free and sovereign nation. It is a struggle
shared by the sons and daughters of the conquistadores and
the colonizers. I think of Flor Crombet and of Quintin
Banderas organizing the descendants of Galicians, Asturians,
Catalonians and Basques to wage war against the Spanish
crown that was to them the motherland.
"It is good that this dialogue among Cubans has begun. It is
especially moving that it takes place here, in the United
States, where the struggle for respect and justice waged by
the sons and daughters of the forced exodus from Africa has
been and is so intense.
"As I look out over the sea of faces before me, I envision
Atlantis, with Cuba as its great altar -- an altar, a garden
where all the imaginable colors make of the flowers an
unforgettable diadem, perennial in its light, in its
essence, in its fruits, its seed. Seeing it, my spirit opens
and I understand more deeply what it is to be Cuban.
"Spain gave us our language and helped shape our character;
Africa gave us her poetry, her magic, and myths in which
song and dance are a ritual of the soul. I attribute to the
African in all of us the tender familiarity and affection
among us. Color is simply an adornment, a garment like that
of the flower, nothing more, and as with the flower, the
essence is the memory -- a memory that commits us to the
clean, harmonious, and deep integration that is found in our
arts: music, dance, poetry, sculpting and painting. And here
our Asiatic component is strongly felt -- in the Chinese
trumpet that enlivens our feast days, and in the works of
one of our most illustrious elders: the painter Wilfredo
Lam.
"And we should not forget the aborigines. They too were part
of the struggle. They rekindle the spirit of that which for
three centuries has been a memory dominating our landscape,
and which in certain regions of the country is scarcely
preserved in what was for Araucans our daily bread.
"...We are the flower, the garden; we recapture the spirit
of Atlantis. Seeing you all here, my spirit soars. We are
custodians of the great altar."
Afro-Cubans in Cuban Society: Past, Present and Future
September 16-17, 1999
Organized by the Center for International Policy, the Cuba Exchange Program of the Johns Hopkins University, the Latin American Studies Program of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Fundaci n Fernando Ortiz in Havana With the cooperation of
TransAfrica Forum and the participation of members of the Congressional Black Caucus
In the Kenney Auditorium of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins
University 1740 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
September 16, 1999
8:30-9:00 a.m. Coffee and registration
9:00-9:05 a.m. Welcome Wayne S. Smith, Center for International Policy and Johns Hopkins University, conference organizer
9:05-9:20 a.m. Introductory remarks Congressman Charles B. Rangel (D-NY)
9:20-10:50 a.m. Session I - The Past: From the Ten Years' War to 1959
Moderator: Jean Stubbs, University of North London, co-editor (with Pedro Perez Sarduy) of AfroCuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture
Aline Helg, University of Texas, author of Our Rightful Share: The AfroCuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912
Robin Moore, Temple University, author of Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Cuba, 1920-1940
Pedro Pablo Rodriguez, Centro de Estudios Martianos, editor of Las Obras Completas de Jose Marti
11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Session II - The Present: 1959 Until Today, on the Island
Moderator: Selena Mendy Singleton, TransAfrica Forum
Ana Cairo, University of Havana Rigoberto Lopez, filmmaker, ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute)
Serafin (Tato) Quinones, Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC), author of A Pie de Obra
12:30-2:30 p.m. Luncheon
2:45-4:15 p.m. Session III - The Present, in the Diaspora
Eduardo Barada, Habana Village, Washington, DC
Alberto Jones, The Caribbean Children's Fund, Palm Coast, FL
Perdo Perez Sarduy, Marti-Maceo Cultural Society, London,
author of Cumbite and Other Poems
September 17, 1999
9:00-10:30 a.m. Session IV - The Importance of Santeria
Moderator: Serafin (Tato) Quinones
Miguel Barnet, Fundaci n Fernando Ortiz, author of Akeke y la Jutia
Lazara Menendez, University of Havana, author of Estudios Afrocubanos
Natalia Bolivar Ar stegui, Cuban National Museum of Fine Arts, author of Los Orishas en Cuba
Eugenio Matibag, Iowa State University, author of Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections in Narrative
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Session V - The Future
Moderator: Enrique Sosa, University of Havana, author of Los Yanigos
Graciela Chailloux, Casa de Altos Estudios Don Fernando Ortiz
Gisela Arandia, Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC)
Carlos Moore, University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad, author of Castro, the Blacks in Africa
12:00 p.m. Final Remarks
Pablo Armando Fernandez, Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC), author of The Belly of the Fish
A video of the conference's final panel is available for $45.00. Additionally, papers by Graciela Chailloux, Tato Quinones, Natalia Bolivar and Gisela Arandia are available for $4.00 apiece.
For more information contact: Kimberly Waldner at 202-232-3317 or write to: CIP-Cuba Project
1755 Massachusetts Ave. NW Suite 312 Washington, D.C., 20036 or kwaldner@ciponline.org
Copyright (c) 1999-2001 Center for International Policy. All rights reserved.
Any material herein may be quoted without permission, with credit to the Center for International Policy. The Center is a nonprofit educational and research organization focusing on U.S. policy toward the developing world and its impact on human rights and needs.
Hard copies of this report are available for US $1.50 each, or 50 cents each for orders of 20 or more. Request them by email at cip@ciponline.org, or send a check or money order and a note with your address and number of copies to: IPR orders, Center for International Policy, 1755 Massachusetts
Ave. NW, Suite 312, Washington, DC 20036.
- The Black World Today
-
http://www.tbwt.com/views/specialrpt/special%20report-1_02-27-01.asp
February 27, 2001
Black Colombians Seek Peace and Freedom by Playthell Benjamin
The Other Side of the Colombian Anti-Drug Policy
On Saturday afternoon February 24, three black Colombian
exiles -- Oscar Gamboa, Carlos Rosero and Luis Gilberto
Murillo, the ex-governor of the state of del Choco -- spoke
to a group of Colombians residing in the US, along with
Americans who support a just policy for the South American
nation of Colombia. It was the most frank and enlightening
talk that most in the audience -- this writer included --
had ever heard about the Colombian situation. And the
Afro-Colombians pulled no punches in their criticisms of US
policy toward their country, which they view as misguided
and driven by military imperatives rooted in their desire to
prop up the present corrupt and racist regime. Sponsored by
the Colombia Media Project and the Patrice Lumumba
Coalition, the meeting was held at The House of The Lord on
Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, the pastorate of
activist/preacher Herbert Daughtry.
It must have been quite a pleasant surprise for the visiting
Afro-Colombians to look about them and see the huge
paintings of the biblical characters that adorn the church's
walls portrayed as black people. Especially since, as they
reiterated throughout the afternoon, the existence of black
people is barely acknowledged in their country. A point
underscored in remarks by Afro-Americans during the question
and answer period, who pointed out that they didn't even
know that Colombia had a black population. The
Afro-Colombians were not surprised by American ignorance of
their existence, although they are almost half the
population and are visible everywhere on the streets of
Colombian towns and throughout the countryside.
Located on the northernmost tip of South America, Colombia
is mainly known in the US as the premier source of the
cocaine that floods the streets of this country. But, as we
learned on Saturday, Colombia is a country of 40 million
people -- 40% of whom are black according to Oscar Gamboa --
bordered by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea that is rich
in oil, natural gas, coal, nickel, emeralds, many species of
flowers, and what many would swear is the world's best
coffee. The country also has an abundance of forest and
rivers. Hence, as the speakers constantly pointed out, there
is much more to Colombia than cocaine.
The present crisis of Afro-Colombians must be viewed within
the context of the generalized crisis in that country, which
includes a civil war, mass fumigation of crops, and the
worst economic depression since the 1930s. With unemployment
rates ranging from 20%, which is the official rate, to the
50% that many observers say is the actual rate, a majority
of Colombians live below the poverty line. With such
widespread poverty it is not surprising that there is a
flourishing cocaine trade.
However as Oscar Gamboa, who was the first of the Colombians
to speak, pointed out in arguing against the US inspired
crop fumigation policy of the Colombian government, "The
coca plant is not the problem. The peasants have long used
it for medicine. The problem is cocaine, the sale and
consumption of cocaine. And there are millions of dollars
surrounding the cocaine business!" Gamboa also pointed out
that most of the people arrested for drug dealing in
Colombia are the same type of small fry dealers that are
generally locked up in the US, and the big money laundering
traffickers at the top go untouched.
Furthermore, Gamboa told the attentive audience, "The
spraying of coca crops hurts other crops more. It is
contaminating rivers and lakes and destroying food crops
that the peasants need to survive. We must find an
alternative to this or the peasants will starve." He also
informed the crowd that Afro-Colombians were heavily
concentrated in the areas where the fighting and fumigations
were taking place and portends a major disaster. He warned
that, "If you destroy the countryside blacks will be forced
to go to the cities. And because of racial discrimination
they will not find work. Then in order to survive they will
either turn to crime or make their way to the US by whatever
means."
But it is not only the crop damage due to fumigations that
is forcing many black Colombians to leave the countryside.
Violence from the Colombian army and the right-wing
paramilitary groups who -- as abundant evidence demonstrates
are the unofficial terrorist arm of the Colombian government
-- also wreak havoc on the black and Indian peasantry. "In
Colombia, killing people is almost an exercise. And we who
attempt to organize to better our condition are risking our
lives because we are labeled as guerrillas," says Gamboa.
But he argues that, "We as blacks in Colombia can't just sit
with our arms folded and do nothing because we have children
and we must leave them a country that they can live in. What
we need in Colombia is peace so that our children can play
and adults can work in peace knowing their children will not
be killed in the war." Gamboa went on to describe the
killings, kidnappings and bombings that are taking place in
his country and pleaded with right thinking Americans to
"Help us create a new reality because we don't want drugs or
war."
The murders in far away Colombia became all too real when a
black Colombian expatriate dramatically arose from the
audience and told of the murder of her brother. "That's why
we are here," said Gamboa, "I heard about your brother's
murder in Colombia. The media reported it but one death
quickly follows another.That is why the people who are still
in Colombia, still doing the work are the real heroes."
While Oscar Gamboa delivered the longest speech of the
evening, Carlos Rosero, who followed him to the podium, also
made a powerful statement on the plight of Afro-Columbians.
"We are located all across Colombia, on the Caribbean and
Pacific coasts," says Rosero, who is very dark complexioned
with long dreadlocks and looked like he was from the
neighborhood, in fact all three of them looked like
round-the-way boys. He summed up the Afro-Colombian
contribution to the national economy this way: "Everything
that leaves Colombia, including products of the mines, has
been largely produced by black hands." But he quickly
pointed out, "still we have nothing. Slavery has been over
for 150 years, but they compensated the slaveholders. We
have yet to receive reparations."
Along with the war against the two major guerilla force --
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-peoples Army, or
FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN -- and the
crop fumigations, Rosero offered an additional reason why
the black population is forced to move from their land. "It
is only recently, after 500 years, that we have land rights.
Yet we, along with the indigenous people, are being
displaced at a rate of 36%. At first our lands were
considered worthless, but now that they have been found to
be valuable we are being dispossessed. Every time they build
a bridge it seems as if it is to remove black people. That's
because our lands are rich with biodiversity and other
products, including oil!"
"We must develop a strategy to halt these dispossessions,"
argues Rosero. "Without territory we cannot build a
community power base. A great part of the problem of
Afro-Colombians in recent years is the absence of autonomy
for our community. Colombia is ethnically diverse, but there
is no official recognition that blacks have a right to
develop as a people, as a community. That is the central
problem of development." Rosero said. He then pointed out
the similarity in the situation of Africans and Indians in
Colombia. "The problems of the UWA Indians and the big US
oil companies is based on this lack of recognition of their
right to autonomous development by the Colombian government.
The blacks and Indians should be consulted on any plans for
national development."
After presenting some statistics on the thousands of animals
killed and the vast acreage of farmlands destroyed, Rosero
pleaded with the audience for their active support in
changing US policy towards his country. "We must deescalate
the war because it is being fought in our regions and we are
most of the dead and displaced," he said, "so we want all
parties to negotiate a peaceful solution to this conflict."
Rosero's statement echoed Gamboa's earlier observation that,
"We cannot continue the strategy of trying to seek peace
through violence. We must seek peace through peace."
With guerrilla armies controlling almost half of the
national territory and the US sending new arms to the
Conservative Party's Andres Pastrana, who presently occupies
the President's office, there seems little hope that peace
will be given a chance. Among the weapons provided the
Pastrana government by the $1.3 billion military aid package
are 42 Huey helicopters -- an aircraft that wrought much
death and destruction in Vietnam -- 18 Black Hawk copters
and funding to train more special forces units to combat the
insurgents. With these kinds of preparations only more
warfare is visible on the horizon.
Luis Gilberto Murillo, the former governor of the state of
Choco, was the last to speak. Driven from office and into US
exile by white Colombian paramilitary death squads, Murillo
said the situation in Colombia is so dangerous he wondered
after arriving in the US whether he should "speak out or
remain silent." He told the astonished gathering that: "Some
of my friends advised me to keep quiet because blacks have
enough problems in Colombia."
But Luis Murillo is glad that he decided to speak out
because by doing so he "discovered that most African
Americans were surprised that there were blacks in Colombia,
and especially so many!" Murillo said "I want to show how a
misguided US policy is affecting blacks and others in
Colombia. So we decided to use Afro-American history month
to begin a dialogue with our Afro-American brothers. We want
to open a dialogue with other races in Colombia, but that
attempt will only exacerbate other problems." This statement
brings to mind the situation of Afro-Brazilians, who risk
being indicted for "disturbing the racial tranquility of
Brazil" for accusing a white Brazilian of racism. Such is
the strange Barnum and Bailey world of many blacks living in
Latin America. Hence they have a long and complex struggle
ahead in countries where simply speaking out for basic human
rights can result in imprisonment or death.
But for the moment says Murillo, "We want to change American
policy so that it is not so warlike. We would like to see a
peaceful US policy, and in that respect we could use a lot
of help from American citizens!" The Afro-Colombian
delegation plans to travel around the country telling their
troubling story. The high point of their American odyssey
will be a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, a
body that has no counterpart in their native Colombia. And,
obviously, there is no black person as powerful as Colin
Powell either. Yet it remains to be seen whether Powell's
tenure as Secretary Of State in the richest and most
powerful nation in the world will have any positive benefit
for oppressed and impoverished black peoples struggling for
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness around the world.
The Colombians are wise to concentrate their efforts among
African Americans because as Mario Murillo, WBAI producer
and member of the Colombia Media Project, pointed out at the
meeting, even the progressive white left often overlooks the
Afro-Colombian problem. Mario, a light skinned native
Colombian who has resided in the US for many years, referred
to a flyer put out by white leftists that was distributed at
the meeting yet failed to even mention black Colombians.
Anyone who would like to get involved in supporting the
Afro-Colombian struggle to change a destructive American
policy that is killing them, to one that is constructive and
life sustaining, should contact the Colombia Media Project
at 212-802-7209, or on-line at mmcompa@igc.org. The struggle
continues!
Copyright (c) 2001 The Black World Today. All Rights Reserved
Connie White announces the first session of International Tribunal on Africa
- International
Tribunal on Africa
c/o Connie White, Tribunal Organizer
P.O. Box 303
2286 East Carson St.
Long Beach, CA 90807
Tel: (562) 915-3510 (voicemail)
Fax: (562) 492-9139
Email: connierw@earthlink.net
____________________________________________________________
(slightly edited)
CALL FOR THE FIRST SESSION OF THE
INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL ON AFRICA
Compton College
Los Angeles, California
February 5-6, 2000
In March 1998, political and trade union leaders from 18
African countries issued an Appeal to hold an "International
Tribunal to Judge Those Responsible for the Murderous Course
Imposed on the Workers and Peoples of Africa." The call for
this International Tribunal on Africa was launched at a
conference held in Bingerville, C te d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
that was organized by the International Liaison Committee
for a Workers' International (ILC).
The first session of the International Tribunal on Africa
will take place at Compton College in Compton, Calif., on
February 5-6 of the year 2000. Compton is in the greater
metropolitan Los Angeles area.
Why Such an Appeal?
African people today are threatened by a human and social
tragedy unprecedented in the history of humanity. Average
life expectancy in the African continent is devastatingly
low, and the latest report of the UNDP (United Nations
Program on Development) has warned that if nothing decisive
is undertaken in the months and years to come, average life
expectancy on the African continent will fall further by 20
years. Thus, the African continent's population would
consist of orphans and decimated and disorganized families
that are ruined by illnesses and epidemics such as AIDS and
malaria.
Today, half of the African people are living on less than
one dollar per day. If things continue to deteriorate, the
African continent will be further ravaged by poverty.
Murderous wars and conflicts -- which are developing one
after the other and affect over half the countries in Africa
today -- bestow upon the African continent untold tragedy
and suffering. Because of these wars and conflicts, hundreds
of thousands of civilians have been killed or uprooted.
There are officially 6 million refugees, and 12 million
others wander from one side of the continent to the other
with only poverty and death as their future.
The destruction of industry and of the infrastructure across
the continent is being accelerated. The peoples of the towns
and countryside are faced with mass unemployment. The only
future offered to youth is poverty or the armed gangs that
are tearing the African continent apart. (There are
officially over 300,000 child soldiers.)
Fundamental choices must be made immediately and put into
action to end the further devastation of the African
continent and to create for Africa the possibility of
reaching its full potential.
One need only look at the situation today to know what will
happen if nothing is changed in the decade to come: (a) the
only borders will be the ones imposed by armed gangs; (b)
there will be no qualified people in Africa because future
generations will have been sacrificed by these lost school
years; (c) because of the wars, the only movements of people
will be these mass displacements, not those involving
increased trade; (d) people will die in the streets because
they will be driven out of hospitals for which they have no
money to pay; (e) men and women will be unable to contribute
much to the national economy because of their short life
span; (e) the African continent will everywhere become
another Somalia; and (g) the continent's elite will, simply,
leave.
>From Slavery to Structural Adjustment ...
When political and trade union leaders of 18 African
countries took the initiative to issue a call for an
International Tribunal on Africa, they emphasized that the
dramatic devastation of the African continent and the plight
of its people cannot be separated from the three successive
plagues that have hit the continent -- the slave trade,
colonial occupation and the "structural adjustment plans"
imposed upon Africa for nearly 20 years by institutions such
as the World Bank, the IMF and the European Union.
The people of Africa were devastated by the slave trade, but
in the 1960s they were able to win independence for the
African countries. The independence was short-lived. An
ensuing succession of military coups took place. Their
function was to establish governments willing to act as
servants of the same interests as those which created
slavery and colonialism.
The faces have changed -- it is no longer the colonial
occupiers who are in charge - but colonial domination is
still everpresent. It is now the "experts" from the World
Bank and the IMF who have taken charge of the economies of
the African countries and who rule its states. In all the
ministries of the African governments, one can find
"experts" who exercise genuine power. This is done in the
name of "good governance" and, therefore, implicitly, in the
name of the so-called inability of Black people to govern
for themselves.
Poverty, economic collapse, and disintegration are first and
foremost the result of the burden of the foreign debt
payment. The figures are no secret: the global amount of the
debt of the African continent totals $350 billion; the
yearly payment on "debt" service alone by African countries
is $33 billion. This so-called "debt" is mainly the
accumulation of the debt service.
The debt service on the public debt in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory
Coast), for example, accounts for $3.7 billion of the $6
billion owed. We must stop this bleeding of the resources of
the African continent. Taken as a whole, the debt service
payments of the African states are four times higher than
the combined budgets for education and health care. In 1997,
Niger and Ethiopia had to use half their budgets to pay the
debt service. Zambia used 44% of its budget, and Malawi used
35% of its budget. Fifty percent of export income is devoted
to the payment of the "debt." A recent study by the World
Bank shows that if the amount of money allotted to "debt"
repayment had been used for real development, the yearly
income per capita in a country like Zambia would have
reached $10,000 dollars, instead of the $600 dollars today.
Today, Africa and the people of Africa are dying.
Why the First Session of the Tribunal Is Being Held in the
United States
We believe that the fate of the African continent and its
people is inextricably tied to that of Africans all over the
world. In spite of the official speeches and exorcising
pageantry, slavery is far from being a closed chapter in
world history. The legacy of the slave trade still weighs
heavily on our present.
When the appeal for an International Tribunal on Africa was
launched, political and trade union leaders from 18 African
countries stated that it was impossible to understand the
present drama in Africa without integrating the meaning of
the slave trade and the mass deportation of African people
from the African continent. Africa today still bears the
scars from tens of millions of men, women and children
deported from its shores, loaded on slave ships in chains,
starved and whipped. Millions and millions died or committed
suicide during slave transport, while millions of others
died resisting enslavement or in slave jails before leaving
the African continent. Africa was emptied of its living
forces and of those who had the greatest ability to produce.
Economic activity was plunged into chaos, and the most
advanced forms of social and political organization were
destroyed.
To all that, one must add that in Africa -- as well as in
America and around the world -- Africans still suffer from
the myth of an "inferior race," which was invented by slave
traders to justify what can't be justified. Disorganized and
maimed by slavery, Africans on the African continent
transitioned to the evil of colonial occupation, while
Africans in America transitioned to institutional racism --
the system of racial segregation and discrimination.
Africans throughout the Diaspora have been used in wars
which were not their wars. These wars were often
characterized as "liberating" African peoples in their
individual areas, but instead Africans were used as cannon
fodder. Those Africans who were lucky enough to return from
these wars discovered that "equality" did not exist for
them.
Today, the African continent is torn to pieces and is
crumbling. What is the official "image" given of this
situation? According to official propaganda, the reason the
African continent is crumbling is because it is populated in
majority by Blacks! -- as if being Black should compel one
to live in misery, illness, and wars; as if being Black
makes one incapable of governing and destines one to
degradation. Through the false and lying depictions of
Africa circulating in the official media, one can witness
the emergence once more of all the features that were used
in the past to justify discrimination against and oppression
of Blacks throughout the Diaspora.
What we are aiming to accomplish by organizing the
International Tribunal on Africa is to re-establish the link
between Africans on the continent and all those victimized
by discrimination and oppression who find their roots in
slavery and the past regimes of racial discrimination.
Beside delegates from all regions of Africa, Black activists
from the Caribbean islands, South America, Europe and the
United States will participate and testify to the jury.
The preparatory documents for the Tribunal call for a number
of key demands: the complete cancellation of the devastating
"debt" and austerity forced onto African people by the
colonial powers, including the United States; the right to
self-determination and the restoring of political and
economic independence for all African nations; and, the
immediate payment of needed reparations in forms determined
by African people for past and present crimes committed
against these nations by the foreign countries, corporations
and militaries.
"We are coming from Africa to Los Angeles because there are
tens of millions of you in the Americas who share with us
the common tragedy represented by the enslavement holocaust
of Africa, and the continuing Mafias," said Tribunal
co-coordinator Norbert Gbikpi-Benissan, General Secretary of
the National Federation of Independent Unions of Togo (West
Africa), during a tour of five U.S. cities this past
September.
The February 1999 Johannesburg conference, which prepared
the Tribunal, adopted a resolution in which one can read:
"Conscious of the devastating effects of slavery,
colonialism and neo-colonialism on the African peoples, the
meeting endorsed calls for reparation for the African people
in relation to crimes committed against them by the
imperialist countries."
In addition to these important issues, joint action to
combat the super-exploitative "African Growth and
Opportunity Act" legislation, which recently passed in the
U.S. Congress, and the repressive and regressive World Trade
Organization, will be developed. Quite significantly,
organizers have asked freedom fighter, journalist and
political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (who is fighting to win a
new trial and freedom while currently held on Pennsylvania's
death row), to serve as the honorary chairperson of the
Tribunal.
The political and trade union leaders of Africa who issued
the initial call for the International Tribunal on Africa
are convinced that the judgment which the Tribunal will
issue will enable the people of Africa to call for the
holding of a Congress of African Peoples that could enable
the workers and peoples of the African continent to garner
the strength to take the measures required to save
themselves from this murderous course.
The judgment which the Tribunal will issue will be a means
for Black people -- wherever they find themselves in the
Diaspora -- to put an end to the racist and discriminatory
policies of those who dare pretend that Africa is in crisis
and dislocated by war because Black people are "savages" and
are part of a race of inferior men and women. We will
eradicate that lie.
With each passing day, as it becomes more and more difficult
to survive, Africans on the continent of Africa are
demonstrating that they are a proud and courageous people
who are standing up and fighting back against the war and
plunder imposed upon them.
One final point: At the conclusion of the Preparatory
Conference of the International Tribunal on Africa held in
Johannesburg in February 1999, the delegates assembled
pledged to give the widest possible publicity to the
existence of the Tribunal. In this connection, the gathering
took notice of the fact that the Open World Conference in
Defence of Trade Union Independence and Democratic Rights
(OWC) will be held in San Francisco on February 11-14 of the
year 2000 at the initiative of U.S. trade unions and the
International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International
(ILC).
The participants in the Preparatory Conference felt that the
OWC provides a unique opportunity for publicizing the work
of the Tribunal. They voted to support fully the convening
of the Open World Conference and to urge its organizers to
assist in the effort to promote the work of the
International Tribunal on Africa.
Who is Convening the International Tribunal on Africa?
The following people have come together to constitute the
Organizing Committee of the International Tribunal on
Africa:
* Jahahara Armstrong, member of the National Coalition of
Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) and member of
the BRC (Oakland, Calif.)
* Norbert Tetevi Gbikpi-Benissan, general secretary of the
Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Togo (UNSIT)
* Alan Benjamin, member of the Editorial Board of The
Organizer newspaper and vice chair, Golden Gate chapter of
the Labor Party
* Miguel Cristobal, member, International Relations
Committee, Workers Party of France
* Daniel Gluckstein, coordinator, International Liaison
Committee for a Workers' International (Paris, France)
* Dedon Kamathi, Organizer, All African Peoples
Revolutionary Party (Los Angeles)
* Julian Kunnie, professor at the University of Arizona in
Tucson
* Ray Laforest, representative of the Haitian Mobilization
to Defend Immigrant Rights in New York City
* Cajuste Lexiuste, representative of the Haitian
Mobilization to Defend Immigrant Rights in New York City
* Lybon Tiyani Mabasa, president of the Socialist Party of
Azania (South Africa)
* Morgan Moss, member of the Black Radical Congress in New
Orleans
* Muhjah Shakir, member of the BRC and many other fighting
African-American organizations in Oakland, Calif.
* Connie White, member of the Black Radical Congress in Los
Angeles
We invite you to attend the International Tribunal on Africa
on Saturday and Sunday, February 5-6, 2000 in Compton,
California (USA). The Tribunal will be held at Compton
College from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. both days.
Additionally, we urgently need your financial support so
that this International Tribunal on Africa will be able to
take place. The costs for the Tribunal are nominal, but the
costs of the delegation from Africa are overwhelming. Each
of the 20 African delegates will require a minimum of
US$3,000 to cover travel and lodging expenses.
Won't you please give us your most generous donation in
addition to your registration amount? Registration has been
set at $50 per person. Registration fees are strictly
earmarked toward the cost of the Tribunal and to assist in
financing international delegations.
Please complete the registration form below, and mail it
today, along with your registration fee and a generous
donation. Also, as you fill out the registration make sure
you let us know if you would like us to mail you the
Tribunal Information Packet, which includes all the
background documents from the Bingerville and Johannesburg
preparatory conferences as well as the text of the Tribunal
Acts of Accusation. Please add $10 (includes postage and
handling) to obtain this Information Packet.
Mail to:
Organizing Committee for the International Tribunal on
Africa, c/o Connie White, Tribunal Organizer, P.O. Box 303
2286 East Carson St., Long Beach, CA 90807.
INITIATORS OF THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL ON AFRICA
ALGERIA: Amar Takdjout, Director, Textile and Leather
Division, General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA); Louisa
Hanoune, National Deputy of Algeria.
SOUTH AFRICA/AZANIA: Lybon Mabasa, President, Socialist
Party of Azania (SOPA); Patrice Mkhize, General Secretary,
Azanian Workers Union (AZAWU); Mtimkulu OUMI, Executive
Board, Black National Convention.
BENIN: Gaston Azoua, General Secretary, Workers Federation
of Benin (CSTB); Assogba Innocent, Executive Committee,
CSTB; Kangbeto Albertine, Association for Struggle Against
Inter-Cultural Conflicts.
BURKINGA FASO: Tole Sagnon, General Secretary, General
Federation of Burkina Faso (CGTB); Richard Tiendrebeogo,
General Secretary of the CSTB trade union federation.
BURUNDI: Pail Nkuzimana, President, Organized Workers Force
(FORTRA).
CAMEROUN: Mbille Martin, Workers Federation of Cameroun
(CSTC); Anicet Ekane, Manifesto For Democracy (MANlDEM).
CENTRAL AFRICA: Patrice Zacarias, General Secretary,
National Teachers Union (SNE CASU).
CONGO: Simon Tsimpangila N'Domba, representative, CDT union
federation.
CHAD: Gami N'Garmadjal, General Secretary, SET.
COMORES: Ibourai Ali Tabibou, Coordinator, Auntonomous
Workers Federation of Comores (USATC).
COTE D'IVOIRE (Ivory Coast): Francois Yao, Adjunct General
Secretary, National Autonomous Workers Federation (FESACl);
Marcel Ette, General Secretary, FESACI; Kouame Kra,
Executive Committee, FESACI.
GABON: Jean-Pierre Omanda, Executive Committee,
Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Gabon (CGSL).
GHANA: Kwessi Pratt Jr., Vice President, Convention Party.
GUINEA: Sherif Aboubacar, Foreign Relations Committee,
Electricity and Water Workers Federation.
MADAGASCAR: Z phyrin Razafimandjary, General Secretary,
SYMPIMA federation; Georges Rakotosondrasoava, Dean of the
Order of Journalists and former National Deputy.
NIGER: Daddo Hadji Mahaman Mansur, General Secretary,
National Workers Union of Niger (USTN); Sidib Assane,
Economic Affairs Director, USTN.
RWANDA: Alphonse Karango Niyonzima, human rights activist.
SENEGAL: Iba Ndiaye Diadji, General Secretary, Confederation
of Autonomous Workers Unions (CSA).
SWAZILAND: Jean-Marie Vianney Nzabakarana, Former Deputy
General Secretary of the Rwandan Trade Union Confederation -
exile.
TOGO: Gbikpi Benissan Norbert, General Secretary, National
Federation of Independent Unions of Togo (UNSlT); Claude
Ameganvi, Organizational Secretary, Workers Party (PT).
Manthia Diawara reflects on Blackness
- [BRC-NEWS] Quote of
the Day:
Manthia Diawara Wed 22-12-99
Blackness
The first manifestation of blackness, on the other hand, took place during the confrontation between European slave drivers and Africans in Africa and in the slave ship as a resistance to the reifying gaze of whiteness:
"During the process of their becoming a single people, Yorubas, Akans, Ibos, Angolans and others were present on slave ships to America and experienced a common horror-unearthly moans and piercing shrieks, the smell of filth and the stench of death, all during the violent rhythms and quiet coursing of ships at sea. As such, slaves ships were the first real incubators of slave unity across the cultural lines, cruelly revealing irreducible links from one ethnic group to the other, fostering resistance thousands of miles before the shores of the new land appeared on the horizon-before there was mention of natural rights in North America." (P. Sterling Stuckey, "Slave Culture")
Contrary to common belief, I submit that the grounds for the emergence of a self conscious concept of blackness as a humanist alternative to whiteness was not developed first in Africa. As a discourse, it was shaped in the Americas by the performative acts of liberation by black people
through Western arts, religion, literature, science, and revolution. Blackness for W. E. B. Du Bois is the function of attaining a better and truer self than the one revealed to black people by whiteness: "the assertion Of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance".
For people of African descent, blackness is therefore a way of being human in the West or in areas under Western domination. It is a compelling performance against the logic of slavery and colonialism by people whose destinies have been inextricably linked to the advancement of the West, and who have therefore to learn the expressive techniques of modernity: writing, music, Christianity, and industrialization in order to become uncolonizable. They have to recuperate the category black from the pathological space reserved for it in the discourse of whiteness, and reinvest it with attributes that are valorized in modern humanism. Blackness insists on a discourse of difference which enables it to combat "the image of the Black as an abberation of Whiteness," and, by undermining white privilege over aesthetics, economics, and law, to posit relativistic aesthetics and the aesthetics of relativity. As a concept, blackness questions the homogenizing desire of modernist theories to reassert the sovereign subject of whiteness. It insists that categories such as literature, Marxism, Christianity, and cinema in themselves are "not enough," and it holds on to compound words such as black literature, black marxism, black Christianity, and black cinema to reveal the space omitted or silenced by Eurocentric definitions of these categories Blackness is therefore a way of being African in modernity, a way of resisting both exclusion and silence. Thus blackness is, to borrow a concept again from Du Bois in the Souls of Black Folk, an "afterthought" of modernity, "the tangle of thought and afterthought", the reflexive movement of modernity which empowers the elements of freedom, revolution, identity formation, and resistance to tyranny.
When blackness is conceived as a humanist discourse on the conditions of black people in the West and in areas under Western domination, it becomes easier to see how people in Africa take it from the West under its different manifestations as "Negritude" or "black consciousness" in order to sing their right to independence. Formations of blackness in the West also empower themselves with "Africanism," i.e.African traditions, history, languages, and nomenclatures. Clearly, therefore, blackness and Africanism depend on each other, feed on each other, but are not always interchangeable.
The view of blackness as a modernist discourse of the West with revolutionary and liberating potential is also enabling as a model to other repressed discourses such as feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and minority discourses in totalitarian systems. The struggles and artistic
creations of black people serve as a model for world liberation and life-affirmation: for example, the Chinese students and workers in Tianaman Square, sang "We Shall Overcome," a black signifying on Christianity, to challenge the logic of authoritarianism. Blackness itself is challenged in the hands of its postcolonial and postmodern subjects to account for its totalizing effects on women, gays, and lesbians. By focusing on such zones of ambivalence as identity formation, sexual politics, and hybridization, the postmodern subjects of blackness attempt to prevent it from falling into the same essentialist trap as whiteness.
--Manthia Diawara
"Englishness and Blackness:
Cricket as Discourse on Colonialism"
1990
[ http://www.tiac.net/users/thaslett/m_diawara/callaloo.html ]
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Professor J F Ade Ajayi: UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in Africa
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UN International Day for the Abolition of Slavery: Africa Centre Conference
December 2nd is the UN's International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. On December 4th, the Africa Centre held this conference.UNFINISHED BUSINESS Keynote Address
Tackling the legacies of slavery and colonialism
The summary of my argument is that development remains elusive in Africa, not merely because of the misrule and warped personalities of many African leaders, but because Africa had been damaged severely, first by the slave trade, then by the colonialism, which grew out of the slave trade. Further, that Africa cannot rejoin the development train in the world until the damage is repaired as much as possible. When that is done, it will be of immense benefit not only to Africa, but also to the whole world.
http://www.africacentre.org.uk/Unfinishedbusinesspapers.htm#Professor J F Ade Ajayi
- 123 To
most white people, slavery and colonialism are just a distant memory of
nothing in particular. . . . Poverty and penury in Africa, and
racial inequality in the West, is explained in terms of black inability,
incompetence or laziness.
To black people, though, slavery and colonialism reiterate themselves in our everyday lives, and evoke poignant and immediate memories of suffering, brutalisation and terror. For black people, Western nations achieved their industrial growth and economic prosperity on the backs of blacks, abolished slavery primarily for economic reasons, have discriminated against black people ever since, and are unrepentant about any of it.
Quest for Inclusion: Realizing Afro-Latin American Potential. US$29.95 + s & h.
-
Organization of Africans in the Americas
1234 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite C-1007
Washington DC, 20005
Tel: 202.638.1662 Fax: 202.638.1667
E-mail: oaa@oaanet.org
OAA's first publication is a must read for anyone interested in the African Diaspora, Latin American Studies, the workings of international donor institutions, or history in general. With chapters entitled "Amnesia and Denial," "Building Community among Africans in the Americas," and "Search for Solutions," the publication runs the gamut of the African experience in Latin America: from past injustices to future triumphs.
Quest for Inclusion begins with an overview of Afro-Latin Americans, in the context of the four decades of development theory and assistance programs that have mostly bypassed their communities. It then goes on to document African contributions to the region's history and culture, often overshadowed by the considerable abuse levied against this large population group.
This publication does not solely concentrate on Afro-Latin Americans in a historical context. In fact, a large portion is dedicated to current socio-economic conditions, including human rights, leadership organization, social sectors, and institutional responses to communities of African descent in Latin America. Quest for Inclusion provides significant insight into how Afro-Latin Americans view their development potential, and how they wish to develop it: a perspective which is all too often ignored. The organizational processes currently in Afro-Latin American communities and their different achievements in various countries in the region are introduced, as is a plan of action " The Vision of Afro-American Peoples for the Third Millennium," developed by representatives of Afro-Latin American communities throughout the Americas.
The unique nature of OAA's first publication is not merely its subject matter, but more importantly, the proactive stance of the content. While Afro-Latin American communities have been the subject of literary, anthropological and historical studies, there has been a lack of works that look at solution. Quest for Inclusion: Realizing Afro-Latin American Potential is now one such publication.