17785: Esser: Mbeki's Haiti Visit Was Tribute to Freedom (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com


Mbeki's Haiti Visit Was Tribute to Freedom

Business Day (Johannesburg)
COLUMN January 7, 2004
Posted to the web January 7, 2004

By Bryan Rostron Johannesburg

Much-criticised president seems intent on taking on vestiges of white
prejudice

CONTINUING gripes about President Thabo Mbeki's New Year visit to Haiti
for
the bicentenary of the world's first black republic have entirely missed
the most interesting point: that while Mbeki courts international
respectability by cautious political and fiscal policies, he still
identifies strongly with the only successful slave rebellion in history.

Some have carped about the price tag, an estimated R10m. This is
actually
less than the cost incurred recently by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to
fly
US President George Bush for a couple of hours from London to his
northern
constituency for a photo opportunity , which cost the British taxpayer
£1m
not that we should measure ourselves against the debased standards of
Bush
or Blair.

Here, perhaps, is the potent attraction for black intellectuals of the
200-year-old slave rebellion in Haiti: it was, above all, a
psychological
break with the white slave masters.

In his great book, The Black Jacobins, the radical Trinidad-born writer
CLR
James eloquently writes : "The transformation of slaves, trembling in
hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organise
themselves and defeat the most powerful nations of their day, is one of
the
great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement."

This was the 1791 slave rebellion in the French Caribbean colony of San
Domingo, inspired by the French revolution two years before, and led by
the
extraordinary Toussaint L'Ouverture, himself a slave until the age of
45.

The Black Jacobins was first published in 1938, but in the preface to a
1980 edition James recalled meeting young black South Africans in Ghana
in
1957, who told him how important the book was for them: typing out
passages, mimeographing and circulating them secretly.

Thus commentators who decry Mbeki's reasons for attending the Haiti
celebrations mostly reveal their own bias ; the partiality of the
Democratic Alliance, for example, which as Jeremy Cronin has pointed
out,
is not so much of the left or right, but of the west.

It is in our attitudes to such iconic events that underlying attitudes
and
enduring mutual incomprehension can most clearly be seen.

"What," Seneca once asked, "if the slaves were asked to count
themselves?"
The answer, in San Domingo, was electrifying.

After a monumental 12-year struggle the independent black state of Haiti
was founded. It had been the single biggest market for the European
slave
trade, and James recounts how they overthrew the shackles of their own
minds: "The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of
the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some
60000
men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte's
brother-in-law."

It is one of the most astonishing military triumphs in history, against
staggering odds. It was not, in short, a negotiated settlement as we
have
had here; it was a revolution.

So Mbeki's fascination with this Haitian bicentenary probably says more
about his own psychology, and past passions, than present politics.
After
all, it would be fair to say that our president today is altogether more
Thatcher than Toussaint.

All the same, Mbeki has a clearer grasp than many critics that endemic
poverty does not lead easily to orderly democracy. He was well aware of
Haiti's murky politics and violence. No wonder he had a South African
destroyer waiting offshore.

Will he one day, like numerous leaders on this continent, have to rely
on
the military to protect him from his own restive, unemployed and
despairing
population?

Mbeki now seems trapped in an impossible paradox. It is said that humans
are the only organisms that can think two entirely contradictory
thoughts
at the same time.

But nurturing revolutionary dreams of total liberation while doing
business
with the status quo?

Ironically, Mbeki has enthusiastically denounced his own allies as
"ultra-leftists", but then travelled halfway round the world to
celebrate a
genuine revolution.

Does such intellectual conflict explain Mbeki's baffling contradictions?
 From bizarre contortions over HIV/AIDS to defensive prevarication over
Zimbabwe, the president frequently appears to be locked in phantom
argument
with what he perceives to be stereotyped projections of white bigotry,
or
oldstyle colonial prejudice.

Who knows? When most political experts are reduced to endlessly trying
to
read the presidential mind or speculating about his motives, psychology
has
displaced politics.

Perhaps Mbeki should re-read The Black Jacobins. It might clear up some
of
these confusions.

Describing a near catastrophic setback towards the end of that momentous
slave rebellion, James concluded: "Once more the masses had received a
shattering blow not from the bullets of the enemy, but from where the
masses most often receive it, from their own trembling leaders."

Rostron, the New Statesman's South African correspondent, is a freelance
writer.

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