29494: Patrick de Verteuil (Opinion) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

from: pdeverteuil@yahoo.com

Most of the posts on this list are concerned with the recent past, the
present and the future. It may help put these in perspective to look at the
distant past. It is pretty obvious that Haiti is different. But why and how
is it different?

Much of Haiti¹s history deals with color conflicts; black versus mulatto.
There certainly has been a great deal of tension along color lines but I
believe that this is a red herring in that most of the color conflicts have
been between members of the same clan. The real, important conflict lies
elsewhere. Let me explain.

There are basically two ways to run a slave economy:

1.)  You buy an initial group of slaves, work them hard but not too hard so
that they reproduce and create a self-perpetuating machine. You only buy new
slaves when your plantation expands and you need a lot more than you have.

2.)  You buy an initial group of slaves and work them to death. You then buy
new, replacement slaves.

Slave based economies in the new world operated on variations on these two
basic models. It would appear that the planters in St Domingue by and large
favored model number two. Plantations were expanding all the way to the
official end of slavery in 1793. Very few new slaves were imported from
Africa after this date but the end result was that when Haiti became
independent it had a far larger proportion of ³Bossales² (born in Africa) to
creoles (born in the islands) than was common in the rest of the western
world. By the time slavery was abolished everywhere else in the Americas
(except in Haiti) the slave trade was long dead and nearly everybody was a
Creole.

This is where Haiti is unique. It started out in 1804 as an independent
state with two separate and distinct societies on one small piece of land.

The creoles had been brought up in a French colonial environment and whether
slave owners, (near white or black) overseers, foremen, artisans or field
hands they had all been raised speaking Creole and to some extent
indoctrinated into the French colonial model.

When the French in France cried ³Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,² the creoles
at the top of the pile in St Domingue (mostly mulattoes) said ³How about
us.² And were rebuffed. The revolution that followed was more about taking
over the privileged place of the French than about freeing the slaves.

The slaves were officially freed (and armed to fight the Spaniards, the
English and eventually the French) but all the Creole leaders: Toussaint
Louverture, Dessalines, Petion, Boyer and Christophe wrote one or another
version of a ³Code Rural² that attempted to tie the rural masses (mostly
Bossales) to the land.

When Independence came in 1804 and the dust settled the Bossales refused to
play the game. They moved away from the plantations into the hills and set
up as independent farmers mostly interested in producing for their own
consumption. The creoles were too few to impose their will and as the
plantations died they recycled into commerce or politics.

There were a few hiccups along the way; the Piquet rebellion for instance,
but by and large each group accepted its place. To the creoles and their
descendants went the urban landscape which includes politics, government,
commerce and the army (The village of Abricots where I live sees itself as
urban, merely on the frontier with the rural world). The Bossales and their
descendants were left the rural environment, with each generation moving
further up the mountain to clear new land.



The urban Creole society developed as a somewhat poor copy of
Judeo/Christian European society.

The Bossales and their descendants created a new and very different society.

The rural masses (half the population) are highly individualized. Their low,
if not non-existent community feeling is replaced by an all-embracing family
feeling. (Your family is your thing and you are your family¹s thing!)
Profoundly attached to the land they revere the elderly, the old and more
particularly their dead. Whilst above average in honesty they have little
regard for truth. Paradoxically they are extraordinarily credulous and great
believers in magic. They live entirely in the present for tomorrow may never
come!

I refer interested readers to the work of Gérard Barthélémy: particularly
³Créoles ­ Bossales: Conflit en Haiti².  Barthélémy was one of the first
researchers to write on the Bossale question.

For at least one hundred years these two societies lived side by side with
very limited interaction.

The women took the farm surplus to market whilst the men stayed home for
fear that the urban world would dragoon them into a rebel or a government
army.

> From generation to generation, as the population expanded and the thin
topsoil of the hills wore out or was eroded, the peasantry moved up the
mountain. Around 1900 the rural world ran out of new land to deforest and
cultivate and began a forced exodus to the towns (and to the sugar cane
fields of Cuba and the Dominican republic). The City culture did not
colonize the country; the country colonized the town and brought it its
peculiar mores and customs, which have gradually filtered, into the life of
the poorer city dwellers.

In addition the middle class and the elite adopted a policy of assigning one
maid to each child. These maids, present 100% of the time in the child¹s
life (as opposed to the 1% presence of the mother) tended to be country
girls, considered more reliable and serious than the urban poor. From birth
to the age of five (when the good ³Frères de l¹Instruction Chrétienne² took
over in their elite schools to teach the primacy of French and the
inferiority of Creole (and Creole speakers), the future leaders, deciders
and managers of Haiti were raised by illiterate peasant girls steeped in
Voodoo, superstition and the very different ideas of the Bossales. By the
time the Brothers took over it was too late for the mindsets of a lifetime
were already established.