by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

This gang leader, who by all reputable accounts, is highly corrupt and villainous, is aspiring to eventually become Haiti’s president. Watch and see!

One of the main reasons why Haiti’s gangs have become dangerously powerful, to the point that they can see themselves as “a government in waiting”, is because of their deep-seated collusion with the security forces in Haiti, particularly the police, many of whom serve as informants. The economic issue is of course the major sticking point, in a country deliberately destroyed for centuries – economically, politically, institutionally and socially – by France and its Western allies, as revenge for mounting the first and only successful Black African slave rebellion in the entire history of the world that birthed the first independent BLACK nation in the Western Hemisphere. This is a nation, led by an Igbo ex-slave, which easily bested the navies of both colonial Britain and Napoleonic France. It is a cautionary tale. The centuries-old plot is that that nation must never, ever succeed; so it is perceived by the entire comity of nations as a tragi-comedy.

I have no faith in the meeting of Caribbean leaders, and of all the characters – FRANCE(!), the effete UN, and Big Brother US. They cannot help Haiti, because among other things, they do not understand its deep-rooted psychology. Besides its overt racism, that’s why the Dominican Republic leaves Haiti well alone. 

Haiti is NOT a semi-sanitized Caribbean nation, in much of its history and cultural components. I don’t know, but when I was there in the 70s and I later arrived on the African continent, it seemed to me far more African than Caribbean. I related a lot with Haitians in NY when I used to work there during my long vac as a student, and they did not behave either like Belizeans or West Indians. Like most Africans, they are highly secretive and clannish, as well as remorseless when crossed – and even when charming and apparently simplistic, never you take your eyes off them or their goals. I had a Haitian lecturer in International Politics when I was doing post graduate work who was a highly rated professor at the Sorbonne. Man! He was a study in “wayoism”. Do you remember your Brer Anansi stories of Old Belize? I did, because I found him to be a later incarnation of the wily spider called Kweka Ananse, who had come all the way from Ghana with the slaves on the slave ships to the Americas and the Caribbean.