Mbeki Haitian Trip Raises Issues
From South Africa, this article that is so hard to read with its local references to the running polemic against the South African government of Mbeki, has a jewel at its core. It is something to remember next month during festivities for Black History month:
The politics of personal ambition are indeed the politics of celebration. But the politics of liberation, of setbacks unflinchingly undertaken and eventually overcome: these are the politics of commemoration.
It is the idea of commemoration, not the small change of celebration, that links our 10th anniversary of democracy with the devastated 200th Haitian anniversary, both equally momentous within our diaspora. Both anniversaries are ours; neither is foreign to us, however foreign one or both may be to careerist politicians.
James's Toussaint (L'Ouverture) wanted a viable free republic, not martyrdom or futile defiance. But as a lone anti-slavery republic, with no liberated allies such as today's India or Brazil, with no G-22 group of nations and no United Nations, a free Haiti could only go down, in self-devastating defiance, to defeat and American interference -- most recently when Clinton's gunboats propped up Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994.
