HAITI’S REPARATIONS AMERICANA

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President Biden should join forces with Ramaphosa to achieve reparations for Africa and Global African Diaspora, writes Okello Oculi

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa demanded (at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly), ‘’reparations’’ for victims of euro-american slave commerce.

As he spoke, American border-guards on horseback were rounding up Haitians seeking to enter the United States along the Mexico-Texas border. Charges and occasional whippings resembles Australian farmers using dogs to keep sheep in line.

Ramaphosa, a politician fresh on legacy of a political oven of South Africa’s racism, was probably unaware of the brutal and shameful drama in southern Texas. The people of Haiti are descendants of traded Africans with a special historic relationship with America’s diplomatic history.

Led by Toussaint D’Louveture, African slaves rose up in 1801 and slaughtered French owners and managers of vast agricultural lands worked by slave labour. Their revolution shook politicians and business owners of plantations in the Caribbean, north and south America, and ran industries that processed sugar, coffee, tobacco and mineral ores from the region.

The French rose with vindictive rage to reverse the Haitian revolution. Its navy was, however, roundly defeated. While the defeat inflicted a second humiliation on France, it was a blessing to the newly independent United States of America. The French navy was due to also crush the rude Americans who had seized a French territory of Louisiana. Their crushing defeat in Haiti saved the American revolution, thereby imposing on her a historic Debt of Deterence owed to the gallant African people of Haiti.

The panic which that defeat aroused in Europe and their Caribbean and South American colonies also resonated among slave-owners in North America. The fear of ‘Haiti Virus’ aroused a consensus to impose a universal economic embargo on Haiti and kill it with diplomatic kwashiorkor. The prospect of a strong Haiti strutting on the international stage would not likely to signify nothing. Haitians would spread seeds of armed revolution against Caucasian peoples to mineral-rich Southern Africa, India and China.

Similar panic was felt in 1976 after Fidel Castro sent mainly Black Cuban troops to Angola and drove back white South African troops. Henry Kissinger, (as America’s Secretary of State), rushed to Brazil to assure its leaders American military help if Castro lit fires of revolution among horribly oppressed Afro-Brazilians. Che Guevara and Castro had propounded the theory of causing American capitalism to crumble from within by forcing it to fight wars in ‘’many Vietnams’’ around the globe.

Haiti is owed reparations for the crime of international economic and diplomatic embargoes which stunted its sovereign right and freedom to develop and build happiness for its people. As President Ramaphosa urged, the United Nations must make ‘reparations’ against peoples of African descent whose right to life, freedom, dignity and development was desecrated by Euro-American slave commerce.

The anti-Haitian drama in Texas stirred images of a panic-stricken crowd of Afghans running on tarmac to catch a ride on an American aircraft rolling towards take-off. Both groups were desperately aspiring to escape certain poverty and death by getting shelter inside the United States. President Biden justified his rushed termination of a 20-year hug with Afghanistan with a vision of America winning minds and souls around the globe with a new internal strength and a diplomacy of virtue.

The last time the United States replaced thuds of bombs with Mana from trans-Atlantic skies, was when her leaders ate and swallowed the ‘Kim Philby Stake’. Philby and his fellow team of Communist Party students at Britain’s Cambridge University, smuggled secret formula for making atomic bombs to Russia so that when World War 2 (1938-1945) came to an end, America’s military power would be checked by Russian power.

They rejected the picture of a Europe devastated by war being trodden over by a lone Yankee exploiting and impoverishing Europe like South America’s ‘’banana republics’’. Their plan was to force America to counter Russian Communist power by throwing vast economic resources in to a war-ravaged Europe.

They got the ‘’Marshall Plan’’ and a proud Europe sucking breasts of the Statue of Liberty.

Africa offers President Biden a post-Afghanistan vision of ‘’Ubuntu Diplomacy’’ which steams hot from Nelson Mandela’s heart and mind: proclaiming a shared ‘familyhood’ of nations and peoples.

The blood-hungry invaders of America’s Capito building on January 6, 2021, showed that veterans of diplomatic legacy of exporting violence (to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Vietnam), have come back as rabid enemies of democratic governance.

. Assassinating visionary African leaders, military coups, promoting corruption, and decades of supporting governance as ‘’crimes against humanity’ in Southern Africa, instructs Africans to view Haiti as a model which Euro-America wishes for them.

Biden’s new ’Ubuntu Diplomacy’ must reject this model; and join Ramaphosa in achieving reparations for Africa and Global African Diaspora. A developed Haiti and Africa must become his diplomatic virtue.