PROUD HAITI.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 147, 23 June 1934, Page 7 (Supplement)

PROUD HAITI.

DEMAND FOR FREEDOM

WHAT LIES BEHIND IX ? INTENSE NATIONALISTIC SPIRIT. You land 111 the free, sovereign and independent republic of Haiti and watch your luggage safely through an Amer-ican-administered custom service, says a writer of the "New York Times." You ride tip to your hotel in a broken-down American automobile over smooth, Amer-ican-built avenues, doging 011 the way an American locomotive pulling cars of cane for an American sugar mill, and passing the marine-commanded police station.

Toward evening, no doubt, you will adjourn to the bar on the Champ do Mars that was known as the German Embassy until its Germ an-American owner departed. If you are not tempted by the excellent Haitian beer (manufactured by an American concern at the ■edge of Port au Prince) or Haiti's golden rum (American sugar mills are turning it out now as a by-product) you may have ice-water, faintly flavoured with chlorine at the direction of the American sanitary officers. Further along the Champ de Mars th 3 Stars and Stripes float placidly over an old palace which now serves as headquarters of the United States marines. It is peaceful and clean and efficient and gives 110 hint that 011 that very spot, on January 28, 1915, a President of Haiti was torn to pieces by a mob in the uprising that brought the United States into the republic.

Two deep and powerful emotions arc stirring Haiti now. One is the nationalistic spirit which animates almost every country. One is tho hunger for independence, even though that independence may not bo well handled after it is attained. Tho Haitians, like most other people, would rather govern themselves, even if they should govern themselves badly, than bo well governed by some ono else. Tho other emotion —and it really is a part of Haiti's nationalism —is wrapped around a pride of race and colour which no American can understand unless iio has gone amoi>g the Haitians and known them as friends and can look back with them across tho country's brave and tragic history.

Clash Between Cultures. Our adventure in Haiti has involved not only tho clash inevitable to the assumption of authority by one country over' another; it also has involved a clash between a white culture and a black. v , We in America are accustomed to a. quite rigidly drawn colour line. In Haiti there had been no colour line since the days of slavery until the Americans drew it. Directing their own destinies, the Haitians had crccted a nation and a culture. There was no one to whom tlicyhad to bow the knee. They were masters of themselves and their country, and could look any man in the eye as equals. A white mam. going among them to-day will be treated with the most delightful courtesy, if liis attitude warrants it, but he will never, though bo meet every one of Haiti s -,•1(10,000 inhabitants, find obsequiousness. If he expects to be deferred to simply becauso his skin happen* to he white, ho would do well to stay away from Haiti. Without outside aid, and indeed often in tlio fa.co of hostility and ridicule, tnc Haitians have erected a culture whicn would amaze most Americans. It is founded upon French culture and nurtured by tho custom of the wealthy members of tho elite sending their children to Franco to study. If you are fortunate enough to be invited to the home of an upper class Haitian, you arc rcceivcd with tlio c«isy poise and trraco of cosmopolitans and find yourself Fn a charmingly Parisian atmosphere. The men aro conversant with world aifairs. The women are garbed more often than not iu clothing from the Kno St. Honore. On the intellectual side, Haitian culturo has blossomed in a, creditable amount of worth-while literature, both prose and poetry, written in French, of course, and it has produced economists and dialecticians who delight in puncturing American boasts of what the occupation lias done for the country. Smouldering With Rage. The culture of Haiti, like that of all countries, is the culture of the few and not of tho many. It flourishes only in tho cities among the wealthy or the well-to-do and all'ects perhaps no mora than f> per cent of the population, while the other 95 per cent dwell in abysmal ignorance. It is this enlightened 5 per cent whom the occupation has touched most directly. It is they who have the political aspirations which have been thwarted so often by the Americans. It is they whoso young men, disdaining industry and commerce, have smouldered with envious rago at tho sight of scores of Americans in well-paid Government jobs. It is they who have felt the impact of this alien civilisation and seen it striving to shape the psychology as well as tho politics and economics of their country. Lastly, to state a bnttal fact, it is tlicy who have seen the white man from the north breaking into their edifice of privilege, insisting on a standard of political purity which we cannot approach in our own country and seeking to deprive them of their traditional right to exploit the peasants beneath them.

As to the other 95 per cent, the dwellers in ignorance, one cannot go among them without being stirred by their simple strength and naive backwardness. They are pure African, as black as ebony. The occupation has meant little to them since the bloody days of the caco uprising, when hundreds of blacks in the interior went down before the marine guns. Now that the fighting is long since ended, they see the occupation only in terms of an enlightened medical service, inaugurated by American navy personnel and now administered in the country districts by Haitian doctors, in improved roads, and in the suppression of ths> banditry which once stalked all though the country districts. The peasants may hazily remember strenuous efforts of the Americans, when the occupation was at its height, to teach them new methods of raising and harvesting their crops, but they go on in their smiling way cultivating their little patches in the same crude, ineffectual manner as before the Americans came. The very word " American " ' means little if anything to the vast majority of them. To the black Haitian one meets on a mountain road tho white man is simply a " blanc," and it is nothing to him whether he is American, French, German, or Spaniard. Drove the Whites Into the Sea. Tho intensity of racial pride among the articulate Haitians is the fruit of Haiti's unique past. The Haitians are the descendants of the slaves whom the Spanish and French brought from Africa to work the sugar plantations after the

crucify of the early conquerors had] annihilated the gentle Indians who hist inhabited, the island. Haitians themselves will tell you that the slave hunters wlio captured their ancestors made the mistake of bringing ovei prisoners of war from the lighting tribes instead of docile negroes from the African plains. There were even African kings and princes among tliem, Haitians will tell you. For two centuries the Africans toiled for their French and Spanish masters, inevitably, of course, absorbing some of the French blood, which is represented to-day in the delicate-featured mulattoes -one sees among the aristociacy of tha cities. _ . Then the blacks rose against their white masters, turned the towns into shambles with their massacres, and drove those wlio remained into the sea. Napoleon sent an army under his brother-in-law to subdue them, and that army perished between the assaults of the infuriated negroes and the fevers of the tropics. In their rage at everything the whites had touched, at everything that reminded them of their long enslavement, the blacks tore to pieces the sugar mills where they had toiled, and burned the chateaux where their masters had lived. Their ruins to this day lino the highways in the north of Haiti.

In a final gesture of independence from the exploiting people of the north, Dessalines, general of the blacks in their war for liberation, dramatically ripped the French tricolour into three strips and flung the white one into the sea. He kept the red and blue as Haiti's flag, and that significant banner is still the national emblem. A Historic Record. The ancestors of the present Haitians were the only people in recorded history to light their way out of enslavement and found a nation, and the Haitians are justifiably proud of it. All that was more than a century ago, and ever since in Haiti's struggles, often blundering and bloody, to build a nation by her own genius, she has been wary of anything that might ever enslave her again. That is the great reason why articulatc Haitians have so rebelled at the presence of American marines and American civilian officials exercising sovereign powers in their midst and why they are impatient at every day's delay in turning Haiti's affairs back to her.