Today in Haitian History - October 17, 1806 – Assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines

Born a slave in 1758, Jean-Jacques Dessalines rose to become one of the most important military figures of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). He served as Haiti’s first head of state, initially as “Gouverneur Général” and then as emperor, until his assassination in the fall of 1806.

Dessalines’s office remains difficult to fully assess. While, by all accounts, he ruled as a despotic leader and, very much in the same fashion of Toussaint Louverture before him, ignored the needs of the nouveaux libres (former slaves), more recent scholarship suggests that he attempted to carry out a more complex national project. The 1805 Constitution, which for many remains one of Dessalines’ greatest achievement as leader of independent Haiti, made clear in Article 14 that “the Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” For Sibylle Fischer (2004), this represented an important break from the colonial period. She stresses that “from the taxonomic lunacy of a colony that had more than one hundred different terms to refer to different degrees of racial mixture and color, we moved to a generic denomination: black.” In an attempt at state and nation building, “black” was to serve as part of the new country’s identity. While Dessalines, like his predecessor, favoured a form of “militarised” agricultural production and gave “citizens” of the new nation the choice of either being soldiers and labourers, historians like Claude Moïse (1988) have noted how the 1805 constitution presented clear dispositions guaranteeing personal liberty (such as articles five and six) suggesting yet another attempt at breaking away from the arbitrary law that embodied most of Haiti’s colonial history.

The achievements of 1805 could not temper the mounting opposition to Dessalines’s style of governing. Through colour politics have led many to simply imagine dissidence against Dessalines as an affair opposing the anciens libres (personified by Alexandre Pétion) and the nouveaux libres (embodied by Dessalines himself), Dessalines had also managed to alienate the former slaves, the very people his leadership should have served. While trying to crush a rebellion in the South headed by the “mulâtre” fraction of the elite, he was ambushed and murdered in October 1806.

In her article “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904” (2016), Erin Zavitz analysed how the memory of Dessalines appeared and disappeared from collective memory and state-sponsored celebrations of Haiti’s founding throughout the nineteenth-century. In many ways, it was only during the preparations leading up to Haiti’s centennial anniversary in 1904 that true efforts were made to reintegrate Dessalines as the founding figure of Haiti’s independence. Today, despite remaining a controversial figure, most Haitians proudly sing “La Dessalinienne” on January 1rst.

_{Image: “Mural on wall of Lycée Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Port-au-Prince.” Courtesy of: Paul Clammer (2016).}

angelindiskies:

angelindiskies:

Don’t ever command me to, or demand of me to, forget about slavery. Don’t tell me it happened years ago and those people are dead now. Don’t tell me to get over it! This centuries old grudge that they have had against the nation of my People… My mother tried to explain this to me decades ago and I wasn’t sure what to think because of my US of A schooling.

They (Europe) could not get over the fact that these slaves freed themselves. Their revolution inspired enslaved people in other nations to revolt. Haiti opened its ports to freed people seeking asylum… White supremacist European leaders hated Haiti for this… America didn’t even recognized Haiti as a free nation until Lincoln (over 60 years later). The so called protector of the Western hemisphere [America], turned its back while France continued to threaten Haiti with invasion and enslavement. America and Europe would not trade with Haiti. They allowed France to extort ~22 billion dollars from this tiny nation.

People want us to forget slavery and yet these countries’ couldn’t let go of this grudge;

Let this country be free…. They had everyone believe that our religion, that is older than Christianity, was something evil…. That we were a backwards nation of people (black) that should be feared…. They had everyone believe, for a good amount time, that HIV/AIDS came from Haiti… They punished Haiti and continue to punish Haiti for truly being a land of the free and a home of the brave.

Let my people go!

Today, I have never been more proud to be the child of Haitian parents.

‪#‎beingHaitian‬

Forget? This is happening in my lifetime

Christian Ledan

I will reblog this often

Hey, @realDonaldTrump, I posted this a while ago… here’s a history lesson on why #Haiti suffers so much.

Needs repeating

As of the 17th, hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians here will be rendered stateless and eligible for summary detention and deportation. The Dominican government maintains that they will not delay implementation of the law, despite pressure from the US, the UN, the OAS, and the Pope.
The government also announced last week that they do not intend to deport those who have already registered for legalization. However, I am documenting dozens of personal accounts from Dominican-Haitians who have gone to great lengths to register, some as much as 8-9 months ago, and as of today have not received any type of confirmation that their paperwork has even been processed. Without confirmation, they are still eligible for deportation. This does not even consider the hundreds of thousands of others who lack birth certificates and thus could not register in the first place.
He also reports that in the barrios, police trucks have come through to conduct limpiezas(“cleanings,” with the adjective implied: “social cleanings”): “The detained tend to range from intoxicated persons to suspected prostitutes, but are disproportionately Haitian or dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features. These could just be guys drinking and playing dominos or women standing on street corners. More often, though, they tend to be young men with Haitian features and darker skin. The police usually—usually—detain them for a night and then let them go with a warning.” But, he says, this stepped-up activity is preparation for June 16:
Given the common practice of nightly police sweeps, the government solicitation of passenger buses, the official declaration of intent to pass Law 169-14 without delay on June 16, and the general history of anti-Haitian abuses on the part of law enforcement and government authorities, it is reasonable to assume that the infrastructure is now in place for mass detention and deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic. The general attitude among this vulnerable subpopulation is a mix of fear and resignation.

How is that the Dominicans (not saying all are this way) do not see that to the white Europeans, that would oppress a people, everyone else is a moor; is Black. What will happened to the children that are born with darker skin?