Its Ongoing Struggle for Life and Liberation, Pt. 2

By Dr. Maulana Karenga —

Part 2.

It is important to note that the legacy and lessons we speak of here are not only for us and the world, but also for the Haitian people themselves. Indeed, there is always a need for us to remember as well as reflect in our going forward, for it is by knowing our history and honoring it that we are best able to engage the present and improve it, and imagine a whole new future and forge it in the most ethical, effective and expansive ways. This is especially important for the Haitian people in these critical times in their urgent need to continue the struggle, keep the faith and hold the line. And their history offers them, us and the world a library of lessons of revolutionary struggle and of the resilience and resourcefulness a people outnumbered, outgunned and enduring what seems like unsurmountable odds against them and yet offering a radical refusal to be defeated, regardless.

Now, if cultural grounding is the first and foundational strength and lesson of the Haitian Revolution as a world transformative achievement, the principle and practice of unity is of necessity the second. Indeed, cultural grounding became a mode and means of unifying the people, anchoring them in a shared will and work and way of life and liberating struggle. Unity as a cultural principle is made active and indispensable in every area of life: in family, community, fighting formations, collective work and responsibility, and ultimately in shaping and building the whole people themselves whom we know and honor as Haitians.

Haiti’s unity was and remains what we have termed an operational unity, a unity in diversity, principles, purpose and practice, and brought into being, and made real and revolutionary in the crucible of transformative struggle. In a word, Haiti conceived and constructed itself in and through its liberation struggle. In this fire and furnace of righteous and relentless struggle, men and women from various nations and ethnic groups of Africa came together in all their variedness to form an invincible fighting force for freedom and to make themselves into a unified new nation, called Haiti. Thus, people from various nations and countries we now know as Angola, Benin (Dahomey), Cameroun, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, united in struggle to form, fashion and free a new nation, the nation of Haiti.

And likewise various other kinds of groups came together in a liberating unity: the enslaved African and the so-called free African, the distinctly African and the mixed person, the conventional army and the guerilla forces, the maroon, urban and rural populations, and the soldier and civilian turned freedom fighter in what became a total war against the people of Haiti by the colonial and imperialist armies arrayed against them. National liberation required and built in unity and struggle a national liberation front of various groups, and created a national and liberation consciousness indispensable to the national liberation struggle and victory.

A third lesson in struggle from the Haitian Revolution is the radical refusal to be defeated. When the Haitians rose up in revolutionary rebellion, they rose up with what the founder of Afrocentric theory, Molefi Asante, calls “a victorious consciousness”. This victorious consciousness and radical refusal to be defeated is expressed in the Haitian battle cry “liberty or death”, “freedom or death”, and “independence or death”. It speaks to Nana Haji Malcolm’s call to pursue “freedom by any means necessary”. That is to say, meeting the oppressor on the terms he dares to pose, as Gen. Jean Jacque Dessalines and the people did, and it means sacrificing and serving the people and the struggle in the various ways that are requested and required. It means also righteous and relentless struggle, regardless of the odds and the oppressor’s catechism of impossibilities posed in resisting them. And it means, as these 221 years of resistance has demonstrated, refusing to forget or forsake the ultimate goal and indispensable and uncompromisable good of freedom.

The Haitian people also understood and accepted the principle and practice of the indivisibility of freedom. They embraced it first as a principle of their internal struggle. Unlike the U.S., they would not practice the rank hypocrisy of claiming a revolution of freedom and freeing only one people, White people. The historic Haitian Revolution freed everyone, all the enslaved and oppressed. It is the first revolution in history to do this. Also, it inspired other revolts of enslaved and unfree people, and supported abolitionist initiatives, especially for other Africans in the Caribbean and the U.S. Again, this made it a source of joy and provider of a real sense of possibility for the enslaved and oppressed and a source of criminal concern and efforts to suppress and reverse it for the enslavers and oppressors of the world. Thus, they, not only France, but the whole enslaving and colonizing White world, immediately begin to blockade Haiti, isolate it from the world community and plot their return and their reversal of the gains of the Haitian Revolution.

Nana Jean Jacques Dessalines, first leader of independent Haiti, recognized this and warns the Haitian peoples in their Declaration of Independence to remain united and vigilant and protect their hard fought and hard won victory against a “barbarous people”, “a nation of executioners” still intent on reversing the Revolution. He tells the people, “It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever ensure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth. We must take away any hope of re-enslaving us from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end, we must live independent or die. Independence or death! Let these sacred words unite us and be the signal of battle and of our reunion”.

Finally, as we look at the condition and position of Haiti and remember and recount its history, a central lesson the Haiti liberation reminds and teaches us is that, as the legendary leader, Nana A. Philip Randolph taught, “Freedom is never a final fact”. Indeed, he says “Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is extracted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races and the struggle must be continuous—for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human social, economic, political and religious relationships” (emphasis mine). But as history teaches us, freedom is not a final fact, not only because it is an ever evolving process and practice. It is also not a final fact because it must, at least in the world we live in, always be defended and secured against would-be and actual oppressors, large and small, internal and external.

And thus, as our all-seasons freedom fighter, Nana Harriet Tubman, taught freedom depends on our continued struggle and going forward regardless. Indeed, she reaffirms Nana Dessalines’ battle cry, saying “we must go free or die”. Therefore, she tells us we must be steadfast and resolute in our commitment to secure our freedom and must keep moving forward in spite of fatigue, hunger, apprehension and other concerns and considerations that might divert or deter us. Nana Frederick Douglass teaches us that “Without struggle there is no progress” in our pursuit of freedom. He praises Haiti in achieving its freedom in liberating struggle, and deems it a great mission and monument to freedom in the world. It teaches “the world the danger of slavery and the value of liberty”, and the unbreakable will of African people everywhere to be free. Let us live this legacy and increase support for the Haitian people in the coming and continuing storm, daring together to forge and secure an inclusive freedom in the enduring interest of African and human good and the well-being of the world.