Farrukh Dhondy | Haiti is the face of total anarchy: Why West Indies did not federate

“Condemned to stand for life -- na jeet na haar

The wind flaps my kameez and torn salwar

The black topee upon my stiff backbone

Means I was born under an evil star

Assigned to the task of scaring the crows

Who keep away. And yet this sparrow knows

That I’m a harmless puppet and alights

On my head, striking a defiant pose!”

From The Rubaiyat of Behseekh Ali, Tr by Bachchoo

In the 1960s hippie era, some “anarchists” I knew said they wanted a world without laws in which humans would be good to each other without the regulation of a nation state. Lenin defined the “state” as a body of people who controlled one class on behalf of another. So “anarchy” in his terms must mean having no one in charge of anyone on behalf of no one.

And now in Haiti, we see anarchy in brutal action. There are armed gangs piling up dead bodies on the streets of Port-au-Prince even as I write and you read these words.

Haiti is today, in the past and coming weeks, the only place in our sad and sorry world to face the absolute anarchy of perhaps a thousand jail-break prisoners terrorising the streets of every town and slum of the island. The PM has fled. There is no government, no police force. The escaped prisoners, with allegiance to different gangs are shooting each other and anyone they associate with the elite that has ruled Haiti --including the judges who convicted these jail-breaking criminals for

their proven crimes, and the politicians who ruled the island.

Let me then tell you, gentle reader, that this was specifically predicted. No, not by Nostradamus, but by my late friend and guru, the Trinidad-born philosopher, Marxist and cricket commentator (he was always most proud of that description!) CLR James. “Nello” as we used to call him -- that being a shortening of his middle name Lionel -- would in political discussions about the Caribbean say that Haiti was the archetype of anarchic degradation, its volcanic violence suppressed by the dictatorial,

fascistic regime of Papa Doc Duvalier. His contention was that the repression may outlast Papa Doc, but would eventually crack and give way to anarchy.

And so, it came to pass.

CLR was born in Trinidad and was one of its literary pioneers, writing novels and stories a generation before V.S. Naipaul, including The Black Jacobins, an account of the eighteenth-century slave revolt in Haiti.

In the early 1960s when the Caribbean spawned a movement for independence from British colonial rule, CLR advocated a confederation of the West Indian islands. His vision encompassed Cuba and the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. This was the only way, he argued, for the islands to survive in the modern world. He even said that this federation should and would then seek to become a flourishing state of the United States of America.

It wasn’t a long-term utopian aspiration. He argued that it was an immediate necessity for the survival of the islands. Yes, Guyana had as-yet-unexploited mineral deposits. Jamaica had bauxite, Trinidad had some oil and all that the other smaller islands of the Caribbean had was sunshine and sands. None of the islands could survive as modern nations dependent on those isolated, limited natural resources. It was logical.

But then ambition very often trumps logic. The politicians of the islands, all of them part of the movement for independence from British rule, disagreed with each other. Which island would be the capital of such a federation? Which politician would be Prime Minister and which democratic system would the federation adopt? Would Jamaica have an equal vote with, say, Tobago or Antigua?

In the end no such federation could be agreed upon and when Jamaica said it would leave even the talks towards such a political creation and go it alone demanding its autonomous independence from Britain, the conclusion was “1 out of 10 leaves 0!” The islands all went their fragmented ways.

The decades since then have proved CLR’s contention. The Caribbean islands send millions of migrants to Canada, Britain and the United States seeking employment and a livelihood. Very many of the islands have inevitably succumbed to dictatorships. Very many have become absolutely dependent on the tourist and holiday-maker trade and on serving as staging posts for South American cocaine.

Poverty and criminality go hand in hand. In the 1980s, I was employed as a commissioning editor for UK’s Channel Four TV station. I ran a series called The Bandung File, which featured news and documentaries from the Third World and the black and Asian populations of Britain. CLR, who lived at the time in close touch with Darcus Howe, one of the producer/editors of the The Bandung File, said: “If you want to know or show the world what the historical fate of the Caribbean islands is, go to Haiti.”

Darcus and crew did and recorded a documentary which three decades later has clearly proved to be a prophecy. Of course there is no turning back the clock; no prospect that the West Indian islands will want to federate… and then the contention that such a federation should apply to join the USA to avoid anarchy?

Oh… hang on, that place might just elect this fellow Donald Trump to be its next President and… err… would CLR then withdraw that final recommendation?