Peter Costello
The World of Books – By the books editor
For a man holding what many still see as the most powerful position in the world, President Trump has an uncanny instinct to express in the brutal language of the bar and locker-room the opinions of some of the most uninformed people in the United States.
Taste will not allow me to repeat here what he had to say about certain West Indian, South American and African countries. These nations undeniably have great social and political problems, but he seems unaware of the role that the US has played in creating the conditions in these places. The US has been deeply involved in Haiti and Liberia, countries covered by his remarks.
The media in reporting his comments about Haiti were themselves very selective, focusing on the aftermath of the recent disastrous earthquake. But that in a way only serves to conceal the past.
Having never been to either place I am forced to reach down some of the books on my shelves.
Here, for instance, is my copy of H. Hesketh Prichards’s Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti (1900) — the title alone is redolent of the age of imperialism.
Critics of Trump’s remarks described Haiti has “the first black-founded republic”: but in fact after the abortive effort of Toussaint L’Ouvreture, the country finally become sovereign as a monarchy in 1820, which turned into a nominal republic, then into an empire in 1849, and back to a chaotic republic. Prichard was sent out to the island in 1899 for the then brand-new Daily Express. For the British journalist Haiti was an illustration of the fact that Blacks could never run a modern state.
Haiti was ruled directly by the US from 1915 to 1935, and then by a series of US-supported dictators. Given the attitude of the US, expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, to interfering European states, the chronic social and political problems of the Haiti can be laid directly at the door of the US.
The years of the tyrant Dr François Duvalier were dramatised by Graham Greene in his novel The Comedians (1965). That was a disturbing book, but Haiti under the Duvaliers was terrifying. The poor country since then has not had much chance to improve.
Intelligence officer
Earlier Graham Greene had visited Liberia in 1935. The account he wrote of this, Journey Without Maps (1936), remains the best of his travel books. He later returned to West Africa as an intelligence officer during World War II.
For a later issue of the book he noted that this stay allowed him to settle in and not notice things that had disturbed him as a tourist. “I have begun to forget what the visitor notices so clearly – the squalor and the unhappiness and the involuntary injustices of tired men.”
This first West African Black republic was founded as a home for freed US slaves in 1820 by the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America. The idea was that liberated slaves would be sent back to Africa, where they would become the Black colonial overlords of other Blacks. They effectively seized possession of native peoples and rulers. The US colonists formed a new ruling elite, with American names, which lords it over the others to this day.
The dubious origins of Liberia were exacerbated later by the activities of the Firestone Tire Co. which set up in 1925 the largest rubber tree plantation in the world, which was seen as an essential US strategic resource.
Firestone took over the control of the state’s finances to ensure the repayment of a loan they had made to Liberia to build the harbour the company was the main user of. The debt crippled the country down to 1952.
When the need for rubber began to decline in the last century Firestone let its poor workers go, causing further poverty. The country remains a sort of quasi-slave state, its national banner (a single star and stripes) a notorious ‘flag of convenience’ for badly-run shipping companies.
As with Haiti, what might have been a landmark of Black freedom has been hopelessly corrupted for the benefit of the US.