Economies of colour

In the worst case it is interpreted wrongly, as something derogatory. But nèg means quite simply “fellow” or “I say…”. Nèg does, however, also mean black, as opposed to blan or milat. Skin colour has never been registered in any Haitian censuses, but the overwhelming majority of Haitians are black. Fewer than 10% are mulattos, and there are scarcely a thousand Levantines – Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians – who came to Haiti at the end of the 19th-century and beginning of the 20th century, and largely marry within their own group.

In 1979 the  British priest and political scientist David Nicholls published a remarkable book, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti, in which he makes a sharp distinction between race and skin colour. Race has, according to Nicholls, always been a unifying factor among Haitians. They all see themselves as joined together by their African biological heritage, and the race factor was an important component in the struggle for independence against the whites. Skin colour on the other hand – black or mulatto – has served to divide the nation. Nicholls wanted to look at these social class distinctions and the struggle for power which characterised the entire 19th century history of Haiti as a struggle between blacks and mulattos. “Politics in Haiti between 1804 and 1915 were largely a power struggle between two elite groups who were characterised primarily by their skin colour”, he writes.

Unfortunately Nicholls’ thesis does not work. Not even in the colonial society so impregnated with racism which existed up to the slave revolt of 1791 is it possible to explain the social stratification only in terms of skin colour. The whites were naturally enough to be found at the top of the colonial hierarchy. Under them came the freed slaves – affranchis (to an overwhelming extent mulattos, the descendants of the French) – but their status was based not merely on skin colour. It was also economic. They were often themselves both land owners and slave-owners. (All in all, they owned up to one third of all the land and a quarter of all the slaves.) At the bottom of the hierarchy were the 450,000 slaves. When the independent nation of Haiti was proclaimed in 1804, after the French had been killed or driven out, the affranchis saw themselves as their natural successors. They were economically important and they liked to identify themselves with European culture. Their view was, however, not shared by everyone. The revolutionary leaders had mainly been black slaves, and they also aspired to elite status.

What is more, northern and southern Haiti differed. It was in the northern part, on the plains around Cap Français (the present Cap-Haïtien) where the colonial sugar economy had developed. There were proportionately mostly slaves there and the position of the whites had been strongest. It was also in the northern part of the country that the revolt against the French had broken out. The southern part was more mountainous, which made it more difficult to grow sugar, and there  were proportionately fewer slaves in the south. There the affranchis were strong. The geographical differences between northern and southern Haiti corresponded to the differences between the military elite and the economic elite.

In his book Nicholls gives an account of the origin of two different historical traditions in 19th-century Haiti. The historiography of the mulattos was in large part based on a justification of the dominant position of their own elite in society. It painted Haiti’s black rulers as despots who did their best to oppress the mulattos, and it opposed military intervention in politics because this intervention only lead to (black) autocracy. Differences in interest between different social groups were toned down. The best thing would be if the nation could be unified under an enlightened civilised (mulatto) leadership, the leadership of the best suited. The most competent people, those who were marked by intelligence, courage and honesty, should lead the nation.

The black historical tradition was perhaps not as explicit or unambiguous, but, to the extent it existed, it threw the blame for all evil on the mulattos, and blamed the weaknesses of black heads of state on the fact that behind the scenes they were being manipulated by the mulattos, what in Haiti goes under the name of politique de doublure (the politics of understudies). In this view paternalistic (Black) rule was preferable to elite rule, and there the Army had a given place.

There were, however, not many people who were affected by more or less ideological writings. On a practical level history writing was the task mostly of people who were not troubled by too much book learning. Often they were illiterate – and they had other interests. Nicholls’ problem is that he cannot find any consistent theme in the skin colour argument. Time after time his analysis gets stuck. The issue of skin colour is reduced to something secondary in the specific complex, and he is forced all the time to resort to ad hoc explanations. Skin colour is always present in Haitian politics, but often it is an excuse, one of many factors – and what is more a minor one.

The history of Haiti in the 19th century is complex, but above all it is about power struggle. In 1843 Jean-Pierre Boyer, who had been president since 1818, was overthrown. After this a period of instability began, with 22 presidents up to 1915. Only one served a full term. Four died during their presidential periods from reasonably natural causes. The rest were overthrown, 11 served for less than a year. All in all, the country experienced more than a hundred more or less successful revolutions, coups or attempted coups during this time. It is not possible to explain this by arguments about skin colour. The political parties were not based on ideologies but stood and fell with their leaders. It is difficult to find any colour system in the political constellations. Nicholls is himself reluctantly forced to state that this was the case at the beginning of the 20th century.

If one wishes to explain the power struggle in 19th-century Haiti, it is far more meaningful to see it as a struggle between different economic interests. In 1807 Haiti was divided into a northern kingdom under the black dictator Henry Christophe and a southern republic under Alexandre Pétion, and up to Pétion’s death in 1818 in principle a state of war existed between them. Paradoxically enough it was the elite mulatto Pétion, who in 1809, through his decision to abolish the plantation system and to begin to re-distribute land, would do more than any other Haitian ruler to increase economic and social equality – despite the fact that he presumably did not realise what consequences his decision would have. This led to the creation of a nation of small farmers, a nation that was radically different from the rest of Latin America; polarisation between the endless latifundias (large states) and pathetically small minfundias.

Pétion’s decision also had an undesirable political consequence however. The new elite was not interested in eating in the sweat of its brow. Now the slaves were, however, free peasants, and there was plenty of land, so that it was not possible to transform them into tenant farmers or farm workers. On the other hand, it was possible to tax them, but for this it was necessary to hold political power. The struggle for the office of president was transformed into a struggle for state revenue, for private gain. Haiti came to be ruled by a never-ending stream of kleptocrats, right up to our times. Some of these looters had lighter skin, and as Nicholls shows, skin colour appeared in politics time after time, but it was never a fundamental driving force in the political game. It was economic self-interest which ruled and that was colour blind.
What muddles up the analysis for Nicholls is that it is not possible in a meaningful way to separate skin colour from the other criteria which constitute social groups in Haiti. Almost 40 years before his book came out the Yale sociologist James Leyburn had published his classic The Haitian People. He also had a thesis: Haiti was not a class society. The reality was considerably worse than that. It was a caste society, with two groups who differed radically in most respects. According to Leyburn the elite did not comprise more than 2% or 3% of the population at the beginning of the 1940s, and more than 90% of all Haitians were peasants. “They are as different as day and night, as nobles and peasants, and they are as incompatible as oil and water”, he wrote.

Leyburn identified a number of characteristics which distinguished the two groups from one another. The elite did not work with their hands; their members rather devoted themselves primarily to politics, as the path to riches first and foremost went through politics. The masses were peasant farmers. These peasant farmers spoke only kreyòl, the dialect that had arisen when slaves from more than 30 African nations had been forced together under French domination. The elite naturally also spoke kreyòl, but they also spoke, and preferred to speak, French. The third difference was economic: the elite was rich and the masses poor. “The elite wears shoes”, answered the American Marine Corps general Smedley Butler laconically, when, during the American occupation of Haiti (1915-34), he was asked by a Senate committee what distinguished the social classes in the country from each other. This was only a mild exaggeration. The peasant farmers lived, what is more, in the countryside and the elite was urban. Fifthly, the elite got married in church, whilst the masses lived in plasaj ònèt, an honourable relationship of cohabitation without the sanction of the Catholic Church. Catholicism was the religion of the elite; the masses kept to voodoo. Finally, “the most complex distinction”,   the skin colour of the two groups differed, but Leyburn warned of making false generalisations. There were black members of the elite and light-skinned peasants, although both were exceptions to the rule.

Leyburn called Haitian society a caste society. This was not based on skin colour, because it was the totality, not the individual criteria, which decided one’s position in society, but characteristics tended to go hand in hand. The elite was in principle endogamous. It would never occur to them to marry anyone from the masses, though possibly to white foreigners. According to Leyburn, Haiti was dangerously close to the classic caste society of India, characterised by both social and economic immobility.

Leyburn’s thesis of the caste society was challenged by Jean Price-Mars, Haiti’s foremost intellectual, in a review which took up an entire issue of Revue de la Société d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Haïti.  One might just as well claim that the USA, with its largely racist legislation, was a caste society. In Haiti after liberation no legislation ever discriminated against either blacks or mulattos (on the other hand against whites). Price-Mars questioned the three fundamental characteristics of the caste system: rigidity, permanence and heredity, as did their inevitable result, endogamy. There was no doubt that Haitian society was divided, along precisely those demarcation lines that Leyburn had indicated, but the lines were movable, if with some difficulty. Haiti was a class society, not a caste society

Leyburn was wrong as regards rigidity in Haitian society. One thing he overlooked, and which Nicholls emphasises, is the growth of a black middle class and new ideas – négritude – about Haiti’s African heritage at the very time he was working on his book. Nothing of that kind would have been possible in a caste society. This middle-class was one of the most important actors when Dumarsais Estimé became president in 1946, the first black president for 30 years, and when François Duvalier, “Papa Doc”, who championed various “ethnological” ideas on skin colour, was elected in 1957.

On the other hand, Leyburn’s analysis of what presupposes the social distinctions is correct. It is only at a surface level that social distinctions correspond to differences in skin colour. “Nèg rich, se milat. Milat pòv, se nèg” – “A rich black is a mulatto; a poor mulatto is black” as Jean-Jacques Acaau, legendary leader of a revolt in the 1840s, summarised it. It is still like that. The social dividing lines run deep, and they are primarily economic. The upper classes are rich, often unimaginably rich, and the masses are poor. Today three quarters of all Haitians live on an income of less than two dollars a day, half of them on less than one dollar a day, and income distribution in the country is just as unequal as it ever was in South Africa or Brazil.

But does skin colour play no role, then? Of course it does; it has always done so and it still does so today but you cannot reduce Haiti’s social structure or history merely to a problem of the relationship between blacks and mulattos. All of Leyburn’s categories must be taken into account, and even David Nicholls is forced to admit that, after Papa Doc’s death in 1971, skin colour came to play a far less prominent political role than it had done during the previous 25 years. In his final chapter he writes that sufficient pains have not been taken to “study the tangible social, economic and political structure in the country.”  That is precisely what he himself should have done instead of persisting in looking at Haitian society through his pre-tested “two-coloured spectacles”.