Already holding the distinction of being the world’s first free Black republic, Haiti has made another first as it prepares to become the African Union's first member state that is not actually on the physical continent of Africa.

Haiti attended the most recent African Union International Conference of Heads of State and Government, held in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, as a member observer, but surprised delegates with the announcement that Haiti would seek full associate membership with the 54-member bloc.

"...The African continent occupies a place increasingly important in the diplomatic action of the Haitian government ... to this end, a process of participation of Haiti in the African Union was engaged with the President of the regional institution, for the grant to Haiti, of a status of associate member and of the accreditation of a diplomatic mission with that organization," Haitian prime minister Dr. Garry Conille said, according to Haiti Libre.


The head of the Haitian delegation at the A.U. conference, Ady Jean Gardy, said that the move was an attempt to “establish exchanges at all levels of the business diplomacy with African states,” and he pledged Haiti’s support with technical assistance to help countries then re-negotiate donor aid agreements with the goal of debt cancellation.


The African Union is the modern incarnation of the Organization of African Unity, started in 1963, and its vision today is to build “an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in global arena.”



Although this is the first time an outside state has requested membership with the A.U., Haiti has long maintained positive relationships with many African nations. In the wake of the 2010 earthquake, several African states urged each other to provide naturalized citizenship to all Haitians that sought refuge in Africa, with Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade proposing a plan for the mass adoption of orphaned Haitian children across the continent.

Wade said the history of Haitians as descendants of African slaves gave them the right to a new life on the continent, according to Reuters.

"We have attachment and links to that country," former A.U. Chairman Jean Ping said of Haiti in 2010, according to Reuters. "The first black republic in 1804, that carried high the flame of liberation and freedom for the black people."

Where is Haiti self?? Well welcome to Mama Africa.

Haiti welcome to Africa. The Caribbean is not a good mother I guess

Very good news

And so it begins. Welcome home.

Wow, well it's ok

@op, this is no recent news nah. Its already been decided by AU member countries 2 years ago, but AU is yet to implement its decision. Implementation is what we are hoping for !

abeg who is Haiti.

Just to put this into perspctive for those who are not aware.

Wyclef jean, nicki minaj, lauren Hill are all Haitians. There's a lonmg list of American celebrities who are originally from Haiti.

The history of Haiti will break your heart. Knowing it, the weak will despair, but the caring will strive to break the chains of tragedy.

When Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Haiti in December 1492, he found a native Arawak, or Taino, population of three million people or more, well fed, with cultivated fields, lots of children, living in peace. It had by far the largest population of any island in the Caribbean. Twenty-two years later, there were fewer than 27,000 who had not fallen victim to the sword, the ravages of forced labor, and diseases heretofore unknown to them. The Spaniards called the island La Ysla Española, which in use became Hispaniola.

The native people called the island Haiti, a word that three hundred years after the Europeans arrived would strike fear throughout the empires of the hemisphere built on slave labor and societies that accepted its practice, but bring hope to slaves as they heard of it.

Only a few who came with the Spanish Conquistadors dared, or cared, to speak out against the genocide. The historic exception was the priest and later Bishop of Chiapas, Bartolome de Las Casas. For his only briefly successful efforts to persuade Charles V and the Pope to protect the peoples of "India" from slavery and abuse, Las Casas became "the most hated man in the Americas" among the violent, rich rulers of New Spain. In a census Las Casas conducted in 1542, only 200 Taino were found. The soil of Haiti was already red with human blood.

Slowly the population of Hispaniola was replenished, the slaughtered Indians replaced primarily by the importation of Africans in chains who rarely knew, but never forgot, those who perished first at the hands of their masters. Few Spaniards settled in far western Hispaniola. By the mid-17th century, French buccaneers gained footholds on its coast. In 1697, France was recognized as sovereign over the western third of the island in a minor concession from Spain by the treaty of Ryswick, which ended the war of the Grand Alliance and resettled the map of western Europe. France called its new colony St. Domingue.

By the 1750s, St. Domingue was France's richest colony, rich from the sweat of slave labor's brow. Hispaniola declined in importance as Spanish colonies in Mexico, Peru and the Caribbean spread through South, Central and North America. On the eve of the revolution in France, St. Domingue had a population of about 32,000 from France, 24,000 freedmen of mixed blood, and nearly 500,000 African slaves. The native population was extinct.

The Creole language found birth in the slave quarters and secret places slaves could meet as their need to support each other and to resist grew. African languages permeated the French with African melody and African drums. English, Spanish and occasional Indian words were gathered into it by chance and attraction. Creole became the heart of Haitian culture, shared with others who were torn out of Africa and carried to European colonies in the Caribbean.

In trials of Haitian-Americans charged with planning to overthrow Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier in the mid-1980s, the most skilled French-English translators and professors of French in the universities of New Orleans could not translate Creole into English for the Court. It is a beautiful, separate language born from the suffering of African slaves of French masters and their determination to maintain their own identity.

In Paris, the philosophers of the Enlightenment condemned slavery. Diderot wrote that slavery contradicts nature. Montesquieu observed that when we admit that Africans are human, we confess what poor Christians we are. Abbe Reynal proclaimed that any religion that condones slavery deserves to be prohibited. Rousseau confessed that the existence of slavery made him ashamed to be a man. Helvetius observed that every barrel of sugar reaching Europe is stained with blood. Voltaire's adventurous hero, Candide, meets a slave whose hand was ground off in a sugar mill and leg was cut off for attempting to escape and proclaims, "At this price you eat sugar in Europe."

Few periods in history have given rise to more intense thought and concern about freedom and the rights of humanity, but St. Domingue was a long way away and the wealth of France and its slave masters were not impressed. Unaware, or contemptuous, of the enlightened views of France's philosophers, "His Majesty" in 1771 considered requests for the emancipation of mulatto slaves in Haiti and other French colonies and authorized his Minister of Colonies to explain his views:

...such a favor would tend to destroy the differences that nature has placed between whites and blacks, and that political prejudice has been careful to maintain as a distance which people of color and their descendants will never be able to bridge; finally, that it is in the interest of good order not to weaken the state of humiliation congenital to the species, in whatever degree it may perpetuate itself; a prejudice all the more useful for being in the very heart of the slaves and contributing in a major way to the due peace of the colonies...
Within two decades the people of France and Haiti would provide Louis XVI a clearer understanding of what was in their heart.
In Léogâne in 1772, a Haitian woman named Zabeth, her story recorded, lived a not uncommon life and death. Rebellious, like many, from childhood, she was chained for years when not working, chased and attacked by dogs when she escaped, her cheek branded with a fleur de lis. Zabeth was locked up in a sugar mill for punishment. She stuck her fingers in the grinder, then later bit off the bandages which stopped the flow of blood. She was then tied, her open wounds against the grinder, where particles of iron dust poisoned her blood before she died. Her owner lived unconcerned across the sea in Nantes.

For five years, the French Revolution, consumed with the struggle for human rights ignored the slaves of Haiti even over the protests of Marat and Robespierre and the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

On August 14, 1791, the slaves of St. Domingue rebelled. News of the insurrection sent electrifying waves of fear throughout the hemisphere. The slave states and slave owners in all parts of the U.S. and elsewhere in the Americas were forced to face what they had long dreaded, that the cruelty of their deeds would turn on them in violent slave rebellions. Their fear produced hatred and greater cruelty toward the slaves that led to the barbarity of lynchings in the late 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries and the excessive force employed with zeal by police in race riots into the 1960s in the U.S.

The struggle of the Haitian slaves for freedom dragged on for more than a decade, the French army caring less and less about the destructiveness of their arms and about the lives of the Haitian people. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, supported France in its efforts to suppress the slaves of St. Domingue. Their successors have consistently acted against the rights and well-being of Haitians ever since.

In 1794, after fighting both Spain and Great Britain to control St. Domingue, harassed by the slave insurrection led by Pierre-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, and in need of troops easily recruited from freedman before the rebellion, France declared the abolition of slavery in its colonies.

Frightened by the freedom of slaves in Haiti, the next year the King of Spain ceded the rest of the island, Spain's first colony in America, to France. The island was once again, temporarily, united. By 1801, Toussaint Louverture, a slave himself before the insurrection, proclaimed a constitution for Haiti, which named him governor-general for life. Napoleon was not consulted.

Later that year, Bonaparte sent General Charles Leclerc with a veteran force of 20,000 trained soldiers, including Haitian military officers, among them Alexandre Pétion, to crush the "First of the Blacks." In 1802, Napoleon ordered the reinstatement of slavery. Toussaint was captured by ruse and sent to France where he died a prisoner on April 7, 1803. Fearful that Napoleon would succeed in restoring slavery, African and mulatto generals in the French Army joined the bitter revolt against France. U.S. merchants sold arms and supplies to the former slave forces, while the U.S. government supported France.

The French army of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by Haitian former slaves. It surrendered in November 1803 and agreed to a complete withdrawal. Haiti lay in ruins, nearly half its population lost. The African slaves of Haiti had defeated the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The 12-year war for liberation had destroyed most of the irrigation systems and machinery that, with slave labor, had created France's richest colony and were the foundation of the island's economy.

On January 1, 1804, independence was declared for the entire island in the aboriginal name preferred by the former slaves: Haiti. In September 1804, Dessalines was proclaimed Emperor Jacques I. Nearly all whites who survived the long violence fled the island before, or with, the departing French army.

Profound fear spread among white peoples throughout the Americas wherever Africans were held in slavery. In the U.S. slave states, news from Haiti of the slave rebellion, the emancipation, the imprisonment and death of Toussaint Louverture in France, the failure of Napoleon's effort to reestablish slavery after sending 20,000 professional soldiers for the task, and their final defeat sent shock waves infinitely greater than those of 9-11-2001 two centuries later. Years before Nat Turner and even the earlier slave rebellions in the United States, the fear of slave rebellion became a brooding omnipresence.

As word spread among slave populations, exaltation embraced its people who could now believe their day of freedom too would come. The conflict between fear and newborn faith sharpened the edge of hostility that separated slave and master, creating greater tension and more violence.

Dessalines' nationalization and democratic distribution of land led to his assassination in 1806 by jealous elements of a new ruling class, both black and mulatto, emerging from the ranks of the Haitian generals. The alliance between the formerly freed � the freedmen or affranchis � and the newly freed � the former slaves � was dissolved with Dessalines' murder. A new ruling class of big landowners and a merchant bourgeoisie supplanted their colonialist predecessors. There ensued civil war primarily between the mulatto Pétion, who was elected president in Port-au-Prince over the south, and Christophe, a full-blooded African, who was proclaimed King Henry I in the north. Christophe committed suicide in 1820 after a major revolt against his rule. Jean Pierre Boyer, who had succeeded Pétion in the South in 1818, then became president of a united Haiti.

Haiti was reviled and feared by all the rich nations of the world precisely for its successful slave revolt which represented a threat not only in nations where slavery was legal, but in all countries, because of their large under-classes living in economic servitude. The strategy of the nations primarily affected, including the U.S., was to further impoverish Haiti, to make it an example. Racism in the hemisphere added a painful edge to the treatment of Haiti, which has remained the poorest country, with the darkest skin, the most isolated nation in the Americas. Even its language, spoken by so few beyond its borders, made Haiti the least accessible of countries and peoples.

In one grand commitment, Haiti, through President Pétion, contributed more to the liberation of the Americans from European colonial powers than any other nation. Twice Haiti, poor as it was, provided Simon Bolívar with men, arms and supplies that enabled the Great Liberator to free half the nations of South America from the Spanish yoke. On New Year's Day 1816, Pétion, his country still in ruins, blockaded by France and isolated from all rich nations, met with Bolívar, who had sold even his watch in Jamaica, seeking funds. He promised seven ships, 250 of his best soldiers, muskets, powder, provisions, funds, and even a printing press. Haiti asked only one act in repayment: Free the slaves.

Bolívar surely intended to fulfill his promise and achieved some proclamations of emancipation, but at the time of his death in 1831, not even his own Venezuela had achieved de facto freedom for all of its slaves. Thus Haiti had achieved the first successful slave rebellion of an entire colony, the defeat of veterans of Europe's most effective fighting force at the time � Napoleon's legions � and made perhaps the decisive contribution to the liberation from European colonial governments of six nations, all larger and with more people than Haiti. Each act was a sin for which there would be no forgiveness.

Spain retained effective control over the eastern part of the island after its concession to France in 1795. The Dominicans revolted against Spain in 1822, joining nearly all the Spanish colonies in the Americas. President Boyer blocked Europe's counter-revolutionary designs against Haiti by laying claim to the Spanish lands where he abolished slavery, but Haitian control was never consolidated. The Dominicans declared independence in 1844 which, after a decade of continuing struggle, was finally achieved.

In 1825, France was the first nation to recognize Haiti, from which it had profited so richly, but at a huge expense to Haiti through a more sophisticated form of exploitation. Haiti agreed to pay France 150,000,000 gold francs in "indemnity." The U.S. permitted limited trade with Haiti, but did not recognize it until 1862, the second year of the U.S. Civil War.

Haiti, true to its struggle against slavery, permitted Union warships to refuel and repair in its harbors during the Civil War. In 1891, the U.S. sought to obtain Môle Saint-Nicolas on the northwest tip of Haiti as a coaling station by force, but failed. A decade later, the U.S. obtained Guantanamo Bay from Cuba after the Spanish-American war. Môle Saint-Nicolas and Guantanamo are strategically located on the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, the best route from the Atlantic to the Panama Canal. First France, then the U.S., coveted the notion of a base at Môle Saint-Nicolas.

Between 1843 and 1911, sixteen persons held the highest government office in Haiti, an average of four years, three months each, but eleven were removed by force and its threat from a still revolutionary people. During the period from August 1911 to July 1915, in which many Haitians believed their country was being taken over by U.S. capital, one president was blown up in the Presidential Palace, another died of poison, three were forced out by revolution, and on July 27, 1915, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was taken by force from the French legation where he had sought sanctuary and killed.

The next day U.S. Marines landed in Haiti and began an occupation that lasted nineteen years. The U.S. invoked the Monroe Doctrine and humanitarianism to justify a criminal occupation. Haiti was forced to sign a ten-year treaty, later extended, which made Haiti a U.S. political and financial protectorate. Shortly before World War I, U.S. bankers, in the most debilitating form of intervention, obtained shares in the Haitian Bank which controlled the government's fiscal policies and participated in a huge loan to the Haitian government, again placing the people in servitude to a foreign master. U.S. capitalists were quickly given concessions to build a railroad and develop plantations. As the Panama Canal neared completion, U.S. interests in Haiti grew.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, than assistant secretary of the Navy, drafted a constitution for Haiti, something Toussaint Louverture had been capable of one hundred and fourteen years earlier. In 1920, while campaigning for the vice-presidency, Roosevelt boasted of his authorship accomplished on the deck of a U.S. Navy destroyer off the coast of Cap Haïtien. Such is the certainty of the U.S. in its natural superiority and right in matters of governance. In 1918, US Marines supervised a "farcical" plebiscite for the new constitution. Among other new rights, it permitted aliens for the first time to own land in Haiti.

Haiti paid dearly. U.S. intervention in education emphasized vocational training at the expense of the French intellectual tradition. The racist implications were clear to the people. The national debt was funded with expensive U.S. loans. The occupying force imposed harsh police practices to protect property and maintain order, but with little concern for injuries it inflicted, or protection for the public. In the spirit of democracy, Haitians were virtually excluded from the government of their own people.

Over the years, opposition to the occupation grew, and slowly Americans joined Haitians in protest against it. In 1930, after student and peasant uprisings, President Hoover sent missions to study ending the occupation and improving the education system. The first election of a national assembly since the occupation was permitted that year. In turn, it elected Stenio Joseph Vincent president. Vincent opposed the occupation, and Haitians quickly took control of public works, public health, and agricultural services.

In August 1934, Franklin Roosevelt, now president of the U.S., to confirm his celebrated Good Neighbor Policy, ended the occupation and withdrew the Marines. When the occupation was over, Haiti was as poor as ever and deep in debt. The U.S. continued its direct control of fiscal affairs in Haiti until 1941, and indirect control until 1947, to protect its loans and business interests. Among accomplishments the U.S. proclaimed for its long governance was a unified, organized, trained and militarized police force. Called the Garde d'Haïti, it guarded Haitians less than it guarded over them.

In 1937, Haiti was weakened by nearly two decades of foreign occupation and subjugation and a huge part of its unemployed work force was in the Dominican Republic laboring under cruel conditions at subsistence wages. The Dominican dictator, President Rafael Trujillo, directed the purge of Haitian farm workers and laborers in an overtly racist campaign of government violence to keep his country "white." As many as 40,000 Haitians were killed. The Organization of American States interceded and forced the Dominican Republic to acknowledge 18,000 deaths for which it paid $522,000 in restitution with no other consequence than an angry neighbor. A Haitian life was worth $29 to the OAS, with most lives unrecognized.

read morehttp://iacenter.org/haiti/ramsey.htm

Grundig:
Just to put this into perspctive for those who are not aware.

Wyclef jean, nicki minaj, lauren Hill are all Haitians. There's a lonmg list of American celebrities who are originally from Haiti.

nicki minaj is from Trinidad and Tobago
I know of wyclef Jean, he's from Haiti

Abbey2sam:


nicki minaj is from Trinidad and Tobago
I know of wyclef Jean, he's from Haiti

Oh. My bad. Thought she is originally from haiti.

Thanks for the correction

IkennaNweke:
Already holding the distinction of being the world’s first free Black republic, Haiti has made another first as it prepares to become the African Union's first member state that is not actually on the physical continent of Africa.

Haiti attended the most recent African Union International Conference of Heads of State and Government, held in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, as a member observer, but surprised delegates with the announcement that Haiti would seek full associate membership with the 54-member bloc.

"...The African continent occupies a place increasingly important in the diplomatic action of the Haitian government ... to this end, a process of participation of Haiti in the African Union was engaged with the President of the regional institution, for the grant to Haiti, of a status of associate member and of the accreditation of a diplomatic mission with that organization," Haitian prime minister Dr. Garry Conille said, according to Haiti Libre.


The head of the Haitian delegation at the A.U. conference, Ady Jean Gardy, said that the move was an attempt to “establish exchanges at all levels of the business diplomacy with African states,” and he pledged Haiti’s support with technical assistance to help countries then re-negotiate donor aid agreements with the goal of debt cancellation.


The African Union is the modern incarnation of the Organization of African Unity, started in 1963, and its vision today is to build “an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in global arena.”



Although this is the first time an outside state has requested membership with the A.U., Haiti has long maintained positive relationships with many African nations. In the wake of the 2010 earthquake, several African states urged each other to provide naturalized citizenship to all Haitians that sought refuge in Africa, with Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade proposing a plan for the mass adoption of orphaned Haitian children across the continent.

Wade said the history of Haitians as descendants of African slaves gave them the right to a new life on the continent, according to Reuters.

"We have attachment and links to that country," former A.U. Chairman Jean Ping said of Haiti in 2010, according to Reuters. "The first black republic in 1804, that carried high the flame of liberation and freedom for the black people."

Haiti and Jamaica have always had attendance in the AU. Am shocked the process of becoming full fledged members is just starting.

Africa is becoming more and more profitable as an associate, with facilities like the African Development Bank with is aiding the recent infrastructural boom in many African Countries.

Europeans are wicked!
They all leave on our sweat.

Typical black story of failure and poverty.

Typical story of black failure and poverty. Can they copy Singarpore.

Hahahahahaha.
Actually, in spite of the geographical barrier Haiti belongs more at home to sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere in the western hemisphere. So it is a kind of home-coming.
The mind-boggling superstition, the abject poverty, the mean spirited people, the decrepit communities, the dysfunctional public institutions, you name it, Haiti is more Mali than Costa Rica. You wont even believe that this blighted outpost of African despair shares an Island with the Dominican Republic.

MirabelArode:
Haitians are good people, I remembee their moral support for Biafrans against Oppresion of the British and her dastardly mess of a creation called nigeria ('Nigger area').

All the countries that recognized Biafra have NOT officially derecognized Biafra but zombies go about shouting 'Biafra is dead." It's dead but you talk about Biafea 10 times per day?

Your great grand father that is long dead, do you talk about him everyday? Zombies sef.

liar which Biafra Haiti support?

johnmartus:
liar which Biafra Haiti support?

^^ Go and complete your education before you start spreading rumors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8V5sr8gI4M

[size=15pt]Haitian-Africans Formally Join the African Union[/size]

quid:
^^ Go and complete your education before you start spreading rumors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War

Biafra wikipedia

quid:
^^ Go and complete your education before you start spreading rumors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War

Biafra wikipedia

ikenga67:
Hahahahahaha.
Actually, in spite of the geographical barrier Haiti belongs more at home to sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere in the western hemisphere. So it is a kind of home-coming.
The mind-boggling superstition, the abject poverty, the mean spirited people, the decrepit communities, the dysfunctional public institutions, you name it, Haiti is more Mali than Costa Rica. You wont even believe that this blighted outpost of African despair shares an Island with the Dominican Republic.

Lol..... expect increase in witches in Africa.

Hearty welcome to our Haitian cousins. Africa is on the rise, with 6 of the world's 10 fastest growing economies, and the Caribbean nations want to be part of it.

We welcum them wit open hands.