tomsdispatch | Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of
conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s
catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to
Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble -- as many as
300,000 died -- when Robertson went on TV and gave
his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been
"under the heel of the French" but they "got together and swore a pact
to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from
the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.'"
A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in
his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in
fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub
arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.
Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791,
when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually
declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to
accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an
extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a
choice: compensate slave owners for lost property -- their slaves (that
is, themselves) -- or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was
forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks.
As late as 1940, 80% of the government budget was still going to service this debt.
In the on-again, off-again debate that has taken place in the United
States over the years about paying reparations for slavery, opponents
of the idea insist that there is no precedent for such a proposal. But
there is. It’s just that what was being paid was
reparations-in-reverse, which has a venerable pedigree. After the War
of 1812 between Great Britain and the U.S., London reimbursed southern
planters more than a million dollars for having encouraged their slaves
to run away in wartime. Within the United Kingdom, the British
government also paid
a small fortune to British slave owners, including the ancestors of
Britain’s current Prime Minister, David Cameron, to compensate for
abolition (which Adam Hochschild calculated in his 2005 book Bury the Chains to be “an amount equal to roughly 40% of the national budget then, and to about $2.2 billion today”).
Advocates of reparations -- made to the descendants of enslaved peoples, not to
their owners -- tend to calculate the amount due based on the negative
impact of slavery. They want to redress either unpaid wages during the
slave period or injustices that took place after formal abolition
(including debt servitude and exclusion from the benefits extended to
the white working class by the New Deal). According to
one estimate, for instance, 222,505,049 hours of forced labor were
performed by slaves between 1619 and 1865, when slavery was ended.
Compounded at interest and calculated in today’s currency, this adds up
to trillions of dollars.
But back pay is, in reality, the least of it. The modern world owes its very existence to slavery.
