Haiti

  In effect, Boyer had created two classes of citizens in Haiti: urban residents, who were governed by the national laws, and rural dwellers, who were subject to a different, highly restrictive set of rules. And yet, while the Code Rural encouraged and enabled mistreatment and exploitation of rural residents by local officials and landowners, it was ultimately unenforceable. Over generations, Haitians had practiced and refined their resistance to various forms of coerced labor, and by Boyer’s time many of them had gained an essential weapon in that battle: their own plots of land. Once they had a place to plant their own crops to feed themselves and their families, they could refuse or avoid forms of wage labor they considered too harsh or poorly paid. In response to Boyer’s attempts to control and constrain them, rural residents perfected techniques of evading government officials, living as much as possible beyond the gaze of the state.26

  The laborers’ resistance made it impossible for Boyer to carry out his grand plans of reviving sugar production. As it turned out, he was not able to realize his goals even on his own two-thousand-acre plantation: after years of effort, only 2 percent of his land was successfully planted with cane. Meanwhile, Beaubrun Ardouin, one of Haiti’s founding historians and a senator under Boyer’s regime, found it similarly impossible to keep laborers on his coffee plantation. Those he tried to get to work for him had established “new properties for themselves and their families.” On land that they owned or leased, rural residents could grow coffee for themselves just as easily, and make much more in the process. “Could I have stopped them?” Ardouin wondered. An English visitor to Ardouin’s plantation noted that many laborers had essentially taken over the land that Ardouin considered to be his—going so far as to “appropriate to themselves almost the whole of the provisions which the land furnishes, sending on down a few of the rarer vegetables, beans, peas, and artichokes to their master.” Throughout the country, landowners largely ceded control of cultivation to their tenant farmers. Increasingly, they had only very tenuous power over the land they held title to. Though the landowners could legally have tried using force against the laborers who resisted them, most of them realized that in practice, any deployment of police or soldiers against the local population would result in at best only a temporary victory.27

  Over time, many Haitian leaders—following the example of Pétion—simply accepted the push for mass land ownership. In 1862, President Geffrard would sign a law allowing for the sale of government-owned land in small parcels, and in 1883, President Salomon, hoping to promote exports, carried out a policy of distributing small plots of land to anyone who committed to cultivating coffee, cotton, tobacco, or indigo there. Over the course of the nineteenth century, then, the number of Haitians owning land—usually no more than a few acres—increased dramatically. Although some individuals and families certainly continued to hold on to large plantations, the overall level of distribution and fragmentation of land ownership in Haiti was remarkable, surpassing that of any other society in the Americas.28

  The population did not just take control of the land. They also developed a set of social and cultural practices intended to secure this land ownership over time and to guarantee every rural resident a measure of autonomy. The most visible and widely shared of these practices, and one that has left a distinctive mark on the social geography of Haiti, was the system of the lakou. In its most basic sense, a lakou (from the French la cour, or courtyard) refers to a group of houses—sometimes including a dozen or more structures, and usually owned by an extended family—gathered around a common yard. But the lakou also came to represent specific social conventions meant to guarantee each person equal access to dignity and individual freedom. The lakou system has had a profound impact on life throughout Haiti, which has long been—and indeed remains—a largely rural country. In the mid-twentieth century, 85 percent of the population still lived in rural areas, and while that number has steadily declined in recent decades, to this day the majority of the population resides outside the cities. What’s more, many of those who live in urban areas were born in the countryside, and they have imported elements of the lakou setup to the cities as well.29

  The lakou system developed largely in the absence of—indeed, in opposition to—the Haitian government. Unable to transform the national political system, rural residents found another solution: they created, as one scholar puts it, “an egalitarian system without a state.” Profoundly innovative, this system was predicated on the “auto-regulation” of local communities. These communities took on many of the tasks of social organization that might otherwise have been supervised or legislated by the authorities, such as the regulation of inheritance, land ownership, and family relationships. In a sense, the lakou system was analogous to the Citadel built by Christophe—except that while his edifice was designed to withstand a siege from external attackers, the lakou enabled communities to repel a threat that came from within Haiti, from the state itself as it attempted to reconstruct the plantation order.30

  The egalitarianism of the lakou system was rooted in the land ownership arrangements. Each individual or nuclear family owned their own land, through which they provided for basic necessities by growing food and raising livestock for their own consumption and for sale in local markets. They also grew export crops, such as coffee, in order to buy imported consumer goods such as clothes and tools. While the lakou involved some forms of communal assistance and exchange—relatives and neighbors might join together to help out with large harvests or the building of a house, for example—the system was generally constructed around close-knit family networks and emphasized self-reliance through working the soil. From the moment a child was born, it would literally become a property owner: the infant’s umbilical cord was buried in the yard, and a fruit tree planted upon it. The fruit of that tree would then be used to buy clothes and other necessities for the child as it grew up, and the income thus generated could eventually provide the foundation for investment in livestock or even land. In principle, at least, the lakou thus divided power in a way that allowed rural residents to live and work as they wished, while preventing the consolidation of wealth, and therefore control, in the hands of any person within the community. In practice, of course, there were some disparities in wealth: certain peasants, for instance, were established on more productive plots or had better connections for selling their products, and were thus able to expand their holdings and consolidate their economic power. Even the wealthier rural residents, however, remained rooted in the codes of the communities where they lived.31

  The antithesis of lakou-based autonomy was salaried work, which represented a surrender to the demands of another individual. Indeed, one scholar argues that whereas workers in many societies over the last two hundred years have accepted salaried work but sought to curb its excesses through government control or union organizing, the preferred strategy in Haiti has been to “refuse the entire system.” The rural population, writes Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, was not willing to trade its liberty for money. “When it had to choose between a higher income and direct control of the labor process, it chose control.”32

  In order to preserve that control, the lakou system established its own set of customs to regulate land ownership and land transfers. The state had no part in these transactions, which were overseen entirely by community and family institutions. When several people in an extended family owned adjacent plots of land, for example, the formal title to the entire set of fields would usually be held by just one family member, who served as the interface between his lakou and the official world beyond. Meanwhile, the actual division of the land would be done within the family, leaving few if any written traces. As far as the lakou was concerned, the individual ownership was no less real for its lack of state recognition. When it came to their own fields, the family members could do whatever they wished, with just one signal exception: they could not sell the land to anyone outside the lakou.33

  That, of course, might seem l
ike a serious restriction. But most rural residents would not have wanted to sell their fields anyway, out of deep-rooted fear that the loss of one plot could open the door to the acquisition of larger pieces of property by outsiders who, by gaining control over land, would gain control over the community and its labor. Land transfers could take place within an extended family, of course, according to processes governed by consensus; but ceding land to an outsider was largely taboo. In essence, the limits on the sale of land were driven by the idea that it was always possible, if the community were not extremely careful, for the plantation to return. And indeed, over generations, these cultural restrictions on selling land have effectively protected Haiti’s rural communities from encroachment by outside interests, whether from within the country or from abroad.34

  Like any social system, the lakou had to keep the peace among its members. That was often a serious challenge, for in a situation of relative poverty and intense individualism, conflicts over property could easily turn violent. As a result, in many communities great care was given to the placement of boundaries—often “living fences” made out of cactus, for instance—to prevent livestock from causing damage to neighboring yards. The means of access to and from properties also required careful discussion, with many communities settling on a network of small paths with few large common roads: the roads might have been useful in some ways, but they would have taken land away from planting and opened up a danger of access from the outside. The location of spots for defecation, too, was a contentious question, regulated by a set of customs whose transgression could be a serious issue. Thus, while the rural residents preserved a sense of individual autonomy, they did so in a world governed by codes and coordinated by lakou leaders, usually the family patriarchs. Everyone was subject to a kind of reciprocal control from family and neighbors that maintained the delicate balance required for an egalitarian existence.35

  Highly charged issues were softened by intensive habits of hospitality, with food shared either through communal dining or through the custom of sending part of whatever one family cooked to their neighbors in the lakou. Religious life, too, served to hold this world together. Each lakou included a set of family tombs, allowing residents of the countryside to do something that had been difficult if not impossible under slavery itself: to keep and maintain a cemetery, paying respects to the dead and through them honoring more distant ancestors in Africa. Such service to ancestors is an important part of Vodou practice, in which departed family members are seen as being connected to the broader pantheon of lwa (gods). The presence of the tombs served as a constant reminder of the origins of the family and the lakou, thereby emphasizing each family member’s responsibility to maintain the community and the land that it was built upon. Naturally, some found this world constraining, even claustrophobic, and fled their communities—often going to the cities in search of education and new opportunities. Still, until the twentieth century, the Haitian countryside seems largely to have sustained and satisfied the population that lived there.36

  Of course, though they were focused on individual autonomy, the lakou were never isolated from one another, or from the broader economic system of Haiti. Rather, they were the building blocks of a complex agricultural system tied together by a network of thriving and bustling markets. The Haitian geographer and novelist Georges Anglade, who mapped this network of markets in a 1982 atlas, described them as not just places for commercial exchange but a “fundamental aspect of rural life.” Each market sustained the region around it, providing a site for the exchange of news as well as for the organization of social events, political action, and secret societies that governed life in much of the countryside. The markets helped “an infinite number of small intermediaries” to “share the crumbs” of rural production: “merchants, resellers, brokers, porters, artisans who all work to get a few cents.” The work of buying and selling in the market was “scattered,” Anglade writes, precisely in order to “provide resources to the greatest number of people, notably peasants without land,” who hired themselves out to work for other peasants in their gardens. Outsiders often saw (and still see) Haitian markets as chaotic and incomprehensible, but their form in fact reflects their evolution over time to serve specific purposes, channeling commerce in particular ways for the communal good. Since the markets were one of the main places where rural residents encountered government officials, their fragmentation had another benefit as well, making it all the more difficult for the state to track, control, and tax the trading that went on there. In this way, the markets also allowed the rural population to resist those who sought to control them from outside.37

  The form of agricultural and social organization developed in the Haitian countryside in the nineteenth century was highly productive, even if it didn’t supply Boyer with the tax revenues he had been counting on. While the lakou system never generated the massive profits that planters and French merchants had gained from the slave economy, it provided the former slavers and their descendants with a relatively comfortable and sustainable life. Indeed, Haiti at this time was a magnet for immigrants. In addition to African Americans drawn by Boyer’s travel subsidy, men and women from Germany, Corsica, Syria, and other countries came to Haiti in significant numbers during the second half of the nineteenth century. Migrants also arrived from other parts of the Caribbean. Hundreds came from Guadeloupe and Martinique after slavery was abolished there in 1848—considering that, even though they were now legally free, they would find a truer independence in Haiti. Thanks to a broadly shared Kreyòl language, they were able to integrate themselves into the society relatively quickly, joining in the creation of Haiti’s remarkable culture.38

  * * *

  “The first step one takes into Haiti is a little frightening, especially for an abolitionist,” the French antislavery activist Victor Schoelcher wrote in his account of the journey he took to Haiti in 1841. “I desired, I feared, I hoped.” He had read ardently about Haiti’s struggle for freedom, and he admired Toussaint Louverture and other heroes of the fight for emancipation. He wanted contemporary Haiti to provide further proof to the world that slavery was unnecessary and that the Caribbean could thrive without it. But he worried that he would find instead that the proslavery voices were right, and that he would encounter only “disorder and barbarism” in the former colony.39

  As it turned out, Schoelcher had kind things to say about many of the Haitians who welcomed him during his travels. Ultimately, however, he found himself disappointed. He was shocked by the scrappy look and habits of Haitian soldiers, and claimed that the material conditions of free Haitians were little better than those of the slaves in other parts of the Caribbean. Schoelcher tried to take the sting out of his remarks by arguing that the situation was a result of bad leadership—Boyer’s unwillingness to fund education, for example—rather than of any inherent incapacity on the part of the Haitian people. But in a curious way, his descriptions of Haiti at times dovetailed with those peddled by the proslavery advocates of the day, who gleefully circulated images of Haitian peasants descending into a mire of laziness and poverty when deprived of the benefits of white tutelage and mastery.

  Schoelcher wrote that areas that had once been covered with thriving sugar plantations had become sites of “misery and sterility,” with residents growing nothing more than food for themselves and a bit of cane to make alcohol. The lakou—scattered houses connected by narrow paths—looked to him like slave huts. He lamented that the women went around bare-breasted and the children naked, that whole families were sleeping together in one room and surviving on meager rations of bananas. Schoelcher was upset to find that Haitians had not developed the desire for consumption that “gives birth to industry and forces us to work” while also “refining” a people’s sensibilities. Theirs was a “negative happiness,” he wrote: “they live from day to day and, thanks to their liberty, they are happy and content despite their poverty.” Desiring little beyond one’s basic needs might be a fine “na
tural philosophy,” he claimed, but it precluded mental progress.40

  Haitian peasants, Schoelcher concluded, were ultimately being condemned to an “animalistic” existence. What was worse, by allowing this to happen, the country’s leaders were doing harm not only to themselves but to the entire abolitionist cause. “The crime of Haitian barbarism is not only mortal for your Republic,” he expostulated, “but can be called a universal crime.” By giving comfort to all those who defended slavery, it helped to keep millions of men and women in chains. “Have you not thought about what you are doing? Have you not considered the responsibility that weighs on you? Are you not afraid that one day the voices of four million of your brothers will be raised against you in the universe’s tribunal, accusing you of having slowed down their emancipation?” From the trees of liberty planted throughout Haiti, Schoelcher wrote, had come nothing but “bitter and disappointing fruit.”41

  It was a strange accusation: certainly the responsibility for holding millions of people in bondage lay with slave owners and their governments, not Haitian farmers. And it shows how even a leading abolitionist like Schoelcher could remain essentially blind to the antislavery revolution that was still under way in Haiti. The rural culture he condemned was driven by a historically constituted set of aspirations and a determined search for autonomy. To him, however, it looked like a retreat into primitivism, a criminal step backwards. Such charges against the country’s rural population were in fact startlingly common during that time. Propagated by defenders of slavery and abolitionists alike, portrayals of Haiti’s rural culture as atavistic, isolationist, and unsustainable took root in the nineteenth century, and they have never gone away. As Louis-Joseph Janvier noted furiously in 1882: “There are tons of idiots who have never used their ten fingers for anything, and who wander around constantly repeating, inanely: ‘Haitians are very lazy.’” Such views were common among foreigners, and they have been shared by many elites in Haiti as well. In 1842, an article in the Patriote newspaper declared that “polygamy and laziness” were the “two major vices that afflict our population.” Since the early nineteenth century, Haiti’s peasants have repeatedly been accused of refusing progress and rejecting the benefits of consumption, depicted by their own rulers as subjects in desperate need of reform who were holding the country back.42