Kwaku's Haiti Diary

Haiti, now devastated by an earthquake, was the first black nation to become independent in 1804 and only the second in the western hemisphere, after the United States , to do so.  Haiti occupies a third of the island named Hispaniola by Columbus who happened upon it in 1492. The remainder of the island is  the Dominican Republic.   Until Columbus claimed it for Spain, the island was occupied by Arawakan people some of whom called their land Ayiti.   In 2003, the year preceding Haiti’s 200th year of independence, award-wnnning Ghanaian International journalist, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, visited Haiti.  His diary is published below:

In Transit
I’m the only black man on the plane from London to Boston, en route to Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.  But from Boston to Port-au-Prince, the demography is reversed.  There’s one white woman on the flight.  Fair.

In the rest of the chocolate-hued passengers I see my own reflection.  And I wonder how, despite centuries and oceans of separation, a people can be so unchanged.  They could very well have been the very men and women the slave-traders snatched from Dahomey and the Gold Coast, except this is the 21st century and these ones are flying, travelling of their free will.  They’re so African.  So us!

95 per cent of Haitians are black.  They travel heavy – just like ‘us’. I know those blue and red checked nylon bags.  That’s where the presents are stowed.  People at home expect them.

Day One
The aircraft touches down; the passengers applaud.  We do that too on Ghana Airways. The airport is named for Toussaint L’Ouverture.  That’s the slave who led a rebellion against the French in the late 18th century, leading to Haiti’s independence in 1804.  President Jean Bertrand Aristide’s bespectacled portrait hangs over the entrance to the arrival hall, greeting passengers and reminding them of the 200th independence anniversary of Haiti.

I check into the Olofsson, the legendary hotel about which Graham Greene wrote in his book, The Comedians.  Voodoo deities and sculpture nestle in the lush-green garden.  The receptionist is round and dark with big buttocks.  She reminds me of my former neighbour’s nanny.  I swear she’s descended from Hohoe straight.

I’ve chicken creole for dinner.  It’s grilled juicy and spicy.  It comes with rice cooked with black beans.  In Ghana, that’s waakye.

The weather’s warm.  The stars are visible.  Strains of Le Premier Gaou, the hit by the Ivorian group Magic Systeme, wafts through the air from a party in the neighbourhood.  There’re even mosquitoes in my room.  Wonderful!  Feels just like home.  So I call home.  It goes through after 12 tries.  No, this is not home.

Day Two
I go out in a taxi to look around Port-au Prince.  The roads are in ruins.  The churches are packed.  The music is good.  The worshippers dance.  I suspect the pastors’ hands are deep inside the congregations’ pocket.  What’s new?

The city centre stinks like a billion bare bottoms breaking wind.  Much like Korle Gonno back in Accra.  Men whip out pathetic, puny penises and piss in public places.  Familiar.

The Place de l’independence is impressive, though.  There’s a statue to The Unknown Slave.  He emits energy.  As if he breathes the collective residual breadth of a million retired slaves.

The tap-taps mimic the matatus in Nairobi:  they come in a riot of day-glo colours and pump racy zouk or kompa music in big boom-box bass.

I visit a voodoo shrine.  The priest is called Gilbert.  He wants US$1,500 for a 15-minute tour.  We settle for US$200.  Gilbert lives in a modern mansion.  This is voodoo for Miami tourists.  It lacks spirit.  It’s plastic.  The deities are white, except two – Dontor and Papa Lokko.  Both are Ghanaian names.

The cabbie wants US$100 for a three-hour job.  We have a fight.  Taxi drivers!

Day Three
I move out of the Olofsson into Hotel Villa Creole in Petion Ville, on the hillside.  People in this suburb are lighter-skinned, more Francophile, less Afrocentric, wealthier and more snobbish.  They can afford weekend grocery-shopping in Miami.  It’s only an hour by air.

Day Four
I get a new driver, Monsieur Armand Pressoir, 74.  He’s sweet like an uncle.  He’s schocked to learn that Accra has better roads than Petion Ville, and Abidjan has skyscrapers.  He wants to visit Africa before he dies.

I go to see a cock-fight in a rough downtown neighbourhood.  Everybody looks so familiar that I feel  secure.  They assume I’m Haitian.  They speak to me in Creole.  I respond in Twi.  We all laugh.  We understand why we misunderstand.  They call me Un Blanc, as in white man as in Obroni as in foreigner .

I tell them I’m from Africa.  And what do they think of Africa?  “No-thing,” one guy replies in a Jamaican-patois lilt.  “We al-so Africains, of cou-orse; we de same, mon!”  There’s a general nodding of heads.

Day Five
I go to meet a Nigerian shoemaker.   Bob Ligali, 55, of Kingsway Stores; married to a Haitian.  He’s lived here for 33 years; been home three times.  Everyone knows him as L’Africain.  He was hired from the US to manage Haiti’s leather-ware factory in the Duvalier years.  But political instability has left the economy in ruins.  He wants to return to Nigeria.

There’re only a few Africans in Haiti, mostly Congolese.  Ligali doesn’t know of any Ghanaians.  He says Haitians are confused.  They don’t want to work on the land because they think it harks back to the days of plantation slavery.  “If Nigeria was this close to America, haba!” Ligali wrings his hands.

Day Six
I fly to Jeremie, capital of Grande Anse province in the west, in a ten-seater single-engine plane without a co-pilot.  The co-pilot’s seat has been sold to a peace-corps volunteer.  The weather is bad. The flight is rough.  Very rough.  A fortnight earlier a plane had fallen down from the sky.  The woman seated next to me is doing Hai Marys.  A woman behind me is chanting Psalm 23.  The Lord is my/her/our/everybody’s shepherd.  But at this altitude, in this weather, with the ocean on our left and mountains on our right, is a shepherd what we need?  There’s a nun seated behind me.  She’s not chanting.  She’s calm.  So I calm.

We come down safely on an unpaved air-strip.  The airport is tiny.  The terminal is a shipping container.  I check-in at the Auberge Inn.  They greet me with fresh bananas.

Day Seven
I travel five hours through the remote countryside of Grande Anse.  It’s mountainous, virgin-green and incredibly picturesque.  People here travel by donkey.  Those with slightly deeper pockets have a horse.  I meet fewer than four vehicles during the entire journey.  Less than five km of the road is paved.  Children walk for ages to school.  They might well be too old when they arrive.

At Chamberlain village, people come out when they hear there’s an African about.  They surround me.  But a guy in jeans and spectacles isn’t quite what they expect.  They know their roots are in Africa, but they don’t know much else except Mandela.  One student recalled Khalilou Fadiga’s 2002 World Cup goal against France, though.

Voodoo shrines abound.  I visit a priestess at Bariadelle, a seaside fishing village.  She’s shoe-polish black.  Her name is Marie-Jose Jean Charles!  With a name like that her voodoo can’t be potent.  Unlike Gilbert, she doesn’t ask for money.  She’s happy to meet a real African, her late father’s life-long but unfulfilled desire.  She too, like Gilbert, has got representations of Catholic saints and white deities in her shrine.  This is voodoo-lite.  I tease her about her French name.  She wants a real African name.  She recalls she was born Saturday.  I rename her Nana Ama Gbagbladza (Ewe for cockroach.  Roaches are hard to kill; they’ll survive a nuclear melt-down.)   I write the name out.  She kisses the paper and holds it to her bossom.

I return to Jeremie.  Dinner is boiled yam and green plantain with spinach sauce, boiled egg and sliced avocado.  Ampesi straight!

Day Eight
 I go to shop for music.  Haitian kompa music will deliver a cripple to the dance floor.  But it’s racine or voodoo roots music that will make him stand up and dance.  This is unadulterated boborbor  from the Volta Region of Ghana or Togo and Benin.  For me, all voodoo is hollow, fraudulent abracadabra.  The magic is the drum and vocal accompaniment.

Day Nine
 It’s my last day.  I’m packing.  And I’m trying to put Haitians into a nice, tidy  box.  But I can’t.  I can’t because Haitians are, genetically, African.  Culturally, they’re French.  And geographically, they’re American.   Yet, they’re too far away from Africa; they despise the French, and the Americans don’t want them that close.  I go to say farewell to Ligali the Nigerian.  He sums them up.   “Haitians,” he says, “were stolen from Africa and enslaved and abandoned on this strange island, so they’re stranded.”

Stranded permanently.  Shipwrecked  forever.   In transit with no outbound boats. Even for Haitians Haiti isn’t home.

Day Ten
So I leave for home.

2010 Post-Script:
The Olofsson where I stayed was flattened by the earthquake.  And I wonder whether Monsieur Presssoir did make it to Africa and whether he survived the quake.

*This diary was originally published in “Focus on Africa” magazine (Jan-March 2004 edition).  It has been edited for The Mirror.