"Give Haitians the time, space and support to imagine a different future for their own country."
In December 2003 I received an assignment that would change my life. I was a young reporter for The New York Times, detailed to the paper's sleepy Westchester bureau but dreaming of a career as a foreign correspondent. Haiti was scheduled to celebrate the bicentennial of its independence on New Year's Day. Was I interested in covering it, my editor asked? |
Was I ever. Haiti had loomed large in my imagination since I was a child. I grew up mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, in Kenya and Ghana, in a house infused with an ethos of pan-African liberation. I had been raised on the thrilling tale of the formerly enslaved Haitian generals who defeated the armies of Napoleon. |
Throughout their history as an independent nation, Haitians paid dearly, literally and figuratively, for their temerity, first with brutal isolation and later with incessant foreign meddling. When I arrived in Haiti to cover its bicentennial, it was roiling with protests. I ended up spending a couple of months there covering the unfolding crisis that ended with Haiti's first truly democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, being forced from office by armed groups and the tacit support of major Western powers. |
Bearing witness to these events shaped much of the rest of my career. I became obsessed with the central questions that formerly colonized peoples have faced for decades: how to govern themselves, how to avoid the hegemony of their former colonial overlords, how to escape the neocolonial traps of the post-Cold War era — how to achieve true sovereignty and real democracy in a world order rife with domination. |
 | | Protesters demanding the resignation of Ariel Henry in the Pétion-Ville suburb of Port-au-Prince this month.Odelyn Joseph/Associated Press |
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So when I thought about what my first piece should be upon returning to The Times as an Opinion columnist focused on the Global South, the answer was obvious: It must be Haiti. The intervening years have been some of the most difficult in Haiti's history, for reasons man-made and natural. The crisis has grown even more acute in recent weeks, as I report in my column, with armed gangs taking control of much of the country's infrastructure and terrorizing its people. |
But the deeper question is the same one that brought me to Haiti 18 years ago: Who gets to decide who will govern Haiti? And will the outside world ever let Haitians determine that for themselves? |
My reporting left me dismayed by the conditions Haitians are living in, but ultimately hopeful. A dedicated group of Haitians from a broad swath of society has come together with a plan to set the country back on the path to democracy and stability. All they need is for the rest of the world to get out of their way and let Haitians build the country that fulfills the promise of their founding. |
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