by David Thill

Created on: June 30, 2009   Last Updated: July 03, 2009

Wow, what a loaded question.

Asking if the Haitian slave rebellion is almost over 200 years later implies that there is some kind of doubt. Wake up and smell the 21st century. Slavery as an institution has been dead for over a century, and even Apartheid, that nasty old "slavery-light" has passed into the annals of history.

For there still to be some sort of rebellion going on, you would need some slaves, and someone who thought they owned them. The political history of Haiti since the successful slave rebellion of the early 1800's has been violent and punctuated by periodic interventions by the United States and France, the former colonial power. Haitians have often been the victims of one dictator or another, and as a result of the generally bad government, these dictators have provided, economic development in Haiti has long been stunted. Many people are poorly educated or have very low income, but no matter how oppressed the citizens of Haiti may be, they are certainly not slaves.

As for slave owners, there don't appear to be any candidates. Although there is resentment in Haiti at the various interventions by foreign powers, most often the United States, not even the most patriotic Haitian would accuse the United States of being a slave holder. The US hardly exploits the labor of the Haitian people for its own benefit. In fact, the US is the largest donor of aid to Haiti, and the formal Haitian economy is so small that even if it were inclined to do so, the US has very little scope for exploitation.

No, the time of the slave rebellion is long past, and the people of Haiti have nobody to blame for their problems but themselves, and the dictators that regularly seize control of their political fates. Haitians live in one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, and certainly the most troubled and unstable country in the western hemisphere. If Haitians are slaves to anything, it is a lack of education. Around half of Haitians are functionally illiterate, crippling any ability of the country to pull itself up out of mere subsistence farming by developing a modern economy.

When the Haitian slave rebellion won independence in 1804, it was the first and only nation born out of a successful slave revolt. Unfortunately, in the two centuries since then the country has failed to meet the promise of those early years, and the people of Haiti still suffer the fate of the poorest and least developed countries on the planet.

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