The question remains: Why did Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted leader of Haiti, end up in the Central African Republic?
No one goes there for kicks. The country has no particular political or economic record to write home about. It can’t even be proven that, as a long shot, Aristide had discovered that his ancestors had been seized from there as slaves many centuries ago, and that, like Kunta Kinte, he was simply finding his way home, when all other avenues had been closed to him.
The whole saga is packed tight with humbug.
The South African government protests that no application has been received from the former Haitian president for asylum — even though it was clear to all the world that the South African president was about the only friend he had on this lonely planet when they were seen standing shoulder-to-shoulder launching doves of peace into the air in the Haitian capital on the anniversary of the country’s hard-won independence from France.
Methinks they do protest too much. What other call would the baffled, embattled Aristide have made but to his loving brother Thabo Mbeki, when it finally seemed that the chips were down (as they already clearly were when Thabo made his New Year visit there with a navy battleship and a strong contingent of South African military and intelligence personnel, as you will recall)?
So, putting aside the many complicated issues of whether Aristide was chased out by George W Bush and Colin Powell, who had made prior arrangements with Pretoria, or whether he was the victim of a popular insurrection, one still has to wonder how he ended up in Bangui.
There are a lot of other places that could have made more sense for a president going into exile from Haiti. A bunch of possible stops in his local Caribbean spring to mind — Jamaica, Tobago, neighbouring Santo Domingo, Cuba, for example. Or even Granada or Brazil. Why not?
In fact what about Florida? Except that, if the poor little defrocked priest’s protestations about a conspiracy against him are true, the Americans would hardly be likely to throw open their doors to him, even in extremis.
But then what about France, the former colonising power? France has given refuge to a lot of fleeing rascals in the past — including Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc” Duvalier, one of Aristide’s predecessors, and a man who did no favours, to say the least, for his beleaguered people. As far as I know, Baby Doc is still living in unearned splendour somewhere in the south of France.
Maybe there are two factors that prevented Aristide taking up this option. One is that he was not enamoured with the idea of bumping into Baby Doc along the boardwalk somewhere on the Côte d’Azur. The other is that, unlike the self-same Baby Doc, Aristide had not used his time in power wisely and stashed away enough stolen millions to make that kind of high-life European exile a viable possibility.
So, stuck between the rock of official South African denial and the hard place of self-imposed penury, he and his wife find themselves in the unlikely limbo of Bangui — a backwater at the crossroads from nowhere to nowhere.
One thing is certain. No one has ever been able to crack the nut that is Haiti. Toussaint L’Ouverture, in whose name books and songs and Africanist poems have been written, and for whom unsuspecting children have been named by their parents for the past 200 years, was cruelly eaten up by his own revolution, and died, ironically, from cold and starvation in a French jail.
His successors were the despotic Dessalines and the philosophical Christophe — both lieutenants in Toussaint’s liberating armies. Both ended up going wildly off the tracks.
Christophe, for example, in an effort to break the deadlock of racial power between the mulatto minor aristocracy and the Negro labourers who had seized power over the French plantations, had himself crowned king — even though this meant going against all the egali- tarian principles that had brought the revolution about in the first place. (We should also not forget the irony that France attempted to suppress the Haitian revolution under the then fashionable banner of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity” — for white French people, at any rate.)
It is a further irony that Aristide should find that the only country that will host him is the one that staged a pale mimicking of Christophe’s self-coronation 200 years before.
Jean Bedel Bokassa crowned himself in Bangui some 30 years ago, with the full support of the French government, who bankrolled most of the proceedings — which included his golden throne, the ermine crown, the horse-drawn carriages and the rest of the fake imperial trappings.
One feels a sense of compassion for Jean-Bertrand Aristide — not least for his elaborate colonial name, which echoes one’s own. He was stranded in a post-colonial situation over which he had no real control. Whichever way he chose to jump, the world was laughing at him.
Haiti, after all, is a joke. It has been made so by those who made it.
My friend Jo, in California, who knows Aristide personally, offers no solace. He agrees that Haiti is ungovernable, and that Aristide fell down the sinkhole that is the fatal flaw of free Haiti.
Me, I continue to disagree.
I have to feel that there is something deeper in the never-ending, downward spiral that is the ongoing saga of Haiti.
I just don’t know where it is supposed to end.