MEMBERS & VISITORS
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM OF AFRICANS AT ITS FINEST
Another cautionary tale for modern Africa…
“I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a leader of the American force in Haiti, wrote in 1935, describing himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.” Read more at “Invade Haiti,Wall Street Urged.The U.S. Obliged” AMERICAN Secretary of State Robert Lansing also portrayed the occupation of Haiti as a civilizing mission to end the “anarchy, savagery and oppression” in Haiti, convinced that, as he once wrote, “the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization.”
For decades, Southern planters had worried about Haiti, the modern world’s first nation to emerge from a slave uprising, and Robert Y. Hayne, South Carolina State Attorney General, was a natural emissary of their fears: a staunch defender of slavery who had been born on a rice plantation and at one point enslaved 140 people.
He was the state’s attorney general during the failed slave insurrection led by Denmark Vesey, a free man from the West Indies, and like some of his contemporaries, Hayne believed that recognizing Haiti — or even debating slavery at all — would “put in jeopardy our dearest interests.”
Prof. Oku Singer, Mechanical/Solar Engineer
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