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The Armorial of Haiti: Symbols of Nobility in the Reign of Henry Christophe. Edited by Clive Cheesman. London: The College of Arms, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9506980-2-1. 216 pages. £45 (U.S. price)
Clive Cheesman proposes to his readers that, once upon a time, the king had clothes, and that his clothes were resplendent. These were the heady days soon after independence which now, in retrospect, seem to have been a Golden Age for Haiti, since-for peoples of color at least-hope seemed justified.
The quest for survival, the search for "respect" internationally, had led Haiti into two empires and one kingdom, and a plethora of republics-nine of which established a life-term presidency praised notably by Simon Bolivar.
Opening here a parenthesis, only two other Latin American nations besides Haiti toyed with empires, Mexico followed by Brazil. Domestic stability was also the leitmotif of successive early Haitian governments. Under severe ostracism and immense fear that colonization and slavery would be re-established, the new country managed-tant bien que mal-to create shaky national institutions based upon the "inheritance" provided by colonialism. In reality, the only lesson the slaveowner can give his slave is how to be a better slave! Indeed, these state institutions were to be a re-creation of European forms transplanted to the tropics, not a re-adaptation of indigenous and traditional West and Central African formulae of statecraft, as was the case with neo-African maroon societies as exhibited in the palenques and quilombos.
The models were unabashedly European, as if to say that only modernderived-read European- institutions would suffice to keep European armies at bay in the reconquest of "Hayti." This became the main thrust of Haitian sociopolitical and philosophical thought throughout the Haitian nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century with the advent of Négritude.
The reality of these governmental forms, however, was immensely more complex and complicated. And though Haiti acquired its independence very early in the nineteenth century, it already had produced a full-fledged creole culture in every sense of that word....