Haiti to join the AU

I just came across an article published in the Guardian in October 2012 which reads, "Haiti to join the African Union: Why not...?". In it, Afua Hirsch discusses Haiti's historical and emotional ties to the African continent and the case for its membership in the Union.

I am more excited than surprised by Haiti's observer status in the AU (which I did not know of prior to the read) and case for membership. Pan-Africanist philosophy and just my understanding of the African Diaspora/migration story always espoused, at least for me, the notion that Africa/being African is indefinitely beyond Africa's land mass. The union between Haiti and the AU is deeply symbolic of this tale.

These were some particular highlights of the piece for me :

"More than any other Caribbean nation, Haiti occupies a special place in the affection of many Africans and members of the African diaspora. The country endured decades of still prescient punishment for daring to overthrow its slave masters, becoming the world's first independent black nation in 1804 – the slave rebellion's leader Toussaint L'Ouverture hailed from Benin. Haiti used its independence and membership of the United Nations in the post-war period to back decolonisation during the fraught period of African independence."

"As the African Union chairman, Jean Ping, said: 'We have attachment and links to that country. The first black republic … that carried high the flame of liberation and freedom for black people and has paid a heavy price for so doing.'"

"After the 2010 earthquake, the Democratic Republic of Congo – which struggles to finance its own "budget – pledged $2.5m in aid to the devastated country."

In a paper I wrote on African sovereignty and statehood, I wrote of Marcus Gavey's Pan Africanist philosophies and how his ideologies present a different understanding of statehood and sovereignty. The following is especially pertinent to this piece:

Other Africanist perspectives on Sovereignty in Practice

Perhaps it is in this context that one can begin to see alternative visions and modes of sovereignty, space, and territoriality in Africa. I take the proposal of Pan Africanist, Marcus Garvey, as a case in point to illustrate a re-imagination of the notion of sovereignty. Randolph B. Persaud’s essay, Re-envisioning Sovereignty; Marcus Garvey and the Making of a Transnational Identity, provides a secondary source analysis of Marcus Garvey’s trans-Africanist philosophies. Here, Marcus Garvey’s trans-Africanism is contextualized within the conversation on Westphalian sovereignty and it fundamentally asserts that the state model systematically disenfranchises people on the basis of race (Dunn, Shaw 123 - 124). 

“According to Gavey, sovereign states do not translate to sovereign people”(Dunn, Shaw 122) and thus, the nation is a construct which Garvey’s foundations, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNITA), the African Communities League (ACL)and his shipping company, Black Star Line, seek to subvert (Dunn, Shaw 12). To Garvey, the territorial space is irrelevant. Leila J. Farmer’s paper Sovereignty and the African Union published in the Journal of Pan African Studies in January 2012 draws a clear relationship between Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Pan Africanist movements to the establishment of the OAU and its remodel, the African Union (AU). From the evolution of the concept of sovereignty as non-interference used in the Charter of the OAU to sovereignty as responsibility upheld in the AU, it is clear that sovereignty, as it is envisioned in the Pan Africanist movement, holds strong practical implications for the vision of sovereign African States.

It will be interesting to follow the practical implications of this membership for both Haiti and the AU/African states.