Edward Lovoquintanilla
The Silhouette
Following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, many outside observers - whose purview extends only as far and wide as their television screens - waited expectantly for social breakdown and looting. Instead, most communities had rapidly mobilized to deliver mutual aid before the arrival of foreigners. Throughout Haiti, foreign aid did not arrive for days, weeks in other places, yet Haitians reached for whatever was in grasp and dug themselves out of the rubble, often with their bare hands. With a barely functional government, the people of Haiti themselves tended to the injured, set up camps, fed one another, sang, prayed, and mourned together.
This self-mobilization has a long history that stretches back into the postrevolutionary period when Haitians transformed traditions of farming inherited from Africa into innovative ways of the management of the land, despite an almost indifferent leadership. Century upon century of foreign intervention and manipulation layers the history of Haiti, never quite able to extinguish the fires of self-determination beneath its sands.
Nation after nation, corporation after corporation have sought to suckle the milk from Haiti’s soil by the sweat of its people. In the presence of French warships, the Baron de Mackau coerced the President of Haiti, without further consultation, into buying the freedom of Haiti for 150 million francs; which is no freedom at all, but the bonds of economic dependence.
The bonds forged by economic dependence have become Haiti’s garment industry, owned by the white and lighter-skinned elite, some of whose production belongs to Wal-Mart and Gildan Active Wear. The workers are paid nearly a third less than the minimum wage, coerced into working more than the legally allowed work-week, rendering food unaffordable; eating, a practical question the worker faces every mealtime.
Not only is Haitian law broken in the treatment of workers, but it also violates the code of conduct of the corporations whose production is in Haiti’s garment industry. In fact, it also violates the ethical purchasing policy of the McMaster Students Union, who purchases clothing from Gildan Active Wear.
Can we conscionably stand idly by while our student government contributes to the current chapter of this centuries-long story of dependence, extortion and exploitation? Ethical purchasing is a question that is being raised by McMaster students, and we are waiting for the answer.
Edward Lovoquintanilla
The Silhouette
On the day of Nelson Mandela’s death, people from all walks of life mourned his loss. Amongst the loudest mourners were politicians who criminalized his actions, branded him a terrorist, and supported his imprisonment—labelling his anti-apartheid work an act of ‘anti-white hostility.’
Today he is mourned a hero. Conveniently forgotten are the campaigns against him. Mandela was on the United States’ terrorism watch list until 2008, Margaret Thatcher famously said that, “the ANC [African National Congress] is a typical terrorist organization ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.”
These were not isolated remarks. Returned and Services League of Australia’s Bruce Ruxton commented that the ANC was a more dangerous “terrorist” organization than the Irish Republican Army and the Palestinian Liberation Organization - the latter ironically transformed into a legitimate arm of government after the Oslo Accords.
These histories of vilification—where the powerless are demonized by the powers that dominate them—are almost cyclical (examine the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for example). Voltaire’s phrase “To know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” echoes through the passageway of time into contemporary events: Mandela’s imprisonment after organizing against a white supremacist regime; the criminalization of the ANC; Palestinians, both adults and children, incarcerated for refusing to cooperate (though sometimes arbitrarily) under the conditions of occupation; Israel’s refusal to recognize the democratically elected Hamas (while prizing themselves as the beacon of democracy in the Middle East, no less) and converting the Gaza Strip into an open air prison.
In 1997, years after Mandela’s release and the crippling of the apartheid state by popular boycott, divestment and sanctions, Mandela famously said in an address at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” And yet those who publicly mourn him sugarcoat the true zeal of the great man that was Nelson Mandela, and work to silence his call for action in solidarity with Palestine.
And yet, there is still hope. In the spirit of Nelson Mandela, actions across the world have taken place in the last year alone.
The Association for Asian American studies passed a resolution for a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) in April followed by the American Studies Association in December. The European Union boycotted several Israeli companies and sanctioned Israel for its illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Stephen Hawking endorsed the academic boycott beside the name of Noam Chomsky the York Federation of Students passed a BDS resolution. Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War’s and Palestinian Association of Hamilton’s, joined by McMaster Muslims for Peace and Justice, picketed at Canadian Tire to boycott SodaStream products, whose production is in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Each one of these actions received backlash from Israel and its supporters. Backlash eerily similar to the controversy surrounding Mandela during the age of apartheid South Africa.
The similarity of the portraits—and the absurdity of both—of South Africa and Palestine leaps out when Palestinians who throw rocks are called terrorists, but when Israeli leader Ariel Sharon levelled Palestinian cities and encouraged their further expulsion (all acts of ethnic cleansing as defined by the United Nations and International Criminal Court)—now he’s an example of a warrior!
The question we are faced with is: will we continue to praise Mandela yet sit comfortably in our hypocrisy in not heeding his call for action?
