Rosalvo Bobo
Here is a text published by Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, in 1903, about the Centennial celebration!
100 Years later, we do and we say the same thing! But what a text! Bravo!
Haitians, you’re talking about celebrating the centenary of your FREEDOM. It’s really not ingenious as a new phantasmagoria opportunity find.
I am tired, o my compatriots, of our Stupidities.
Let us do thanks to the world, which we know exist, of appalling caricatures.
A little shame, let’s see, in the absence of moral grandeur.
Centenary of our freedom? Not.
Centenary of Negro Slavery.
Centenary of our misleading, of our baseness and, amid endless vanities, of our systematic surrender. Centenary of our fraternal hatreds, of our triple moral, social and political impotence.
Centenary of our genocide in our cities and Savannas.
Centenary of our vices, of our political crimes.
Centenary of all that there can be more heinous within a group of Men.
Centenary of the ruin of a country by misery and Filth.
Centenary of the humiliation and perhaps definitive deprivation of the black race, by the Haitian fraction, this is Understood.
I beg you, let us not profane the names of those whom we call as pompously as foolishly our Forefathers. It’s enough to be treacherous, let’s not go to the Sham.
Let’s see, my friends, a little peace and conscience.
Since we are 100 years old, what are we?
It is an old pretension to believe that we are something in the eyes of the civilized world
Well, no!
You have to be in the middle of Europe to get an idea of our SMALLNESS.
Little distant place inhabited by Negroes.
The most curious know that we have a slight hue of French Civilization.
What a favor!
The immense rest is content to know us Savages.
Between us, when I hear these words “haitian people “, “haitian Nation”, there is a spill of irony in me.
No, my friends, “groups, isolated individuals governed by a stigmatized group, government name.”
And as, from the point of view of the common thing, we have, as a result of grave dislocations in the primitive grouping, interests, tastes, ideas, different ideals, we are to live each one as in a desert, not being able to rely on the forces Social and political, since society and politics no longer exist.
The mass can pass from one moment to the Next. That it matters to be fawn, it does not hold to itself. The individual has to defend himself against the Masses. Alive and well who can. But watch out!
Posters around this monstrous and fatal caricature, strip of the loin-cloth: republic, chambers, constitutions, laws.
Ah! The evil of France! It must be a pleasure for the Orang-outang to recall the human beast!
Will! Let’s bring it closer and TALK. As we must do in family, without scruple, without showing off. Those of us who have learned to read a little in the big books believe the big blow. Beautiful things amaze them. And with an enthusiasm most often mercantile, they put themselves, as they turn the pages, to tackle artificial quantities on our immutable smallness. Alas! Smallness of our wretched brains!