La gauche, et notamment sa piétaille enseignante, a toujours cru qu'elle avait le droit absolu de disposer de l'Ecole comme outil d'endoctrinement et de transformation sociale. En France, le régime républicain a beaucoup usé de l'histoire enseignée aux enfants pour imposer une vision du passé compatible avec ses propres ambitions.

Aux Etats-Unis, l'école publique a également été un vecteur puissant du progressisme et de l'Etat fédéral. A titre d'exemple, ce sont les enseignants qui ont largement contribué à faire du médiocre Martin Luther King l'icône de vertus civiques qu'il n'a jamais été dans la vie.

Heureusement, l'Amérique est aussi un pays où la démocratie possède un large volet local et cette fois, les électeurs du Texas ont donné un coup d'arrêt à la machine à bourrer le mou aux enfants.

Cet article du très conformiste Guy Adams pour The Independent rend compte des principaux changements apportés aux programmes d'histoire au Texas et leur importance pour les livres de cours du reste du pays.

Texas to vote on curriculum that changes history

The slave trade was in fact the "Atlantic triangular trade". Capitalism, with all its negative connotations, should in future be referred to as the "free enterprise system". And don't even think about buying into the theory of evolution: children must instead be taught that God created Earth using a euphemistically-titled technique known as "intelligent design".

It may sound like the backdrop to a comedy sketch, but these are instead the guiding principles by which teachers in America's second-largest state will be forced to go about the business of education, according to critics of proposed changes to the school curriculum.

After months of increasingly fractious debate, the 15-member school board of Texas is expected today to approve more than 100 pages of new guidelines governing the teaching of social studies. They changes cover everything from Cold War history to the "correct" interpretation of the US Constitution. The proposed rules stipulate, among other things, that Republican superstar Ronald Reagan should be added to a list of "great Americans". Country music can be described as an important cultural movement, but hip-hop can't. And speeches by Jefferson Davis, the slave-owning president of the Confederacy, should be taught alongside those of Abraham Lincoln.

Et pourquoi pas ? Jefferson Davis représente fort bien le courant de l'histoire américaine qui affirme les droits des Etats sur ceux du gouvernement fédéral. Le fait de l'écarter au simple titre qu'il possédait des esclaves est un anachronisme ridicule.

Elsewhere, the new curriculum changes references to American "imperialism" to "expansionism", and forces teachers covering post-war politics to tell students that Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious anti-Communist show trials during the 1950s may have been justified.

L'expansionisme est le terme utilisé par les historiens et impérialisme par les polémistes de gauche et de droite. Quant à Joe McCarthy, le sénateur avait mis le doigt dans la plaie et la haïne que lui voue la gauche est la preuve de la valeur de son action.

Most controversial of all is a rewriting of a passage in the syllabus dealing with economics. Previously, it stipulated that eighth-grade students must learn how to, "explain reasons for the development of the plantation system, the slave trade, and the spread of slavery". In the re-worded version, the words "slave trade" were replaced with: "Atlantic triangular trade".

Ce changement peut défriser les bonnes consciences de gauche mais il est ridicule d'isoler le commerce des esclaves de leur contexte comemrcial, le commerce triangulaire.

The elected school board includes dentists, housewives, and other laymen who have little teaching experience. Like a growing number of legislators in an increasingly-polarised country they are, however, politically divided: every one of the 10 Republicans on the committee support the proposed revisions; all five of the Democrats oppose them. At stake is education in not just the Lone Star State, but across the entire country. Texas has almost five million students, and is the largest market for new textbooks in the US. It is also one of the few states that gives its school board power to rewrite, rather than just rubber stamp, the curriculum.

In recent years, the board's annual meetings – they review a different subject each year – have turned into a noisy media circus, as lobbyists from both left and right seek to exert influence on the increasingly conservative committee. A record 206 people signed up to testify during this week's hearing.

Among the critics of the proposed changes was Rod Paige, the first African-American education secretary, under George Bush. "In Texas, we've allowed the pendulum to swing backwards and forward," he said. "I'm asking that the swing [should] be narrower and let history speak for itself."

Social conservatives, however, accuse the left of cherry-picking tiny passages from a wide-ranging document to criticise the new syllabus in its entirety.

"Most of the complaints are coming from a liberal fringe," said Jonathan Saenz, a spokesman for the Liberty Institute. "They're making a huge issue out of some very small changes. The people of Texas are simply trying to stop atheists and the extreme civil liberties lobby from taking over their history."

Triangular trade

Taking place from West Africa to America, America to Europe, and Europe back to West Africa, the lucrative international transactions from the 17th to 19th centuries were indeed triangular – and also reliant on slavery. First, slaves were shipped to North America, where they were put to work growing cash crops – such as tobacco – which were exported to Europe. The Europeans who made use of those crops went on to use their goods – such as rum, distilled from Caribbean sugar – to buy slaves in Africa. There have been other examples of triangular trade, but few so ruthlessly efficient

Le journaliste affiche ici son ignorance. Le point de départ du commerce triangulaire se trouve en Europe. Les commerçants chargent leurs navires de marchandises que les Africains souhaitent échanger contre leur principale exportation : des êtres vivants. En Afrique, les Européens chagent les hommes que des Africains leur vendent et les transportent en Amérique, au Brésil, dans les Caraïbes et vers les futurs Etats-Unis. A destination, les esclaves sont vendus et les navires ramènent en Europe des marchandises tropicales, notamment du tabac du sucre et du café.

Les points importants sont les suivants :

Les Européens exportaient des marchandises de prix en Afrique. Remplir les cales d'un négrier représentait un capital important.

A l'inverse des musulmans qui pratiquaient en Afrique des véritables chasses à l'homme, les Européens n'ont pas mis d'Africains en esclavage. Le changement d'état, de libre à servile, était le fait des élites africaines, les mêmes qui sont aujourd'hui au pouvoir en Afrique.

Pour en savoir plus :

Traite des Noirs et navires négriers au XVIIIe siècle


Patrick Villiers


Editions des 4 Seigneurs, 1982, 162 p., ISBN 2-85231-079-1 (rel.)

Ils sont incroyables ces historiens anglais

L'Angleterre est une île et cela n'est pas prêt de s'arranger.

La récente éruption du volcan islandais au nom imprononçable a rappelé à des millions d'insulaires des îles britanniques que parfois la nature et la géographie imposent leur volonté.

Dans un blog paru ce matin dans The Telegraph, le journaliste Harry Mount recense l'ouvrage Sugar – A Bittersweet History, d'Elizabeth Abbott (Le sucre : une histoire douce-amère, Fides 2008).

Journaliste et écrivain, Elizabeth Abbott écrit de l'histoire marketing. Prenons ces autres titres les plus récents : Histoire universelle de la chasteté et du célibat (2003) et Une histoire des maîtresses (2004).

I’ve just been reading a review of an intriguing book, Sugar – A Bittersweet History, by Elizabeth Abbott. Among its findings are how the Caribbean slave plantations boomed in the late 18th century to feed the rising appetite of the British working classes for sugary tea.

Annual per capita sugar consumption in Britain in 1700-09 was four pounds per head; in 1720-29, it was eight pounds; in 1780-89, 12 pounds; and, by 1800-09, 18 pounds. This soaring demand continued despite the admirable middle-class abolitionist campaign to abstain from sugar in the 1790s, in order to cut the slavers’ income.

A James Gillray cartoon of 1792 showed George III and Queen Charlotte trying to convince their children of the dubious charms of sugarless tea. “O, my dear creatures, do but taste it!” says the Queen, “You can’t think how nice it is without sugar.” The children grimace, and leave their cups in their saucers.

I wonder if that’s when the inverse connection between wealth and sugar-consumption began. Certainly, by 1937, when Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, the average unemployed miner’s family was eating eight pounds of sugar a week, as opposed to per annum.

Orwell explained the popularity of bad food well:

The basis of the unemployed miners’ diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes – an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the Public Assistance Committee level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

The inverse relationship between wealth and sugar consumption continues today. The patronising term, “Builder’s Tea”, is defined by Wikipedia as “(usually strong) English Breakfast tea, usually served with milk and, often, one or more sugars”. “Barrister’s Tea”, if there were such an expression, would be sugarless.

Une chose frappe le lecteur : l'anglocentrisme de l'auteur qui centre son travail non sur le sucre et son marché mais sur la documentation accessible en anglais sur la question. C'est sans doute pourquoi elle fait de la consommation anglaise le moteur du commerce du sucre en minorant le rôle des consommateurs continentaux.

A quelques exceptions près, les historiens anglophones sont murés dans une insularité qui ne doit rien à un volcan islandais.

La clef de leur prison est dans leur tête et ils ne sont pas disposés à ouvrir la porte.

La vérité historique s'impose aux Noirs

Dans cet article du New York Times de ce matin, Henry Louis Gates, professeur à l'université de Harvard écrit noir sur blanc un fait historique que les Afro-Américains ne veulent pas encore admettre : la mise en esclavage de leurs ancêtres n'a rien à voir avec les Blancs. Ce sont leurs frères de race qui les ont placés en servitude pour les vendre aux commerçants européens.

Avec quelques exceptions, à l'inverse des marchands musulmans, les Européens n'ont pas capturé et mis en esclavage des populations africaines.

C'est bien que le New York Times le publie.

Cela contribue à raffermir ma croyance dans les miracles.

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.

In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.

Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.

Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.

For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.

Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.

African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.

Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.

So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”

About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

Une base de données à découvrir sur la traite Atlantique.

Haïti, ce que l'on ne dit pas

Papa Doc Duvalier au temps de sa splendeur.

Dans cet intéressant article, le journaliste John Henly tente dans les colonnes du Guardian d'expliquer les raisons de la faillite de la première république noire du monde, l'ancienne Saint-Domingue. Mais on peut lire ert relire l'article et à aucun moment l'auteur ne parle d'un élément qui saute aux yeux de tous les visiteurs.

Nos visiteurs seront-ils capables de le nommer ?

Haiti: a long descent to hell

Haiti, born of slavery and revolution, has struggled with centuries of crippling debt, exploitation, corruption and violence

'Papa Doc' Duvalier in 1962 (centre, with leg extended), who ruled Haiti with the aid of the murderous Tonton Macoutes militia. Photograph: Robert Lerner/Getty Images

Geography and bad luck are only partly to blame for Haiti's tragedy. There are, plainly, more propitious places for a country and its capital city to find themselves than straddling the major fault line between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. It's more than unfortunate to be positioned plumb on the region's principal hurricane track, meaning you would be hit, in the 2008 season alone, by a quartet of storms as deadly and destructive as Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike (between them, they killed 800 people, and devastated more than 70% of Haiti's agricultural land). Wretched, also, to have fallen victim to calamitous flooding in 2002, 2003 (twice), 2006 and 2007.

But what has really left Haiti in such a state today, what makes the country a constant and heart-rending site of recurring catastrophe, is its history. In Haiti, the last five centuries have combined to produce a people so poor, an infrastructure so nonexistent and a state so hopelessly ineffectual that whatever natural disaster chooses to strike next, its impact on the population will be magnified many, many times over. Every single factor that international experts look for when trying to measure a nation's vulnerability to natural disasters is, in Haiti, at the very top of the scale. Countries, when it comes to dealing with disaster, do not get worse.

"Haiti has had slavery, revolution, debt, deforestation, corruption, exploitation and violence," says Alex von Tunzelmann, a historian and writer currently working on a book about the country and its near neighbours, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. "Now it has poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, no infrastructure, environmental disaster and large areas without the rule of law. And that was before the earthquake. It sounds a terrible cliche, but it really is a perfect storm. This is a catastrophe beyond our worst imagination."

It needn't, though, have been like this. In the 18th century, under French rule, Haiti – then called Saint-Domingue – was the Pearl of the Antilles, one of the richest islands in France's empire (though 800,000-odd African slaves who produced that wealth saw precious little of it). In the 1780s, Haiti exported 60% of all the coffee and 40% of all the sugar consumed in Europe: more than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined. It subsequently became the first independent nation in Latin America, and remains the world's oldest black republic and the second-oldest republic in the western hemisphere after the United States. So what went wrong?

Haiti, or rather the large island in the western Atlantic of which the present-day Republic of Haiti occupies the western part, was discovered by Christopher Columbus in December 1492. The native Taino people knew it as Ayiti, but Columbus claimed it for the Spanish crown and named it La Isla Española. As Spanish interest in the island faltered with the discovery of gold and silver elsewhere in Latin America, the early occupiers moved east, leaving the western part of Hispaniola free for English, Dutch and particularly French buccaneers. The French West India Company gradually assumed control of the colony, and by 1665 France had formally claimed it as Saint-Domingue. A treaty with Spain 30 years later saw Madrid cede the western third of the island to Paris.

Economically, French occupation was a runaway success. But Haiti's riches could only be exploited by importing up to 40,000 slaves a year. For nearly a decade in the late 18th century, Haiti accounted for more than one-third of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Conditions for these men and women were atrocious; the average life expectancy for a slave on Haiti was 21 years. Abuse was dreadful, and routine: "Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars?" wrote one former slave some time later. "Have they not forced them to eat excrement? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss?"

Not surprisingly, the French Revolution in 1789 raised the tricky question of how exactly the Declaration of the Rights of Man might be said to apply both to Haiti's then sizeable population of free gens de couleur (generally the offspring of a white plantation owner and a black concubine) – and ultimately to the slaves themselves. The rebellion of Saint-Domingue's slaves began on the northern plains in August 1791, but the uprising, ensuing bloody civil war and finally bitter and spectacularly brutal battle against Napoleon Bonaparte's forces was not over for another 12 years. As France became increasingly distracted by war with Britain, the French commander, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, was finally defeated in November 1803 (though not before he had hanged, drowned or burned and buried alive thousands of rebels). Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804.

As Stephen Keppel of the Economist Intelligence Unit puts it, Haiti's revolution may have brought it independence but it also "ended up destroying the country's infrastructure and most of its plantations. It wasn't the best of starts for a fledgling republic." Moreover, in exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay enormous reparations: some 150m francs, in gold. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could afford.

"The long and the short of it is that Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 until 1947," says Von Tunzelmann. "To come up with the money, it took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at exorbitant rates of interest. By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. It completely wrecked their economy. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a spiral of debt. Plus, a succession of leaders had more or less given up on trying to resolve Haiti's problems, and started looting it instead."

The closing decades, though, of the 19th century did at least mark a period of relative stability. Haitian culture flourished, an intelligentsia emerged, and the sugar and rum industries started to grow once more. But then in 1911 came another revolution, followed almost immediately by nearly 20 years of occu pation by a US terrified that Haiti was about to default on its massive debts. The Great Depression devastated the country's exports. There were revolts and coups and dictatorships, and then, in 1957, came François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Papa Doc's regime is widely seen as one of the most corrupt and repressive in modern history. He exploited Haiti's traditional belief in voodoo to establish a personal militia, the feared and hated Tonton Macoutes, said to be zombies that he had raised from the dead.

During the 28 years in power of Papa Doc and his playboy son and heir, Jean-Claude Duvalier, or Baby Doc, the Tonton Macoutes and their henchmen killed between 30,00 and 60,000 Haitians, and raped, beat and tortured countless more. Until Baby Doc's eventual flight into exile in 1986, Duvalier père and fils also made themselves very rich indeed. Aid agencies and international creditors donated and lent millions for projects that were often abandoned before completion, or never even started. Generous multi national corporations earned lucrative contracts. According to Von Tunzelmann, the Duvaliers were at times embezzling up to 80% of Haiti's international aid, while the debts they signed up to ­account for 45% of what the country owes today. And when Baby Doc ­finally fled, estimates of what he took with him run as high as $900m.

It is hardly surprising then that Haiti isn't Switzerland. The Duvaliers' departure, as Keppel puts it, "left a void, and a broken and corrupt government. Democracy got off to a really bad start there. The Duvaliers may have bankrupted the government, they may been brutal, but they could keep control of the place. Since they went, Haiti has seen more coups, ousters and social unrest." The country is short on investment, and desperately short on most of the infrastructure and apparatus of a functioning modern state. For Keppel, while Haiti's problems undoubtedly began "a long way back, there have been periods when it could have set itself on a different track". It's the recent transition from dictatorship to democracy that is at the root of today's problems, he believes. "It's led to a situation where the population is continuing to grow, where poverty drives many of them to Port-au-Prince, and where Port-au-Prince, even at the best of times, doesn't have the infrastructure to cope with them. And then comes an earthquake of an unprecedented magnitude . . ."

Von Tunzelmann isn't so sure. Haiti's descent began earlier than that, she believes. One reason why Haiti suffers more than its neighbours from natural disasters like hurricanes and flooding is its massive deforestation, under way in the country since the time of the French occupation, she says. "The French didn't manage the land at all well," she says. "The process of soil erosion really began then. And then in the chaos after the revolution, the land was simply parcelled out into little plots, occupied mainly by individual families. And since the 1950s, people have been cutting it down and cooking on charcoal. As the population has soared, the forests have come down. Haiti is now about 98% deforested. It's extraordinary. You can see it from space. The problem is, it was those ­forests, those tree roots, that held the soil together. So with every new storm, more topsoil and clay disappears." Arable land is reduced, simply, to rubble. Even before the devastating storms of 2008, Haiti's population was starving. There were shocking reports of desperate people mixing vegetable oil with mud to make something that at least looked approximately like a biscuit.

"I wouldn't lay it all at the door of history," says Keppel. "But it's true to say that while this earthquake was unprecedented and unpredictable and would have caused huge problems anywhere, Haiti is impacted by natural disasters much more than some of its neighbours. The infrastructure is so poor; the government can't control all its territory. There's been a whole combination of factors, many of which have repeated themselves over and over, that have left Haiti in the state it's in today."

For Von Tunzelmann, Haiti today is "down there with Somalia, as just about the worst society on earth. Even in Afghanistan, there's a middle class. People aren't living in the sewers." As far back as the 1950s, she says, Haiti was considered unsustainably overcrowded with a population of 3 million; that figure now stands at 9 million. Some 80% of that population live below the poverty line. The country is in an advanced state of industrial collapse, with a GDP per capita in 2009 of just $2 a day. Some 66% of Haitians work in agriculture, but this is mainly small-scale subsistence farming and accounts for less than a third of GDP. The unemployment rate is 75%. Foreign aid accounts for 30%-40% of the government's budget. There are 80 deaths for every 1,000 live births, and the survival rate of newborns is the lowest in the western hemisphere. For many adults, the most promising sources of income are likely to be drug dealing, weapons trading, gang membership, kidnapping and extortion.

Compare Haiti with its neighbours, equally prone to natural disasters but far better equipped to cope because they are far better functioning societies, and the only conclusion possible, says Von Tunzelmann, is that it is Haiti's turbulent history that has brought it to this point. For the better part of 200 years, she argues, rich countries and their banks have been sucking the wealth out of the country, and its own despotic and corrupt leaders have been doing their best to facilitate the process, lining their own pockets handsomely on the way.

Approach Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic and the lush green of the forest begins again: this is a wealthier place. An earthquake here has less impact because constructions are stronger, building regulations are enforced, the government is more stable. In nearby Cuba, hardly a country rolling in money, emergency management is infinitely more effective simply because of a carefully coordinated, block-by-block organisation. Haiti has two fire stations in the entire country – and people on $2 a day cannot afford quake-proof housing.

Barack Obama est dans la place

Chose rare dans la presse américaine, ce caricaturiste fait allusion au fait que des points importants de la biographie du nouveau président demeurent obscurs.

Depuis hier, Barack Hussein Obama est à la Maison blanche. Il dispose désormais de l'intégralité des pouvoirs attribués à l'exécutif et un Congrès pratiquement entièrement acquis à sa cause. Sans compter les médias qui à quelques exceptions près (Fox News, par exemple), ont remarquablement manqué d'esprit critique à son égard. Les journalistes ont largement contribué à créer cette hystérie de masse qui caractérise la foule que l'on a vue dans les rues de Washington et ailleurs dans le monde.

Comme le fait remarquer l'éditorialiste du Daily Telegraph Gerald Warner : « tout cela se terminera dans les larmes ». Et il cite d'autres entrées en fonctions accompagnées d'un comparable enthousiasme, notamment celle de Tony Blair en 1997.

La lune de miel avec les journalistes se poursuit. Pour combien de temps ?

Il conclut par ces mots que je reprendre à mon compte :

La plus puissante nation sur la terre est confrontée à la pire crise économique sous la direction de son politicien le plus à gauche lequel n'a pratiquement aucune expérience de la politique nationale. Ce n'est pas une chance, c'est une catastrophe.

Ce sont des paroles franches à défaut d'être aimables. Elles ont au moins le mérite que, contrairement à tout ce qui a été publié aujourd'hui au sujet d'Obama, elles ne vont pas m'obliger à manger mon chapeau dans quelques années.

Pour le moment la presse demeure obamaniaque.

Walter E. Williams, un éditorialiste noir américain, n'est pas dupe des trucs utilisés par Obama pour susciter l'émotion à bon compte, par exemple en utilisant la Bible d'Abraham Lincoln. Interrogé à ce sujet, le nouveau président a affirmé qu'il s'agissait pour lui d'évoquer la proclamation du 1er janvier 1863 qui proclamait la libération des esclaves. BHO oublié tout simplement de préciser que n'ont été libérés par cette proclamation que les esclaves des États du Sud en sécession. Autrement dit, les esclavagistes du Nord n'étaient pas concernés tout comme ceux des paroisses de Louisiane fidèles à l'Union.

Comme le faisait alors remarquer The London spectator : « le principe de la proclamation est qu'un homme ne peut légalement posséder un autre être humain à moins d'être loyal aux Etats-Unis d'Amérique ».

Le plus inquiétant dans le choix de Lincoln comme figure tutélaire, est d'avoir choisi le président qui a plus violé la constitution dans l'histoire américaine. Mais BHO ne le sait probablement pas.

Un grand mot creux.

Les décisions que prendra BHO dans les semaines qui viennent seront révélatrices sur le rapport des forces derrière l'homme. Va-t-il signer le Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), un ensemble de mesures libéralisant l'avortement et restreignant la capacité des professionnels de santé à l'objection de conscience ? Au risque de commencer une guerre de tranchées avec les catholiques et les évangélistes ? Va-t-il poursuivre le soutien inconditionnel des Etats-Unis à Israël ? Au risque de s'aliéner une bonne partie du monde en développement et de la gauche européenne ?

Mon pronostic personnel : il signera le FOCA et il maintiendra l'aide inconditionnelle à Israël.

Les paris sont ouverts.

Un homme confronté à une situation mondiale périlleuse.

Retrouvez les caricatures qui illustrent ce post ici.

Traite des Noirs

Dans une boîte poussiéreuse des archives nationale à Buenos Aires, j'ai trouvé égaré entre deux dossiers, ce formulaire, rempli le 2 mars 1803 par un fonctionnaire du port de Montevideo, enregistrant l'arrivée d'un voilier chargé de 330 esclaves. Un formulaire banal, une tragédie humaine. Que de destins en un morceau de papier.

Le New York Times s'étonne

Une vision de l'événement par Emiliano Ponzi.

Dans les colonnes du New York Times de ce matin, Eric Foner (professeur d'histoire à l'université de Columbia), s'étonne du manque de résonance publique du 200e anniversaire de l'interdiction de l'importation d'esclaves noirs aux Etats-Unis.

Pourtant, cette décision a largement contribué à réduire la part de la population noire dans le total de la population de la jeune république. A titre de contre-exemple, les Noirs sont devenus majoritaires à Cuba vers 1840 grâce à l'importation massive d'esclaves pour nourrir les plantations de sucre, culture industrielle mise à la mode par les Français venus de Saint-Domingue.

Il est probable que le manque de publicité s'explique par le fait que cette commémoration rappellerait trop que ce sont les Européens qui sont à l'origine de la fin de la traite puis de la fin de l'esclavage, alors que les autres civilisations esclavagistes comme l'islam ne l'ont toujours pas fait deux siècles après.

Forgotten Step Toward Freedom

WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that country’s banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences, museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, “Amazing Grace,” about William Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in abolition.

What explains this divergence? Throughout the 1780s, the horrors of the Middle Passage were widely publicized on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1792 the British Parliament stood on the verge of banning the trade. But when war broke out with revolutionary France, the idea was shelved. Final prohibition came in 1807 and it proved a major step toward the abolition of slavery in the empire.

The British campaign against the African slave trade not only launched the modern concern for human rights as an international principle, but today offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character. It remains a historic chapter of which Britons of all origins can be proud.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade.

The American Revolution threw the slave trade and slavery itself into crisis. In the run-up to war, Congress banned the importation of slaves as part of a broader nonimportation policy. During the War of Independence, tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines. Many accompanied the British out of the country when peace arrived.

Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the war and lost the largest number of slaves.

The slave trade was a major source of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. South Carolina’s delegates were determined to protect slavery, and they had a powerful impact on the final document. They originated the three-fifths clause (giving the South extra representation in Congress by counting part of its slave population) and threatened disunion if the slave trade were banned, as other states demanded.

The result was a compromise barring Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until 1808. Some Anti-Federalists, as opponents of ratification were called, cited the slave trade clause as a reason why the Constitution should be rejected, claiming it brought shame upon the new nation.

The outbreak of the slave revolution in Haiti in the early 1790s sent shock waves of fear throughout the American South and led to new state laws barring the importation of slaves. But in 1803, as cotton cultivation spread, South Carolina reopened the trade. The Legislature of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory also allowed the importation of slaves. From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.

By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty.

It is easy to understand, however, why the trade’s abolition appears so anticlimactic. Banning American participation in the slave trade did not end the shipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. Some three million more slaves were brought to Brazil and Spanish America before the trade finally ended. With Southerners dominating the federal government for most of the period before the Civil War, enforcement was lax and the smuggling of slaves into the United States continued.

Those who hoped that ending American participation in the slave trade would weaken or destroy slavery were acutely disappointed. In the United States, unlike the West Indies, the slave population grew by natural increase. This was not because American owners were especially humane, but because most of the South lies outside the tropical environment where diseases like yellow fever and malaria exacted a huge toll on whites and blacks alike.

As slavery expanded into the Deep South, a flourishing internal slave trade replaced importation from Africa. Between 1808 and 1860, the economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the sale of slaves to the cotton fields of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. But demand far outstripped supply, and the price of slaves rose inexorably, placing ownership outside the reach of poorer Southerners.

Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the “democratization” of slavery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves, along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced by South Carolina’s political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.

More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have reinforced Southerners’ demands to annex to the United States areas suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America. Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many Southerners dreamed.

Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of slavery.

Un trésor gaulois

Un trésor gaulois exceptionnel a été découvert par l'INRAP. Un exemple remarquable du savoir faire exceptionnel d'une équipe de professionnels de haut niveau.

L'Institut national d'archéologie préventive n'est guère connu du grand public et c'est bien dommage. Il intervient en urgence quand un site archéologique est découvert au cours de travaux. Il ne dispose que d'un délai très bref pour agir avant de rendre le site à sa destination première.

En Bretagne, une équipe de l'Inrap a récemment mis au jour les vestiges d'une exploitation agricole de l'âge du Fer à Laniscat (Côtes-d'Armor) à l'occasion de la fouille d'un tracé routier. Dans ce contexte a été découvert un des plus importants dépôts monétaires celtiques jamais mis au jour en Armorique.

L’or du peuple du bout du monde :
découverte d’un trésor gaulois


Les archéologues ont dégagé à Laniscat un grand établissement agricole dont l'implantation remonte au IIIe siècle avant notre ère et perdure jusqu'à la conquête romaine.
Vers le milieu du IIIe siècle avant notre ère, un notable et sa parenté s'installent sur le site de Rosquelfen. Comme c'est l'usage à l'époque, il délimite l'emprise de sa ferme par un enclos composé d'un fossé doublé d'un talus, geste ostentatoire plutôt que volonté défensive. L'ouvrage de plan quadrangulaire couvre 7500 mètres carrés. L'enclos est ponctué de six entrées fermées par un porche et la cour intérieure présente une petite zone palissadée pour parquer des animaux de trait ou d'élevage. Installées le long des talus, les habitations construites sur poteaux sont peu spacieuses mais bénéficient cependant d'un foyer central, dont les fumées s'échappent à travers la couverture de chaume. Une partie de l'enclos est réservé au traitement et au stockage des céréales. Elles sont conservées dans de petits greniers surélevés de façon à aérer le grain et à le protéger des rongeurs.
À la conquête romaine, la ferme est profondément modifiée mais l'enclos gaulois a pérennisé l'orientation du parcellaire. L'enclos gallo-romain ne couvre que 1850 mètres carrés de l'enclos gaulois mais possède un imposant fossé taluté défensif. En pleine romanisation de l'Armorique, le site semble abandonné au cours du Ier siècle de notre ère.

Monnaie osisme : statère gaulois en électrum du trésor de Laniscat (revers).

Le trésor de Laniscat

Probablement juste avant la conquête romaine, le trésor est enfoui au sein de l'enclos gaulois. Protégées par un talus durant des siècles, ses 545 monnaies d'électrum (alliage d'or et d'argent) ont été éparpillées sur 200 m² par les récentes mises en culture mais sont toutefois dans un excellent état de conservation.
Le trésor de Laniscat se compose de 58 statères et de 487 quarts de statères. Toutes ces monnaies ont été frappées par le pouvoir osisme. Il s'agit du plus important dépôt monétaire jamais découvert en Armorique celtique : 254 monnaies avaient été mis au jour à Kersaint-Plabennec en 1903 (Finistère), 254 à Guingamp en 1934 (Côtes-d'Armor), 184 à Perros-Guirrec en 1933 (Côtes-d'Armor), 53 à Poullaouen en 1853 (Finistère)... Il compte des monnaies rares et des variantes inédites : on relève ainsi la présence de statères du type de Carantec jusqu'ici connus à six exemplaires. Ces monnaies portent à l'avers une tête humaine à gauche, chevelure disposée en grosses mèches. Un double cordon perlé entoure la chevelure et se termine à chaque extrémité par une petite tête coupée. Devant la face, un sanglier. Au revers, un homme monte un cheval non androcéphale à gauche. Il brandit de la main droite une lance et tient, de l'autre main, un bouclier. Devant le cheval, un motif floral. Sous le cheval, un sanglier enseigne.
La composition du métal des monnaies, un alliage ternaire or argent avec une forte proportion de cuivre, confirme la datation tardive du dépôt, durant les années 75-50 avant notre ère.
Ce trésor a d'autant plus d'importance qu'il a été découvert dans son environnement archéologique. Il représente une fortune considérable pour l'époque et renseigne sur le statut du site et de ses occupants. Il permet de reconsidérer le rôle et l'importance des Osismes dans la péninsule bretonne.

Quelques statères gaulois en électrum du trésor de Laniscat.

Les Osismes

Pythéas de Marseille, un navigateur grec qui partit de Marseille vers 300 avant notre ère pour rejoindre l'île de Bretagne (la Grande Bretagne actuelle), a mentionné la présence des Ostimioi, un peuple localisé à l'extrémité d'une péninsule qui s'avance loin dans l'Océan. Selon Léon Fleuriot, ce terme signifierait « les plus éloignés », en bref « les finistériens », nom tout à fait adéquat pour ces hommes de l'extrémité du continent. Quelques siècles plus tard, on le retrouve sous le nom d'Osismes dans les textes latins.
Jules César mentionne ce peuple, allié des Vénètes lors de la guerre des Gaules. On a longtemps pensé que les Osismes, localisés à l'extrémité de la péninsule bretonne, vivaient sous la dépendance de leurs puissants voisins du Morbihan. Or, les données récentes de l'archéologie soulignent au contraire la prédominance de la Cité des Osismes, qui maîtrisait le trafic maritime entre l'Atlantique et la Manche ainsi que des gisements de métaux précieux. Elle contrôlait un vaste territoire, comprenant le Finistère, ainsi que l'ouest du Morbihan et des Côtes-d'Armor.
La découverte du trésor osisme de Laniscat permet de préciser les frontières orientales de cette cité, structurée autour de deux agglomérations fortifiées majeures, les oppida de Huelgoat et de Paule, et d'une série d'agglomérations secondaires, comme Quimper ou Douarnenez.

le film du trésor
Le trésor de Laniscat
Interviews d'Eddy Roy (archéologue responsable d'opération, Inrap), Michel Baillieu (adjoint scientifique et technique, Inrap), Sylvie Nieto (numismate, CNRS), Yves Menez (spécialiste de l'âge du Fer, Inrap), Stéphane Deschamps (Conservateur régional de l'archéologie, DRAC). Film réalisé par Mathilde Deschamps et praduit par l'Inrap et Tournez s'il vous plaît.

Un site de mise à disposition de courtes vidéos qui est à explorer d'urgence.

Pour en savoir plus, nous vous invitons à visiter le site de l'INRAP qui est tout à fait remarquable, non seulement pour les étudiants mais aussi pour tous les amoureux d'histoire et d'archéologie. La page consacrée aux reportages vidéo est très bien faite et permet de s'y abonner. De cette manière, les internautes malins peuvent recevoir régulièrement sur leur ordinateur des petits films passionnants sur les derniers chantiers de l'INRAP.

Voici un exemple des films à la disposition des internautes sur le site de l'INRAP.





L'Utile, 1761.
Esclaves oubliés

Interviews du commandant Max Guérout et de Thomas Romon (Inrap).

Partie de Bayonne le 17 novembre 1760, l'Utile, flûte de la Compagnie française des Indes orientales, fait naufrage le 31 juillet 1761 sur l'île de Tromelin. 203 ans plus tard, le commandant Max Guérout et le Groupe de recherche en archéologie navale (GRAN), en collaboration avec l'Inrap, lancent, sous le patronage de l'Unesco, le projet « Esclaves oubliés ». Son objectif : fouiller l'épave de l'Utile, retrouver les traces du séjour des naufragés et des conditions de leur survie sur l'île. La première mission s'est déroulée du 10 octobre au 9 novembre 2006.

Avec l'INRAP, nous avons enfin l'impression que l'argent public sert vraiment à quelque chose !

(Le texte est de l'INRAP et les photos sont d'Hervé Paitier de l'INRAP. )

La vérité sur l'esclavage en Islam

Dans le Nouvel Observateur, Marie Lemonnier publie un article fort bien fait sur le dernier livre de Malek Chebel consacré à l'esclavage en l'Islam (Fayard). Un hebdomadaire et un livre à acheter d'urgence.

La Mauritanie a voté le 8 août 2007 une nouvelle loi antiesclavagiste plus répressive. En mai dernier, à Marrakech, s'est également tenu le premier colloque international sur l'esclavage dans les pays arabo-musulmans, sous l'égide de l'Unesco. Et un peu partout dans le monde arabe, dans le Golfe, en Iran, en Afrique, des écrivains s'engagent, des associations, composées d'anciens esclaves ou de leurs descendants, apparaissent et militent, malgré l'hostilité des Etats. Un véritable mouvement se dessine, dont l'Occident ne mesure pas encore l'ampleur, mais qu'il faut soutenir, sans quoi le pire est toujours à venir. Ces enfants de Bamako qui courent vers les étrangers pour se livrer eux-mêmes en servitude ne nous le disent-ils pas ?
La traite atlantique avec son système triangulaire, concentrée entre le XVIe et le XIXe siècle, nous est désormais bien connue. Malgré l'existence de travaux universitaires de qualité, on connaît encore malheureusement trop peu la traite orientale ou musulmane, qui s'étend, elle, sur près de quinze siècles et qui a asservi des millions de Noirs (15 millions ? peut-être plus ?), mais aussi des Européens captifs de guerre, des Slaves, à l'instar des janissaires dans l'armée ottomane, ou des Circassiennes, ces femmes originaires du Caucase qui remplirent les harems du calife et des notables de Bagdad.
Parce que je suis un intellectuel musulman, un anthropologue qui défend depuis toujours le droit des personnes et qui combat les tabous de l'islam, je me sens missionné pour dénoncer ce drame de l'esclavage qui a contaminé tous les pays où l'islam a prospéré. A Brunei, au Yémen, dans les pays du Sahel, chez les Touaregs, en Libye, dans le Sud tunisien, en Egypte, en Arabie, en Mésopotamie, à Oman et Zanzibar, au Soudan ou à Djibouti, il n'est en effet pas un lieu gagné par l'islam où ne se soit jamais pratiqué le commerce d'esclaves.

Le phénomène demeure encore vivace. Les marchés de chair humaine à ciel ouvert n'existent certes plus, mais que sont d'autre que des «esclaves modernes» les domestiques non rémunérés, réquisitionnés nuit et jour, fondus dans le décor des palais et des maisons bourgeoises marocaines, les ouvriers auxquels on retire leur passeport dans les pays pétroliers du Golfe, les jeunes enfants exploités en Afrique, en Inde ou en Indonésie, les femmes qu'on livre à des inconnus contre quelques billets ou lors de «mariages de jouissance», et les concubines qui subissent un asservissement sexuel dans les familles ? Sans oublier la polygamie, qui est selon moi une forme soft d'esclavage. Comment expliquer ces pratiques, si ce n'est par la survivance d'une mentalité esclavagiste au sein même de l'Islam ?

Le Coran et les esclaves
On me dira peut-être que j'aggrave les attaques continuelles contre l'Islam ou l'on utilisera mes positions pour tenter de déculpabiliser l'Occident de son passé colonialiste. Tant pis, je cours le risque de ces récupérations idéologiques. Je parle avec ma conscience et avec l'objectivité du scientifique. Je n'en demeure pas moins scandalisé par les discours de la droite, ceux de 2005 sur les «effets positifs de la colonisation» comme celui prononcé cet été à Dakar par le président Sarkozy, qui réitère le refus du «repentir de l'homme blanc». Or il y a bel et bien eu crime. J'ajoute qu'il est tout autant nécessaire que l'Islam fasse lui aussi son travail de remise en question. Les pays musulmans ont leur propre responsabilité pour un esclavage qu'ils ont eux-mêmes fait prospérer.
Héritage de l'Antiquité, l'esclavage, lors de l'avènement de l'islam, au vif siècle, était une pratique largement répandue. La situation des hommes asservis dans le Hedjaz et dans la péninsule Arabique était alors déplorable. Le Coran, qui évoque la question dans vingt-cinq versets, a voulu y mettre fin en promulguant une politique d'affranchissement suivie par le calife Abû Bakr (mort en 634), qui consacra sa fortune personnelle au rachat et à la libération des esclaves. Mais dès Omar, le deuxième calife, elle fut contrecarrée.
Dans un hadith classé «authentique», le Prophète dit que «Dieu n'a rien créé qu'il aime mieux que l'émancipation des esclaves, et rien qu'il haïsse plus que la répudiation». A celui qui Lui demandait ce qu'il devait faire pour mériter le Ciel, Mohammed aurait répondu : «Délivrez vos frères des chaînes de l'esclavage.»
En adoptant la nouvelle religion, l'esclave païen acquiert aussi la liberté. Tout musulman sincère qui possède un esclave est donc invité à l'affranchir. Mais l'Islam n'a pratiqué qu'une politique timorée, sans réelles contraintes pour les grands propriétaires terriens et les marchands d'esclaves, les gellab en arabe (le même mot utilisé pour désigner les marchands de bestiaux !), qui ont continué à faire fructifier leur abject commerce.
C'est là qu'est la faille constitutive de l'islam qui fait de l'esclavage l'une de ses pathologies : le Coran n'étant pas contraignant, l'abolition relève de la seule initiative personnelle du maître. L'idée d'affranchir un esclave en vue de gagner la bénédiction du Ciel a ainsi été reléguée au second plan. J'ai même découvert que juristes et théologiens avaient édicté un «Code noir» arabe, composé d'articles réglementant toutes les questions concernant l'esclave, depuis sa vente jusqu'à sa place dans la guerre sainte, en passant par son échange pour vice caché. J'en ai trouvé trois versions. Au paragraphe 58 du Livre de la propriété sexuelle, extrait de la «Moudawwana» d'Ibn al-Qâsim, telle que rapportée par Sahnoun (776-854), il est par exemple écrit : «Les parties honteuses» de l'esclave femelle appartiennent de droit à son maître. Il en va ainsi de son ventre (ses enfants) et de son dos (sa force de travail).» Le grand penseur Ibn Khaldoun (1332-1406) lui-même, dans sa «Muqaddima», explique les diverses manières de choisir son «domestique». Il a fallu attendre le XVIIIe siècle vertueux et surtout l'émergence, au XIXe siècle, d'une morale universelle, impulsée par les Constitutions occidentales, pour que s'amorcent lentement des politiques d'abolition dans le bassin méditerranéen. Certains souverains réformateurs, comme Ahmed Bey, à Tunis, virent là l'occasion de rattraper la marche du progrès, mais trop souvent ces politiques furent hypocrites et peu suivies.

Pour un sursaut
Aujourd'hui encore le constat demeure affligeant. Je regrette que de nombreux musulmans, arabes ou non, ne semblent éprouver de plaisir, hélas, qu'en accomplissant l'inverse de ce que recommande si clairement le Prophète, et s'emploient sans vergogne à répudier leurs femmes et à mettre en servitude leurs domestiques. Au Koweït comme au Qatar, en Arabie Saoudite ou à Dubaï, l'employeur a de puis longtemps remplacé le négrier. «Esclaves économiques», Philippins, Indiens, Malais, Bangladais se sont substitués aux anciens captifs d'Afrique, Habachis et Zandj. Au Maroc se pose aujourd'hui la question des domestiques, ces «petites bonnes» non rémunérées, corvéables à merci, qu'on réquisitionne jour et nuit, et que les autorités elles- mêmes évaluent à plus de 1 million. Que dire aussi des eunuques à La Mecque ! Oui, en 2007, des eunuques gardent toujours les lieux saints de l'islam !
Soyons clairs, je n'attaque ni un pays en particulier, ni l'islam en tant que religion. Mais son dévoiement, qui n'en finit pas de faire des ravages. Il faut que l'Islam retrouve sa vraie nature et rejoigne enfin les grandes civilisations libératrices.

Anthropologue et spécialiste de l'islam, Malek Chebel est l'auteur d'une vingtaine d'ouvrages, dont le «Dictionnaire amoureux de l'islam» (Plon, 2004). En 2007, il a publié «l'Islam expliqué par Malek Chebel» (Perrin) et «Treize Contes du Coran et de l'islam» (Flammarion). Il publie aujourd'hui chez Fayard «l'Esclavage en terre d'Islam. Un tabou bien gardé».