A Short Note to the Ancestors

Dear Ancestors,

On this day after the 222nd anniversary of the foundational act by which you broke the chains of slavery, colonization, racial segregation, and imposed upon the world the existence of a free and independent Black people, I write to you with solemnity, anger, and fidelity. Fidelity to your sacrifice, solemnity in the face of the state of the State, anger at the persistent betrayal of the ideal of 1804. You not only defeated the greatest colonial army in the world at the time, that of Napoleon; you laid the foundations of a universal political project based on human dignity, sovereignty, and justice. This legacy, today, is methodically trampled.

For the territory you wrested from the slave-owning order is now emptied of its substance. National sovereignty is confiscated, fragmented, commodified. The country is handed over to armed gangs who rule by terror, while obscure economic, diplomatic, and financial forces silently dictate the national agenda. The Republic no longer exercises its authority over its territory; the law of the strongest supplants common law.

Your descendants pay the price for this failure. They are displaced in their own homeland, wandering on a land nevertheless conquered at the cost of blood. Others are forced into voluntary exile, humiliated, hunted, denied their humanity on the roads and in the very countries that have enriched themselves from our history. Institutions, pillars of the modern State you dreamed of, are in ruins. For more than a decade, the process of democratic legitimation has been paralyzed, transforming exception into norm and transition into system.

In this sustained chaos, a predatory political class thrives. It instrumentalizes instability, voluntarily prolongs the impasse, plunders public resources, and governs without moral or popular mandate. While the people survive, the country slowly dies. This is no longer just a political crisis: it is a historical betrayal.

Dear Ancestors, we appeal to you today not out of nostalgia, but out of duty. Awaken dormant consciences, shake off cowardice, revive the spirit of insubordination and responsibility. Help us resume the unfinished struggle, interrupted too soon after October 17, 1806, to refound the State and the Nation with rigor, real sovereignty, and collective interest.

For Haiti will not rise again through charity or tutelage, but through a demanding return to the spirit of Independence.

Pierre Josué Agénor Cadet