Third World Debt and The Future
Ellison | Associate’s Note
During the 1987 summit of the Organization of African Unity, Thomas Sankara, the Marxist revolutionary and first president of Burkina Faso, spoke on the hopeful campaign of resisting African countries’ debt obligations. He expressed that debt must actually be recognized as a system intended to subvert, rather than support, public sovereignty. According to Sankara …
Debt is a skillfully managed reconquest of Africa, intended to subjugate its growth and development through foreign rules (Sankara, 1987)
It is the outcome of a global financial system that was meticulously planned to support the exploitation from neo-colonialism and neoliberalism. Further, through the example of so many Third World countries like Sankara’s Burkina Faso referenced above, how has debt taken form?
We should take a close look at Haiti, a country just 700 miles from the Florida coast of the United States that is currently beset by intense violence as armed gangs overrun it. Through the example of Haiti, the first independent colonial-era Black nation, one sees a perfect prototype for the mistreatment of the Third World. Although previously known as the richest colony in the Americas, Haiti is currently the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. As over half of Haitians live in poverty today, debt and foreign involvement have continually impeded Haiti’s developmental initiatives, where governance is immobilized by civil unrest. As the World Bank Group reports …
Haiti remains the poorest country in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region and among the poorest countries in the world. In 2023, Haiti had a GDP per capita of US$ 1694.1 and a GINI index of 41.1. Haiti's Human Development Index (HDI) value for 2022 is 0.552— which put the country in the Medium human development category—positioning it at 158 out of 193 countries and territories on this United Nations metrics, published in March 2024.
For centuries, the island of Hispaniola - which is now a landmass shared between modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic - established a profitable outpost of the transatlantic slave trade and generated the most revenue out of all French colonial assets at the time. However, within that economic growth lies the deep injustice endured by enslaved Africans who made up an overwhelming majority of the population. In a unified resistance against colonial oppression, the Haitian Revolution established the first independent country founded by the formerly enslaved, arguably making the Haitian Revolution the most volatile and decisive moment in the history of New World colonization.
Even after a full scale military revolution, colonial powers continued to take advantage. Haiti was commanded to pay reparations to France as a result of the freedom of Haitian slaves which crippled Haiti's economy for decades. Since then, these same colonial powers still exercise an enormous level of power through political manipulation and debt, and the nation continues to experience those negative impacts. For example, in 1915, the United States occupied Haiti to enforce and maintain socioeconomic and political stability. This occupation remained for nearly 20 years, and though Haiti did see some reform, the U.S. continued to exploit and extract Haitian resources and successfully implemented pro-American officials into the government, including a new constitution which allowed foreign land ownership over Haiti (Osgood, 2024).
Since the birth of the nation, Haiti has been faced with institutional oppression, political instability and corruption as outside influences shaped the trajectory of the nation. Furthermore, the oppression of Haiti is a question of the racialized exploitation and capital accumulation that is interconnected within debt and the colonial model as what Cedric Robinson calls “racial capitalism” …
... the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.
The colonial model never left, as evidenced by the system that still affects us today - it simply took on a new name. To understand the state of Haiti’s economic and political instability, it is also important to understand the foundation from which these inequities form.
As Haitians continue to face overexploitation, the country was never able to define itself as a sovereign nation. Debt and foreign aid continues to impose the destructive neo-colonial and neoliberal paradigm on Haiti, resulting in a never ending cycle of economic poverty and political corruption. That raises some additional questions: Even if the Third World refused debt, would other examples of capitalism and development lead to a better or more prosperous future for these countries? What does the future hold? Given colonial histories, how can Haiti or any community alike, truly be liberated?
In Afro-Caribbean political philosopher Franz Fanon’s classic 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explains that the descendants of enslaved Africans need to go beyond a Eurocentric path of modernity and pave a new way for themselves. He wrote how …
... on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men… Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. (Fanon, 1961).
Contrary to the common narrative led by capitalists that the Third World will be liberated through an adaptation of the capitalist model, Fanon would disagree with this opinion. The capitalist model, the same system that continues to oppress, will not liberate the same people it exploits. Through neoliberalism, the system is intended to be an ongoing cycle of privatization.
Developing a country would continue this model and will allow economic disparity to fester. Even if a country managed to rid itself of white colonists, those same white colonists would simply be replaced by eager Black neo-colonists if formerly colonized states didn't rid themselves of the capitalist economic structure. Among the lasting effects of colonization are the corporations and the political elite that persist in enforcing disparities that enable exploitation. This economic model, based entirely on unmitigated extraction, is unsustainable (as evidenced by, for example, the destruction from the climate crisis and other forms of ecological apartheid: it’s just that crucial to form some sort of opposition to it).
To answer the questions posed above, the only way for these communities to finally experience liberation is to start with themselves. Keeping in mind the philosophies of Fanon, Sankara expresses this same concept in his 1987 speech. He states …
Let's also make the African market be the market for Africans: produce in Africa, transform in Africa, consume in Africa.
Foreign influence can not “save” Third World countries and populations, and the same capitalism designed for Europe will not work for the African diaspora.
The true liberation of the Third World lies in redressing centuries of inequality bred through the capitalist system that spawned racism, slavery, injustice and the costly systematic targeting of marginalized Black, Brown and Indigenous populations around the world. That injustice manifests as the everyday realities of “underdeveloped” and “third world” citizens fed by greed, or what we know as capitalism. Yet, too many features of capitalism are based on exploitation, corruption, suppression and either the displacement or, sometimes, elimination of entire populations. It is possible, for the just future of the planet and our societies, to transition from a toxic capitalist economy that continues a system of colonial oppression, to finally, a prosperous remediation economic model that repairs and heals.
CROIX ELLISON is a Research Strategist for B|E Strategy. She is also a student and Spatial Justice Fellow at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.