alternatehistory.com

An article appearing in the website 'Maul', 9th January 2016
"In August 1994, the People’s Republic of Haiti (or South Haiti as it is almost universally known) was engaged in one of its periodic scraps with the USA over unpaid bills. The American President had set a deadline for South Haiti to get its finances in order before it would send in the bailiffs, in this case in the form of the US marines. Being threatened with invasion by one of the world’s most powerful countries is one of those things that one might assume would focus the mind. But any attempt to conduct talks between the various companies and politicians was hampered by the fact that the Rugby World Cup was on and South Haiti had qualified for the first time in their history. Compared to that, Yankee bellicosity was nothing.

‘You are asking which is more important – the game against Italy or a US invasion?’, one Haitian fan asked an American reporter in 1994. ‘We are hungry every day. We are poor every day. The Americans talk about invading every day. But we only have the World Cup every four years.’

Rugby is not the only prism in which to view the struggles of the four Haitian countries but I do not think it is a bad one. It is, after all, how a great part of the world was reminded that they existed.

It may be a constant refrain of the old, but it is still true that Rugby, as all other things, was not like it is now, back in the day before the internet and satellite television. The world was a great deal smaller and held more mysteries. We in London watched the English league and saw our closest neighbours in the eight nations tournament but we didn’t have any knowledge of Rugby in the New World or Australasia, we couldn’t name their teams, we hadn’t watched their games.

So when Samuel Ducasse took to the field against Argentina, we weren’t watching out for him, we didn’t know he was the best young player in the world, that he’d lit up the American leagues. We didn’t know what was about to happen next.

I don’t need to tell you that South Haiti didn’t win the world cup that year or indeed in any other year, that their young team ran into Germany in the semi finals and finally met a defence that Ducasse couldn’t burst through. But that moment, when a player and a team nobody knew anything about from a country none of us knew existed announced themselves on the world stage, was the thing everyone remembers from 1994, not Australia’s victory in the final. For many of us Haiti still brings to mind Rugby more than Vodou or Poverty.

I flew from London to Port-au-Prince in June 2015, the city still bearing the damage of the Earthquake that had hit 5 years earlier, to meet Mézard Dieujuste, a South Haitian official, who was attempting to do what no one else has ever managed to do. Create a professional Rugby League in Ducasse’s country. To do that he needed money and official support and publicity. I was to provide the latter, the former he would attempt to gather from all over Hispaniola. In my month with Dieujuste, I visited Rugby grounds and Government buildings across South Haiti, North Haiti, Gonâve and the Colombian department of Spanish Haiti. This is the story of that month and what it taught me. The story of Rugby in Haiti is inevitably the story of the legacy of Ducasse, 21 years later but just as much it's the story of the legacy of Dessalines, the first independent President of Haiti, 215 years later."

With thanks to @Jonathan Edelstein
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