What’s his line? Who’s Robert Berrouët-Oriol? Is he really a “linguiste terminologue” at the service of our Kreyòl-speaking nation?

For more than a couple of years now, Robert Berrouët-Oriol has become the epitome of the fraudulent pseudo-intellectual in the course of his relentless attacks against me as a linguist and educator for my work in the MIT-Haiti Initiative—an initiative that’s contributing to the pedagogical and linguistic foundations of rightside-up schools for a rightside-up country (“lekòl tèt an wo pou peyi tèt an wo”). One of MIT-Haiti’s main objectives is the valorization of Kreyòl as primary language of instruction in Haiti—as a necessary tool for children to learn to read and write, then to learn all other subjects, including science, mathematics and second languages like French, English, Spanish, etc. Our MIT-Haiti team is a rapidly growing network of educators, in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora, who are co-creating high-quality online open-access resources in Kreyòl. So we find ourselves at the heart of the Kreyòl movement, which is a liberation movement to escape age-old neo-colonial yokes!

Judging from Berrouët-Oriol’s non-stop slander against myself and against the MIT-Haiti Initiative, my hunch is that the steady progress of this Initiative, alongside the global progress of the Kreyòl movement, has become a source of existential angst among Haitian francophiles who rely on French qua “butin de guerre” as a source of political and socio-economic advantages, including social prestige.