Interviewed for Callaloo's Haitian issue, the veteran historian Jean Fouchard sets out the claims of a lifetime's research. He refuses to join the quincentenary celebrations, calling Columbus's arrival a genocide that destroyed a million Taino, and notes that the country's founders chose an indigenous name as a tribute to those who resisted. Marronage, he insists, is the organising fact of Haitian history: flight to freedom began in 1503 with the first Africans brought to Hispaniola and continued alongside poisoning, arson and sabotage, so that maroon chiefs, seasoned by two centuries of guerrilla fighting, carried the war against Leclerc's army when the regular forces faltered. He claims that Toussaint Louverture's refusal to serve Napoleon indirectly secured the Louisiana Purchase, and explains Haitian poverty by the devastation of 1804, the indemnity paid to France, diplomatic isolation and the American occupation. He closes on sources: seventeen years of exile spent in the Schomburg collection and the Paris archives.