Haiti loses its forest and then loses the soil under it

Hispaniola was forested when Columbus arrived and held more than six thousand plant species. Less than two percent of Haiti carries forest today. The decline is documented and its mechanism is dull. Around sixty percent of the country was still wooded in 1920. The population grew through the twentieth century, no electricity or gas supply was built for ordinary households, and people cooked with charcoal, which is made by cutting trees. Cover fell below twenty five percent by 1980 and has kept falling. Each stage feeds the next. Bare slopes lose soil, thin soil grows less food, poorer families burn more charcoal. Rain that intact forest would have absorbed now runs off in mudslides that kill people in their houses. USAID has planted more than sixty million trees in Haiti since 1990 and most of them have been cut for fuel, because nobody supplied the cooking energy the trees were being burned to provide. Planting without fuel is a way of looking busy.

In 1492 the most celebrated samba on the island the Taino called Hayti was a woman named Anacaona. She came from a royal line, was the sister of the cacique Bohechio and the wife of Caonabo, who ruled the Maguana. Her poems, called areytos, delighted her contemporaries and pleased the Spaniards enough that they became her friends or acted the part. Poetry left her time for government. When her husband died she became sole head of Xaragua, whose old capital Yaguana later became the town of Leogane, and visitors were still shown the cave where she made her offerings to the zemis. She gave the Spaniards splendid festivals as an attempt to draw the two peoples together. One of the conquistadores carried off her daughter Higuenamota, the first of the betrayals that followed. At a military review Nicolas Ovando had her seized and hanged.

When Portuguese priests reached the Kongo court in 1491 and explained that the king would have to set aside all his wives but one, those wives grasped that they would lose their standing as wives of the king. They combined with the wives of his most trusted nobles and worked on their husbands to have the king advised against conversion. The lobbying failed and the court accepted Christianity. One of the women, Leonor, then asked to be baptised herself. The priests reported that she learned the doctrine quickly and answered their questions accurately, and that she supplied them with food and with money of the country, almost certainly nzimbu shells, out of income she controlled in her own right. She was the first cousin of her own husband, an early sign of how tightly the elite married inside itself. Her son Afonso later credited her with telling him how to enter the capital in order to defeat his half brother in the war of succession.

Columbus reached Hispaniola on 5 December 1492 and claimed it for Spain. On Christmas Eve the Santa Maria, his flagship, went aground in shallow water near what is now Cap-Haitien and could not be got off. He had it broken up and raised a fort from the timber. When he sailed for Spain on 2 January 1493 he left thirty nine men in it, the first Europeans holding ground on the island. He came back on 28 November 1493 and found the fort burned and all of them dead. The Taino who had helped build the place had destroyed it, and even Spanish accounts blamed the garrison's treatment of local women and its appetite for gold. Three hundred years of the island's history sit inside those eleven months. Europeans arrive and declare ownership. The people already there resist. The reply escalates until the original population is gone and Africans are brought in to replace them.