The forest that was here in 1492

When the ships arrived, Hispaniola was under forest and held more than six thousand plant species. Today Haiti's forest cover is below two percent. People love to hand that number to you as a story about Haitian peasants cutting trees for charcoal, and the charcoal is real, so let's do the whole ledger instead of the convenient half of it. Colonial sugar needed cleared land and it needed fuel to boil cane juice, so the first great cut was industrial and it was French. The mahogany and campeche export trade took the second. The American occupation took a third for its plantations. Charcoal dependence is what remains when a country has no other household energy source and no rural credit, and reforestation projects that ignore that keep planting trees into the same fire. The trees are a symptom of the energy system, and nobody has fixed the energy system.

In 1492 Christians completed the expulsion of Moors and Jews from the Iberian peninsula and forced conversion on those who stayed. The quarrel between the three religions of the book was old, but from that year it was reorganised around a new principle. Christian theology located the difference between Christian, Moor and Jew in the blood, which made descent rather than belief the test, and made conversion insufficient. In the same years the ranking of Spanish, Indian and African began to take shape in the Americas. By the eighteenth century blood as the marker of race had been transferred to skin, which is the form in which it reached the plantations of Saint-Domingue and the colour laws of the 1760s and 1770s. The doctrine that classified free people of colour by the number of their African ancestors was worked out first in Spain, against Jews and Muslims, before there was a Caribbean colony to apply it in.

On 4 June 1491 one of the king's sons, Mvemba Nzinga, then governor of the northern province of Nsundi, was baptised along with his mother and given the name Afonso. A month later the first church in Mbanza Kongo was blessed. Within three years his father had given the whole thing up. The missionaries wanted the village charms destroyed and the king restricted to one wife, and both demands cut at the working order of the country. The charms secured rain and health and guarded against witchcraft. The king's many wives tied him to different sections of his people. A few foreign priests chanting in an unknown language inside a hastily built shed did not replace either. So Nzinga Nkuvu returned to the practices of his ancestors, as many quickly baptised African rulers did. His son in Nsundi refused to follow him, and for the next twelve years that province held the only Christian community in the kingdom.

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.