Vodou and Kreyol are the country's real institutions

Vodou joins West African religious practice to Catholic ritual and imagery, and by the Heinls' account something close to the whole population takes part in it whatever they write on a form. Kreyol is the language of about eighty five percent of Haitians and the only language most of them speak. For most of the country's history the state was administered in French by an elite that could use it, which meant the official life of the nation was conducted in a language the nation did not share. Two consequences follow. The population held on to forms of family authority, mutual obligation and worship that came from West Africa, and it held on to them inside a system that officially disapproved of all of them. Outsiders reading Haiti in French or English have consistently missed what was happening in front of them, and Haitians have had good reason to let them. The Heinls put it plainly: dismiss Vodou and you have foreclosed any serious understanding of the country.

On the night of 24 December 1492 the Santa Maria drifted onto a reef off the northern coast of Hispaniola, near what is now Cap-Haitien. A ship's boy had the helm. The hull opened and could not be saved. Columbus was left with one seaworthy vessel, since the Pinta had gone off on its own some weeks earlier, and the Nina was too small to carry every man back to Spain. He decided to build a fort out of the wreck and leave part of the crew in it. This accident produced the first European settlement in the Americas, and it produced it on the coast of what is now Haiti. Nothing about the site had been chosen. Rouse notes the practical consequence for the return voyage. Columbus sailed for Spain in January with a crew cut down to what one caravel could hold, and with a garrison behind him that he expected to find alive.

In the autumn of 1503 Ovando went into Xaragua, gathered the district chiefs into a single building on the pretext of a meeting, and had it set alight with eighty of them inside. Anacaona, who governed the province, was hanged in public. Rouse states the result plainly: this destroyed the last independent chiefdoms on Hispaniola and gave Spain complete control of the island. Eleven years had passed since the first European ship anchored off the coast. In that time a society of several hundred thousand people organised into five polities had been reduced to a labour supply with no leadership of its own, and the killing of a chief had become an administrative act performed by a governor holding instructions from Madrid. Everything that followed came out of a decision to leave nobody standing who could negotiate: the encomienda, the gold tribute, the collapse of the population, and the shipping in of Africans to replace it.

Governor Ovando sent Spain a report in 1503 warning that Africans escaping into the interior of Hispaniola had become a danger to the colony. Fick takes the document as a marker. Africans had been on the island perhaps three years, and already enough of them had gone into the mountains and stayed free there for the administration to treat it as a standing threat needing a policy. Marronage on this island is therefore as old as African slavery on it. No period of acceptance can be found before resistance begins. The same mountains sheltered maroon communities continuously for three centuries, through the Spanish period and the whole of French Saint-Domingue, and the leaders of the 1791 rising drew on a tradition of flight, concealment and armed refusal running back to the first decade of the sixteenth century. Fick built her history of the revolution on that continuity.