Istwa Nou

By the late eighteenth century the western third of Hispaniola produced around three quarters of the sugar sold in the world, along with a large share of its coffee, and it did so on the labour of enslaved Africans imported in numbers that had to be replaced constantly because the work killed them. The wealth left the island. It paid for town houses in Bordeaux and Nantes, for country estates, and for the ships and the credit that carried the next cargo. What stayed behind was cleared forest, worn soil and a population held down by law and by violence. The same mountains that made the plantations awkward to police gave the enslaved somewhere to run, and marronage became a permanent feature of the colony. By 1788 the arrangement was carrying more pressure than it could hold: an enslaved majority of several hundred thousand, a free population of colour with property and no rights, and a white minority quarrelling with Paris. Everything that followed came out of that pressure.

American administrative control of Haiti ran from 28 July 1915 to 15 August 1934. In those nineteen years the occupation rebuilt the Haitian armed forces on an American model and laid 1,200 miles of all weather highway, much of it built by peasants conscripted under an old corvee law that the Americans revived. The same period produced Charlemagne Peralte, who led the Caco war against the occupation, was shot dead in 1919 and was then photographed tied upright to a door so that the picture could be circulated as proof. The photograph became the standing image of Haitian resistance and did the opposite of what the occupation intended. The Americans who governed treated Vodou as a police problem and never grasped how much of Haitian life ran through it. Haitians called the withdrawal of August 1934 the second independence. The phrase set the terms of every argument that followed about what exactly the country had to take back.