Istwa Nou

Hispaniola carried two colonial projects at once and they diverged completely. The eastern two thirds stayed Spanish in institutions, language, law and religion, a slow society of cattle ranches and small towns oriented toward Madrid. The western third, taken over by France, became the most intensive plantation economy in the Atlantic world and then destroyed itself and its masters in a revolution. Out of that came a state whose political vocabulary was drawn from the French Revolution and whose religious life was African, organised around Vodou and conducted mostly in Kreyol. The Heinls set the two halves against each other as the gardens of Spain and the Coast of Slaves, with a tree of liberty on the western side watered in blood. The phrasing is theirs and it is heavy. The observation underneath it holds. The border on this island separates two societies built by different empires for different purposes, and the suspicion running across it in the twentieth and twenty first centuries has roots three hundred years deep.

By 1994 income per head in Haiti had fallen to 270 dollars a year. The Heinls set that figure against 1789, when the French colony of Saint-Domingue produced roughly three quarters of the sugar sold in the world and was the most profitable possession any European power held. The modern country buys its sugar abroad along with its fuel. Adjusted for inflation, Haitian exports in 1995 were worth less than the colony's exports in 1788. Across the same two centuries the population grew to eight million while the ground that will grow anything shrank, because the topsoil has washed off the hillsides into the sea. The authors call the whole arc a regression measured in centuries, and read it as the compound result of foreign greed and deliberate isolation imposed on the first state founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery. Chronic hunger is the ordinary condition of the country that once paid for Bordeaux and Nantes.

The Heinls call the racial and linguistic division the most important fact of life in modern Haiti. Roughly nine Haitians in ten are noir, speak Kreyol, and hold an inherited relation to Africa that surfaces in everyday speech: the ordinary phrase for a death is that the person has gone to Ginen, meaning Guinea, meaning the continent the ships sailed from. The remaining tenth are jaune or mulatre, French-speaking, schooled, and long dominant in the ministries, the courts and the diplomatic service. Eighty-five percent of the country sits below the line where literacy and money begin. This is a colonial arrangement that survived the colony. Saint-Domingue sorted people by shade and rewarded proximity to France, and the republic that destroyed the colonial state left the sorting machinery running. Independence in 1804 removed the French. It did nothing to the criteria the French had installed, and those criteria were still ranking Haitians in the year this book went to press.

The Heinls propose reading Haiti as a fragment of Black Africa that the slave trade tore loose and set down in the Antilles. Their comparison is Latin America, whose institutions, law and church came out of Spain and Portugal and are still recognisably Iberian. Haiti's founding materials were different. What the revolution drew on came from the Slave Coast and from the Jacobin politics of the 1790s, and the state it built refused the European inheritance it was expected to claim. Jean Price-Mars pointed at the evidence in the countryside. Haitian peasant agriculture, land tenure and family organisation follow West African patterns closely enough that continuity explains them better than local invention does. Calling the result underdeveloped measures Haiti against a standard it was built to reject. The people who fed the country for two hundred years worked with knowledge that crossed the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, and they kept it working in a climate and a landscape that had nothing to do with the one it came from.