Istwa Nou

Haiti's terrain is a serrated mass of mountain ranges and narrow valleys, and moving an army or an administration through it has always been hard. A French officer explained the shape of the country to Napoleon by crumpling a sheet of paper and dropping it on a table. That inaccessibility did work. People escaping enslavement went up into it and stayed, and the tradition of marronage that fed the revolution depended on ground where a small group could vanish and a column could not follow. After independence the same terrain kept the rural majority out of sight of the towns, which is one reason West African social forms survived in the countryside with so little interference. Colonial governments and the American occupation both drove roads across it, and the roads decayed. The mountains have also been stripped. Peasants who were given nothing else to burn cut the mahogany and then everything after it, and the topsoil went down the rivers. Protection and poverty came off the same landscape.