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National Geographic : 2015 Dec
Contents
112 national geographic • december 2015 1791, when a Vodou priest called Boukman gave the signal to begin the uprising that would be- come the most successful slave revolt in history, slaves—two-thirds of them African born—out- numbered masters by ten to one. In 1804, after 13 years of bloody insurrection, Haiti emerged as the world’s first independent black state. The impression of Africa in Haiti remains in- delible. Almost as soon as I landed at Toussaint Louverture International Airport, I had the dis- quieting sense that I’d landed not on a lobster- claw-shaped chunk of island in the Caribbean but in a small sub-Saharan African nation. Or rather in an African country of the imagination, as if Haiti were a mythical chip off the mother continent, adrift in the wrong hemisphere. It was the smell first and foremost: carbolic soap; charcoal smoke from the street-food kiosks selling fresh conch, corn fritters, and roasted pork; and the scent of tropical foliage emanating from irrigated gardens in the suburb of Pétion- ville. In one of these pockets of affluence, an ailing Baby Doc, having returned in 2011 from a 25-year exile in France, was living out his last days in unmolested peace. The presence of the failing ex-dictator, who died on October 4, 2014, did not seem to be ex- citing much local attention, perhaps because people had enough current political incompe- tence to cope with. Parliamentary and munici- pal elections were already three years overdue. Nevertheless the electoral council of President Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, who once sang konpa, a modern Haitian merengue, announced that the elections would be postponed indef- initely. Preliminary parliamentary elections were finally held in August 2015. (By the time you read this, follow-up parliamentary and presidential elections may—or may not—have happened.) In the view of some of her citizens, Haiti had become less democratic than anarchic. Wittily desperate graffiti was splashed across ‘Haitians are rooted in resistance. No one can eradicate us.’ Samuel Nesner couldn’t compete with the cheap and donated imports. Many farmers, after chopping down the last of their trees to sell for charcoal, gave up and flooded the cities, crowding into slums. In March 2010 Clinton apologized for his role. “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked,” he told the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to... I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.” In 1492, when Christopher Columbus first saw the island of what became known as Hispaniola, he called it “a wonder.” But you can’t eat beauty, so the Spanish did the next most ruinous thing: They mined every ounce of gold they could eas- ily find, enslaving the native Taino to do so. As a result, almost all the Taino subsequently died, either from overwork or introduced European diseases, especially smallpox. Then came the French colonists, who took over the western third of the island for 140 years and made themselves among the wealthiest people on Earth at that time. They brought up to a million African slaves to the colony they called Saint-Domingue to raze the land’s leg- endary forests—“tall trees of different kinds which seem to reach the sky,” Columbus had written—for hardwood to furnish their man- sions in Europe and to make room for lucrative sugarcane and coffee plantations. The incipi- ent environmental disaster—Haiti is now one of the most deforested nations on Earth, with less than 2 percent of its land covered by forest— paled in comparison with the human rights ca- tastrophe that was under way. French masters in Saint-Domingue treated their slaves so brutally that they died in the thou- sands. To replace their dead slaves, the French imported more. By the night of August 22,
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