History of Haiti
In 1492 Christopher Columbus lands in Hispaniola before reaching the shores of North America. He describes it as heaven and claims the island for Spain. The Spanish build the New World’s first settlement at La Navidad on the north coast. The Arawaks, the native population, attack this settlement dispearsing the Spanish to the eastern side of the island. Britain, France, and Spain all covet the island for its location, rich soil, and lush climate. While the Spanish colonize the eastern part of the island, French pirates are frequenting the western side and French plantations are being established and eventually France incorporates the island.
In 1697, it became the French colony of Saint-Dominique, which became a leading sugarcane producer dependent on African slaves. For over 100 years the colony of St. Domingue (known as the Pearl of the Antilles) was France’s most important overseas territory, which supplied it with sugar, rum, coffee and cotton. Since all but a few or the native Arawak population had quickly succumbed, African slaves were brought to work the plantations. At the height of slavery, near the end of the 18th century, some 500,000 people mainly of western African origin, were enslaved by the French.
With the ideology behind the French and American Revolutions spreading, in 1791 an insurrection erupted among the slave population of 480,000 launched in Haiti by the Jamaican-born Boukman leading to a protracted 13-year war of liberation. The slave armies were commanded by General Toussaint Louverture who issued the first declaration of independence. He was eventually betrayed by his officers Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe who opposed his policies, which included reconciliation with the French. He was subsequently exiled to France where he died.
Flag of Haiti
Pure African slaves unified with those of mixed European and African ancestry and fought victoriously to proclaim the first declaration of universal human rights that included African citizens in the full sense of the term. Napoleon Bonaparte suppressed the independence movement, but it eventually triumphed in 1804 under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who gave the new nation the name Haiti. Ayiti in Creole, is the name given to the land by the former Taino-Arawak peoples, meaning “mountainous country.” It was the world’s first independent black republic.
The colonial powers quickly realized the significance of Haiti’s independence. They viewed it as a dangerous precedent and vowed to keep the liberation disease from spreading. They quarantined the new nation. In 1825 Upon payment of the first installment of an indemnity of 100 million francs, France granted conditional recognition to the independence. The Vatican did not have any diplomatic relations with the new nation until 1860. No foreign heads of state set foot on Haitian territory for any extended visit before President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.
Haiti developed into two worlds, one a tiny minority of mulatto (light skinned blacks who are the product of intermarriage), the other the majority of the population, the former slaves. The elite mostly live in the towns, especially in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and control the government, commerce, and military. The majority of Haitians live in the countryside, farming small plots of land.
Haiti is still marked by extremes of poverty and wealth. While eighty percent of the rural population live below absolute poverty level and over seventy percent of pre-school children suffered from malnutrition, the government officials and business owners live in luxurious hillsides villas with fountains and swimming pools.