10:56am Saturday 23rd January 2010
AS I watch the nightly horrific scenes on TV, I realise how little I know about Haiti. How can a government crumble as quickly as buildings? What causes a country to be the poorest in the western hemisphere? So I’ve found a few pointers: Ayiti means “mountainous country” in the language of the native Taino people.
An old Haitian proverb – “Deye mon, gen mon” – means: “Behind the mountains are more mountains.”
Christopher Columbus claimed the island for Spain on December 5, 1492. He called it Hispaniola because it looked like Spain.
Within a century, the 100,000 Tainos were wiped out by European disease and harsh conditions in the goldmines. From 1517, slaves were imported from Africa.
In 1697, Hispaniola was divided into French-owned Haiti on the west and Spanish-controlled Dominican Republic.
In 1706, a French captain called Saint-André moored Le Prince in a bay.
Port-au-Prince, where half the BBC is stationed, is named after this ship.
By 1790, Haiti was France’s richest colony, producing sugar, coffee and indigo.
The French imported 790,000 slaves – the main reason Haiti is overpopulated today.
Some slaves ran away to the mountains.
They were called “maroons”, the mountaintop dwellers.
On August 14, 1791, the maroons reputedly held a voodoo ceremony before starting a revolution. The American religious right this week claimed that this pact with the devil means the island is cursed.
The revolution lasted 13 years. About 100,000 slaves were killed – some boiled in sugar or buried beneath insects by the French. In reply, the slaves killed 50,000 French soldiers and 40,000 colonialists.
Toussaint l’Ouverture was a famous slave leader until betrayed by his own men, including Jean Jacques Dessalines.
On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared Haiti independent. It was only the second republic in the Americas (after the US), and the only country in the world to be freed by a slave rebellion.
In 1806, Dessalines, by now too dictatorial, was assassinated by his own side.
In 1826, Haiti agreed to pay French former plantation owners 150 million francs compensation. It took 122 years to pay.
From 1843 to 1915, 21 of Haiti’s 22 heads of state were assassinated or forced to flee.
From 1957 to 1971, Haiti was ruled by Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a brutal voodoo practitioner. His 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, ruled after him until a coup in 1986.
The Duvaliers’ private army was called the Tontons Macoutes. In a Haitian fairytale, the Tontons Macoutes are bogeymen who steal children.
Over the past 30 years, as Haiti has opened up to world markets, its agriculture has collapsed. There were food riots in 2008.
In 2009, it was the 149th poorest country in the world out of 182. Of its ten million population, two million failed to get adequate daily food.
At 4.53pm local time, on Tuesday, January 12, a 7.0 earthquake struck. Its epicentre was 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince and its hypocentre eight miles down. After 250 years of building up stress, the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system slipped, moving the earth one metre and killing more than 100,000 of the four million people affected.
As they say in Haiti, “Deye mon, gen mon.”
After one uphill struggle, another uphill struggle.
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