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Eden of Despair

© Derek Royden Guiler

"There might be little food in the land, but there was always colour. The deep blue shadows sat permanently on the mountain slopes, the sea was peacock green. Green was everywhere in all its varieties, the poison bottle green of sisal slashed with black, the pale green of banana trees beginning to turn yellow at the tip to match the sand at the edge of the flat green sea. The land was stormy with colour."

Graham Greene, The Comedians

Haiti has been many things in its long history but today it is best known as the country that holds the dubious distinction of being the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. The island, which holds both French-speaking Haiti and the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic, was visited and claimed by Columbus himself in the name of the Spanish Crown.1 The Treaty of Rijwijk, signed in 1697 by France and Spain gave a third of the island to the former.2 The colony that would become Haiti was named Saint-Domingue by its new French masters.

Under French rule the tiny colony grew to be the most profitable in the world until the time of French Revolution when Haitian slaves revolted and declared a Republic of their own. Although there were freed slaves in Saint-Domingue and a mulatto class was groomed to govern alongside white landowners, slavery in Haiti is comparable to that in other slave-based economies, including the American South. Under incredible hardships these transplanted peoples mixed elements from their places of origin with that of their captors, in the process creating their own distinct cultural milieu. One expression unique to Haiti, where West African Animist religion met Roman Catholicism, was the religious practice called Voodoo. Another expression of Haitian culture is the Creole "patois" of the common people, a language successive elites have rarely been able to penetrate.

The slaves of Haiti rose up against their white and mulatto masters in 1791, following in the footsteps of the French revolutionists who had ended the reign of the French monarchy in 1789. A French abolitionist group, "Amis des Noirs", which had been formed in France in 1787 fought for the rights of citizenship for all the slaves in France's colonies, including Saint-Domingue.3 Although these battles, both physical and political, contributed to freedom from slavery for the majority of Saint-Domingue's population in 1794 it also created a great rift between the planter class and their economic allies in France and the newly freed slaves resulting in the colony's succession in 1804. This was a situation that would become more and more common into the twentieth century as the naturalised sons and daughters of the colonial elite and those native groups who had collaborated in ruling former colonies rushed to protect their economic interests against the liberal and socialist doctrines that were unleashed by the American, the French and the Russian revolutions.

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