"The question has been asked innumerable times by journalists, politicians, aid workers and academics over the years: What’s wrong with Haiti? Why can’t a country that seems to have so much potential overcome its political instability and extreme poverty? Why don’t aid programs ever seem to have the intended results? Why is the country so vulnerable to disaster and turmoil?
Historian Laurent Dubois attempts to answer that question in Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by carefully detailing Haiti’s history, with particular emphasis on certain turns in the road that have left indelible marks on the island nation often referred to as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, “a moniker incessantly repeated like some dogged trademark,” Dubois notes.
Dubois, a professor at Duke University and author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, rejects the two common and diametrically opposed versions of Haiti, which resurfaced in the wake of the 2010 earthquake: “Nearly all of the coverage portrayed Haitians themselves as either simple villains or simple victims.”
“The true causes of Haiti’s poverty and instability are not mysterious, and they have nothing to do with any inherent shortcomings on the part of Haitians themselves,” he writes. “Rather, Haiti’s present is the product of its history: of the nation’s founding by enslaved people who overthrew their masters and freed themselves; of the hostility that this revolution generated among the colonial powers surrounding the country; and of the intense struggle within Haiti itself to define that freedom and realize its promise.”
Reading The Aftershocks of History, I was repeatedly struck by the deep and detailed explanations of things that had never quite made sense to me about Haiti. Those aha moments were some of the most satisfying passages in this engrossing and deeply-researched book. The first came in the book’s first chapter. Though I have long known that Haiti was the first and only successful slave revolt in the world, the country’s most heroic moment confused me by its very uniqueness. But there is an explanation for why Haitian slaves were different from their counterparts in the rest of the hemisphere. The slavery practiced by the French colonialists was so brutal that Dubois describes it as murderous. The slave owners found it more profitable to simply import more slaves rather than ensure conditions were sufficient to keep the ones they had alive. This meant that when Haitian slaves revolted, the vast majority of them had been born in Africa and only recently crossed the Atlantic. And a significant number of them were enslaved after serving in civil wars in central Africa. ..."
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