Haitians

By ROBERT LAWLESS

Ayisyens, Haïtiens, Haytians

The Republic of Haiti is the second-oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, and it is the only one with a French-Creole background and an overwhelmingly African culture. Large communities of Haitians exist outside Haiti, especially in the Dominican Republic, on other Caribbean islands, in Central America and northern South America, and in North America. The second-largest Haitian community, after Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, is in New York City, with about 500,000 members. Occupying 27,750 square kilometers on the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic, Haiti lies between 18° and 20° N and 72° and 74° W. It is 90 kilometers southeast of Cuba, 187 kilometers northeast of Jamaica, and about 1,000 kilometers from Florida. Its topography ranges from flat, semiarid valleys to densely forested mountains; about one-third of its area lies 200 to 500 meters above sea level, and the remaining two-thirds is covered by three mountain ranges. The highest point of elevation is La Selle Peak (2,680 meters). The mean temperature is somewhere between 24° C and 27° C; averages for the hottest and coolest months differ by perhaps 5° C, although temperature variations on any given day may be as great as 12° C. Temperature decreases three-quarters of a degree per 100 meters of elevation. Port-au-Prince, with an elevation of 40 meters, has a mean temperature of 26.3° C, but Pétionville, at 400 meters, records 24.7° C, and Kenscoff, at 1,450 meters, enjoys 18.5° C.

Demographic information is at once scarce and unreliable. Haiti has had only four censuses; the latest census results from 2003 came out in 2006. Population was estimated to be 8.4 million and projected to be 10 million in 2010. According to educated estimates, the total population of Haiti in the mid-1990s was about 6.5 million. The total population calculated from the 1971 census was 4,314,628, In the last census, 40 percent of the population lived in urban areas. The largest city is Port au Prince.

The language spoken by all Haitians is usually referred to as Haitian Creole. For most of modern history, however, the official language of government, business, and education has been French. At best, only about 8 percent of the population, the educated elite, speaks French well—and then only as a second language. Another 2 to 7 percent uses French with a lesser degree of competence. Traditionally, the elite has used the requirement of fluency in French to exclude the general population from competing for positions in government and business. Haitian Creole, which has often been seen as a nonlanguage in which sophisticated thoughts cannot be expressed or, at best, as a poor imitation of French, is coming into its own, and the prestige of French is rapidly declining in Haiti. Both Creole and French are the country's official languages.

The post-occupation period (1934-1957) was characterized by a succession of undistinguished administrations, with one notable exception: the government led by President Dumarsais Estimé (1946-1950), which many view as a highly progressive era in Haitian politics that probably spelled the end of mulatto political domination. Important developments during his presidency were the entrance of Blacks into the civil service, increased pride in the African heritage, greater interaction with other Caribbean nations, the beginning of peasant integration into the national polity, and, especially, the rise of the new Black middle class.

With little gain from fourteen years of rule by a second Duvalier, Haitians finally reached the end of their patience and overwhelming public protests led to the ouster of Jean-Claude on 7 February 1986. An interim government, the Conseil National de Gouvernement (CNG) headed by Lieut. Gen. Henri Namphy, took charge. Elections for president and for seats in the national assembly, set for 29 November 1987, were aborted by army sponsored violence. In January 1988 the CNG held sham elections and announced that Leslie Manigat had won the presidency. About four months later, Manigat's attempt to play off one segment of the army against another led to his own ouster, and Namphy declared himself president. On 17 September 1988 Namphy was forced out of the National Palace and leadership was handed over to Lieut. Gen. Prosper Avril. Jean-Bertrand Aristide of the National Front for Change and Democracy (FNCD) was elected president on 16 December 1990 and assumed office on 7 February 1991 but was deposed on 30 September 1991. The military ousted him a little more than seven months later, but no state (except the Vatican) recognized the military government. After considerable vacillation, the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton forced the military leaders to leave Haiti, and in October 1994 Aristide was reinstated under heavy U.S. military sponsorship. An armed rebellion in 2004 led to Aristide exile. All this political instability and elite in-fighting further weakened the capacity of Haiti’s government for providing basic services. This was reflected, for instance, during the massive earthquake of January 12, 2010 which, in the absence of effective emergency response, killed hundreds of thousands and wounded many more. In 2011, a new president, Michel Martelly, was elected.

At the time of European contact, anywhere from 60,000 to 4 million Indians inhabited the island of Hispaniola. The indigenous population rapidly succumbed to the ravages of disease, slavery, and brutality; and the Europeans soon had to look to Africa for the labor they needed to work their plantations. In the colonial period (1492-1804) sugarcane plantations were established and slavery instituted in Saint Domingue, as the French called their territory on Hispaniola.

François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, president from 1957 to 1971, established his power base largely among this middle class. Duvalier carried out a brutal campaign of oppression against his opponents, and Haiti was increasingly isolated from the international community. When Duvalier's 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), became president in 1971, a new economic program guided by the U.S. government was put in place; U.S. private investment was wooed with such incentives as no customs taxes, a minimum wage kept very low, the suppression of labor unions, and the right of U.S. companies to repatriate their profits.

A series of minor uprisings culminated in the slave revolt of August 1791. By 1796, White supremacy was at an end, and within the framework of the French Republic, Black rule was established under the leadership of a former slave, the charismatic Toussain Louverture. In 1800 Napolian sent 28,000 troops under his brother-in-law, Gen. Charles Leclerc, to retake the colony and re-enslave the Blacks. By 1803, however, Haitians had defeated Napoleon's troops, and on 1 January 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussain's successor, proclaimed the independence of Haiti.

In the post-independence period (1820-1915) Haiti became a focal point of debates about the effect of emancipation and the capacity of Blacks for self-government. Many slave insurrections in the southern United States were consciously modeled after the Haitian example.

The U.S. military occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 for pressing economic and strategic reasons. The major, though certainly unintended, results of the occupation were the increasing Black consciousness of the elite, the suppression of peasant movements, the training of the army, and the concentration of sociopolitical power in Port-au-Prince.

With 60 percent of the population living in a rural setting in 2003, the majority of Haitians are farmers. They live in dispersed villages loosely connected by trade routes. Scattered within these villages are huts of wattle and daub surrounded by gardens, fields, and out-buildings. Regional centers once had considerable cultural and commercial importance, but since the first U.S. occupation, Port-au-Prince has become disproportionately dominant.

In 2010, an estimated 38.1 percent of the labor force was small landowners engaged in agriculture and 11.5 percent were in manufacturing. The service sector employs 50.4 percent of the labor force. The unemployment rate for 2010 was estimated at 40.6 percent. Agriculture was precarious because the countryside was s 95 percent deforested, and 25 percent of the soil has undergone rapid erosion. Haiti's primary products remain coffee, sugar, rice, and cocoa.

Its light manufacturing enterprises produce shoes, soap, flour, cement, and domestic oils. Its export industries produce garments, toys, baseballs, and electronic goods for the U.S. market. Despite this small-scale industrialization, the gross national per capita income for 2011 was $700 US. . According to the United Nations World Food Program, 80 percent of Haitians live in poverty. The continuity of political instability is having deleterious effects on the national economy.

Many people engage in part-time craft work, particularly in the manufacture of wood utensils, tools, and furniture. Formerly, many of these items were destined for the tourist trade.

Most commercial exchange is carried out in open-air markets. The market women are justly famous both for carrying heavy loads of merchandise and for bargaining with great skill. Haiti's economy is closely tied to that of the United States; a sizable portion of its exports go to North America, and it is dependent on governmental and nongovernmental U.S. aid.

In rural areas, men generally handle agricultural production, and women take charge of the produce. The women depend on the men to provide a product to sell, and the men depend on the women for domestic labor.

A crucial problem facing the newly independent Haiti was access to land. Having failed in its attempt to reinstate the plantation system of colonial Saint Domingue, the government distributed much of the land among the former slaves. By the mid-1990s, 60 to 80 percent of the farmers owned their own land, although few had clear title, and the plots remained fragmented and small. Fairly large plantations do exist but not nearly to the same extent as in Latin American countries. The state owns land, but the government has rarely shown a sustained interest in agriculture.

The plantation system and the institution of slavery had a profound influence on domestic entities. Additionally, the laws of the early republic reinforced the tendency of the rural population to avoid legal and church marriages. The most recognizable kinship pattern in rural Haiti is the somewhat patrilineal extended family living in a cluster of households linked through legal, ritual, consanguineal, and affinal ties and headed by the oldest male member.

In addition to conventional church weddings, long-term monogamous unions, and neolocal nuclear-family households, there are socially accepted unions without formal sanction, couples who do not co-reside, fathers who do not participate actively in rearing their children, and households without a nuclear family at their core.

In writing about Haiti, anthropologists often avoid the word “family”; instead they use “household,” which embraces the wide range of relatives - direct and collateral, on the sides of both parents - that the Haitian “family” typically includes.

The complexity of the domestic unit and the varieties of household types do create inheritance problems. In general, all children from all the varieties of conjugal unions have equal rights of inheritance, but, in practice, residents, contacts, and personal feelings are important determinants of who inherits.

Because both adults and children may change residential affiliation with relative ease and frequency and enjoy a variety of temporary residential rights, children often come into contact with a relatively large number of adults who may discipline and train them. In general, a great deal of emphasis is placed on respect for adults, and adults are quick to use corporal punishment to ensure that they receive it. Fewer than half of the rural children attend school, and only about 20 percent of those complete the primary grades.

With the ouster of Jean-Claude (the second Duvalier) on 7 February 1986, Haiti has sought to reestablish its political and social institutions under a democratic administration. . Agreements with the U.S. government and international finance agencies had created a difficult set of parameters within which a move toward more social equality and justice was being attempted. A democratically elected government was inaugurated in 2006.

One result of the land reform in the early 1800 was that the largely mulatto elite fled to the cities and, with no land of their own, made their living from taxing peasant markets and the nation's imports and exports. These elite also practiced the religion of the slave owners, Roman Catholicism. Driven by fear of a renewed French occupation, the bulk of the population retreated into the mountainous interior, inside a ring of magnificent forts. What emerged from these displacements was a nation with a very small European-oriented, Roman Catholic, mulatto elite residing in several coastal urban centers and a large, scattered Black population that farmed the interior and worshiped in the ancient African manner.

The largely Black peasantry has always regarded the government as having little relevance to their lives. Haiti's regional political units, called departments, are further divided into several arrondissements, each with an administrative center. Arrondissements consist of several communes, which usually coincide with church parishes. Each commune is divided into sections rurales, each of which is headed by an appointed chef de section, who reports to the commandant of the commune, who in turn reports to the préfet of the arrondissement. The limited contact rural Haitians normally have with the government is, for the most part, with the chef de section.

Criminality is rare, and, for the most part, the rural population, in deference to village elders, polices itself. The urban areas have police and courts, mainly modeled after the French system.

Governments in Haiti have been run primarily by members of the elite, and despite the early and heroic independence of Haiti from France and the elimination of slavery, the attitude of the elite classes of Haiti has traditionally been a neocolonial one. Nativism, negritude, and the increasing use of Creole have made all Haitians more aware of their Haitianness, but tensions exist between the affluent city dwellers and the poor peasants and shantytown residents. Aside from a very small but moderately influential group of Middle Eastern merchants, the population of Haiti is exceptionally homogeneous, both culturally and linguistically.

Although the majority of the population is nominally Roman Catholic and although Protestant missionaries have won a number of converts in the poorer rural areas, the religion of Haiti is still Vodun, an ancient religion that focuses on contacting and appeasing ancestral spirits (lwa), which include both distant, stereotyped ancestors and more immediate relatives, such as dead parents and grandparents.

Vodun is a particularly egalitarian religion; both men and women serve as priests (ougan-yo and manbo-yo, respectively; sing. ougan and manbo).

As many of its rituals are performed in the context of sickness and death, Vodun is primarily a system of folk medicine that attributes illnesses to angry ancestors; it consists of appeasement ceremonies, including divination rites, which are used to find the cause of illnesses; healing rites, in which a Vodun priest interacts directly with sick people to cure them; propitiatory rites, in which food and drink are offered to specific spirits to make them stop their aggression; and preventive rites, in which ancestors are offered sacrifices to help head off any possible future trouble.

In the 1940s Haiti burst into the consciousness of the art world with an astonishing display of paintings, and its artists received worldwide attention for their so-called primitive or naive art. In 1944 the Centre d'Art was founded in Port-au-Prince.

Haiti is also renowned for its literature, despite its high rate of illiteracy (85 percent). Major themes include concepts of negritude, which foreshadowed the Black Power and post-World War II anticolonial movements, and Vodun. The most famous novel in Haitian Creole, Frankétinne's Dézafi, is about the revolt of a colony of zombies.

Although Western medicine has been available to the urban elite since the early 1960s, by 2006 still only 43 percent of the population received the recommended immunizations, according to the World Health Organization In 2006 there were only 25 physicians and 11 nurses per 100,000 population, so it is estimated that 40 percent of the population lack access to formal health care services. In the rural areas, curing depends on a rich body of folk knowledge that includes herbal medicine and Vodun. Prior to the earthquake in January, 2010, Haiti had one of the worst rates of malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean. For example, one-third of children under five had stunted growth. After the earthquake, the situation got worse. In 2010, only about 51 percent of the population has access to potable water. Tuberculosis is the most devastating disease, followed closely by dysentery, influenza, malaria, measles, tetanus, and whooping cough. Eye problems are endemic in Haiti; the chief causes of blindness are cataracts, glaucoma, pterygium (a growth over the cornea), and scarring of the cornea. A cholera epidemic broke out following the 2010 earthquake, claiming an additional 6,435 lives in only one month.

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World Bank. 2010. Promoting Nutrition Security in Haiti: An Assemment of Pre- and Post-Earthquake Conditions and Recommendations for the Way Forward. Washington, DC. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NUTRITION/Resources/HaitiNutritionAssessmentEnglishFINAL.pdf Accessed September 4, 2012.

This culture summary is from the article "Haitian in the Caribbean" by Robert Lawless in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures,Vol. 8, Middle America and Caribbean, James W. Dow, 1995 Teferi Abate Adem wrote the synopsis and indexing notes in September 2011. Population and other statistics were updated July through September 2012 by Teferi Abate Adem and Ian Skoggard.