In the humid, velvet-black Haiti night, we talk on a hotel terrace overlooking Port-au-Prince. Five years have passed since the earthquake that razed parts of this city and its island nation to the ground, taking up to 300,000 lives with it. One Haitian man remembers roads lined with bodies – “pow, pow, pow, like that”, he says, chopping out lines with his hand. Many more died from starvation and disease in the aftermath.
Haiti, which declared itself free from slavery in 1804, has paid a high price for its presumption. Natural disasters, the refusal of the US to recognise its statehood (Thomas Jefferson feared an autonomous republic of former slaves), the dictatorships of the Duvaliers (1957-86) and continuing political corruption combine to suggest a land in bondage to a cruel fate. Little wonder the few white outsiders who venture beyond the city without the protection of charities, NGOs or the UN find themselves fascinated by the Haitian practice of vodou.
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