The history of Haiti – in pictures

A woman prays in the rubble of the main cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Today marks the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, killing more than 230,000 people. Even before the disaster, the country was among the very poorest, and most poorly equipped, on Earth. At more than 10,714 square miles in size and with a population of 3 million in the 1950s, Haiti was already considered unsustainably overcrowded; the population is now 9 million. Over 70% of Haiti now lives on less than $2 a day. The country is in an advanced state of industrial collapse, with a GDP per capita in 2008 of $716.5. The unemployment rate is 75%. Some 66% of Haitians work in agriculture, but this is mainly small-scale subsistence farming and accounts for less than a third of GDP. Foreign aid accounts for bertween 30% and 40% of the government's budget. There are 80 deaths for every 1,000 live births and the survival rate of newborns is the lowest in the western hemisphere Photograph: Allison Shelley/Reuters

A 16th-century engraving of Haitians fighting the Spanish. Haiti – or rather, the large island in the western Atlantic of which the present-day Republic of Haiti occupies the western part – was discovered by Christopher Columbus in December 1492. The native Taino people knew it as Ayiti, but Columbus claimed it for the Spanish crown and named it La Isla Española. As Spanish interest in the island faltered with the discovery of vast reserves of gold and silver elsewhere in Latin America, the early occupiers moved steadily eastward, leaving the western part of Hispaniola free for English, Dutch and, particularly, French buccaneers Photograph: Stapleton Collection/Corbis

Buccaneers fish for turtles, 1571; from the Histoire Générale des Antilles Habitées par les Français. The French West India Company gradually assumed control of Haiti in the 17th century, and by 1665 France had formally claimed it as Saint-Domingue. A treaty with Spain 30 years later saw Madrid cede the western third of the island to Paris. Economically, French rule was a spectacular success. By the mid-18th century, Haiti was known as the Pearl of the Antilles, one of the richest islands in France's colonial empire. In the 1780s, Haiti exported 60% of all the coffee and 40% of all the sugar consumed in Europe: more than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Carnival of the Ferocious, Belle Anse: a carnival celebration in this small fishing village in which locals paint their bodies in beige and black to symbolise the early African and American-Indian slaves from whom most Haitians are descended. Haiti's riches could only be exploited by importing up to 40,000 slaves a year, and in the late 18th century Haiti accounted for more than one-third of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Conditions for these men and women were atrocious; the average life expectancy for a slave on Haiti was 21 years. Abuse was dreadful, and routine: 'Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars?' wrote one former slave many years later. 'Have they not forced them to eat excrement? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss?' Photograph: Olivier Coret/Getty

By the late 18th century the white French planters were outnumbered by slaves 10 to one. This was an uncomfortable position once the French Revolution of 1789 had raised the awkward question of how exactly the Declaration of the Rights of Man might be said to apply not only to Haiti's large population of free gens de couleur (generally the offspring of white plantation owners and black concubines) but also to the slaves themselves. In August 1791, Dutty Boukman, a Jamaican-born Haitian voodoo priest, conducted a ceremony at the Bois Caïman during which he prophesied that a massed rebellion would at last free the slaves of Saint-Domingue. A wild animal was sacrificed and Boukman urged them to take bloody revenge on their French oppressors. Earlier attempts at slave uprisings had been brutally put down, but Boukman's words, and stature, are seen as having proved decisive: within a week of the ceremony, 1,800 plantations had been destroyed and 1,000 slave owners killed
Photograph: La Ceremonie du Bois-Caiman by Ernst Prophete/Flickr/arte del pueblo

The founders of Haiti, Toussaint Louverture (left, painted by Delpich) and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The rebellion of Saint-Domingue's slaves began on the northern plains in August 1791 but the uprising and the ensuing bloody civil war, which culminated in a brutal battle against Napoléon Bonaparte's forces, was not over for another 12 years. As France became distracted by war with Britain, the desperate French commander, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, hanged, drowned or burned and buried alive thousands of rebels. The slaves' eloquent, inspirational and highly effective military and political leader was Louverture, born a slave but a free man by the time he joined the rebellion. After his betrayal and capture in 1802 (he died of pneumonia in prison in France), his lieutenant Dessalines became leader of the revolution and independent Haiti's first ruler, finally vanquishing Napoléon's troops at the Battle of Vertières in 1803 and declaring his country's independence in January 1804 Photograph: Corbis

Gravediggers prepare the ground for the burial of earthquake victims in the devastated landscape of Titayen, February 2010. Haiti's revolution destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and most of its plantations; the country's economy never fully recovered. In exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay punitive reparations: some 150m francs, in gold, the equivalent of something like $21bn in today's money. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could ever afford. In fact Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 right up until 1947; to raise the money, it was obliged to took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at utterly exorbitant rates of interest. By 1900, Haiti was spending a staggering 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the country was trapped in a vicious spiral of debt. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The border between Haiti (left) and the Dominican Republic (DR) is more than just a political boundary: it also reflects terrible deforestation on the Haitian side. The process of soil erosion began under French rule, when the land was managed without a thought to future fertility. Then, in the chaos after the revolution, land was parcelled out into minuscule plots occupied by individual families. An impoverished population has since the 1950s been felling trees for charcoal to use in cooking. Haiti is now considered to be roughly 98% deforested, its arable land little more than rubble, more clay and topsoil disappearing with every storm. Its population was starving long before a quartet of crippling storms, Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike, struck in 2008, killing 800 people and devastating over 70% of Haiti's remaining agricultural land. There were shocking stories of desperate people mixing vegetable oil with mud to make something that looked approximately like a biscuit Photograph: Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/NASA

US marines in Port-au-Prince, 2004. The US, a near neighbour – Port-au-Prince is 700 miles, 90 minutes' flying time, from Florida – first invaded Haiti in 1915, and stayed until 1934. Washington was concerned about Haiti's violent and permanently unstable political scene (the country had been through six presidents between 1911 and 1915), and alarmed by the rapidly growing influence of a small but powerful German business community. But above all, it was terrified at the prospect of an anti-American regime emerging that might default on Haiti's huge debts to US and French banks. Within six weeks of the 1915 invasion, US officials controlled Haiti's customs houses, banks and treasury. Some 40% of the country's national income was diverted to paying off US and French debts. For the next 19 years, US advisers essentially ran the country, using the marines as enforcers Photograph: Hector Mata/AFP

President Francois Duvalier (rear, centre) in May 1963. Haiti's rulers, with few exceptions, have made little attenpt to try to solve their country's desperate problems, tending to concentrate instead on looting it as efficiently as they could. François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier came to power in 1957, heading a regime widely seen as one of the most corrupt and repressive in modern history. He exploited Haiti's traditional belief in voodoo to establish a personal militia, the feared and hated Tonton Macoutes, said to be zombies he had raised from the dead. During the 28 years in power of Papa Doc and his playboy son and heir, Jean-Claude Duvalier, or Baby Doc, the Tonton Macoutes and their henchmen killed between 30,00 and 60,000 Haitians, and raped, beat and tortured countless more Photograph: Michael Rougier/Getty Image

A woman collects water from the ground to clean a table from which to sell meat in Port-au-Prince, in November 2010. Under the Duvaliers, Haiti's basic infrastructure – roads, sanitation, hospitals, schools – went from bad to worse. Aid agencies and international creditors donated and lent millions of dollars for large-scale projects that were often abandoned before completion, and which sometimes never even started. Multinational corporations earned lucrative contracts in exchange for handsome sweeteners. Historians estimate that the Duvaliers were at times embezzling up to 80% of Haiti's international aid, while the additional debts they signed up to during their near-30 years in power accounted for 45% of what the country owed by the time of their departure Photograph: Kena Betancur/Reuters

Demonstrators destroy a Duvalier effigy in February 1986. Aged just 19 when he assumed power on his father's death in 1971, Baby Doc at first appeared less brutal than Francois. He left the boring business of governing to his mother, and enjoyed an extravagantly dissolute lifestyle while profiting every bit as much as his father from fraudulent development and trading schemes. Baby Doc's popularity began to wane, though, when he spent $3m on his wedding, and plummeted after an epidemic of African swine fever prompted, on the advice of US officials, the mass slaughter of the island's hardy native creole pigs, the main source of income for most poor families. Highly critical comments by a clearly outraged Pope John Paul II during a visit proved the final straw: the army sided with the people during the ensuing popular uprising and Baby Doc was forced into exile in France. Estimates of what he took with him run from a mere $120m to over $900m Photograph: Ricki Rosen/Corbis

Haitian boat people fleeing to the US in 1991. Haitians have been settling in the US and Canada since independence from France in 1804. Prior to the American civil war, citizens of the world's free black republic came to seek fame and fortune, and some found it: Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, known as the Father of Chicago, is thought to have been born in Saint-Domingue, while WE Du Bois, a leading intellectual and civil rights activist and the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, was the son of a Haitian immigrant. More recently, large-scale emigration has been driven by the brutal political repression and desperate poverty from which many Haitians suffered under the Duvalier regime and its successors. New Orleans has historic links to the country dating back to the revolution, but there are also large and highly visible Haitian communities in New York, Miami and other major US cities. The Haitian diaspora in the US is now reckoned to be between 800,000 and 1m strong Photograph: Patrick Chauvel/Corbis

Jean-Bertrand Aristide in his office in 1995. Haiti's first democratically elected president, Aristide was a parish priest and fiery liberation theologist in Port-au-Prince in the early 1980s when he became involved in the pro-democracy movement. He captured 67% of the vote in the 1990-91 elections, pledging to move the population 'from destitution to poverty with dignity'. Ousted in September 1991, he fled the country but returned in 1994 when US pressure forced the military leaders who had removed him to step down. Barred by the constitution from serving two consecutive terms, Aristide won the 2000 presidential elections with 90% of the vote. But he was overthrown again in 2004 in a coup widely alleged to have been backed – even orchestrated – by Washington; he says he was abducted and put on a US plane to Africa, where he remains in exile Photograph: Gerard Rancinan/ Corbis

Pilgrims pray and play in the waterfall at Saut d'Eau in one of first major voodoo and Catholic pilgrimages of the season. Voodoo has played an essential role in Haitian society since before independence, and is seen by many as both soul and the memory of the nation. The faith has its roots in west African pantheist religions but was demonised from the time the first African slaves were brought to the Caribbean in the 16th century; European slave traders justified their activities by saying they were rescuing slaves from devil worship. In Haiti, secret ceremonies helped slaves keep alive the spirit of resistance, and voodoo priests helped lead the 1791 revolution. It was nonetheless banned for many years after independence. Voodoo was finally given official recognition in the 1987 constitution but many of its rituals have been lost, and outside the country it has never fully shaken off its black-magic image: sticking pins in wax dolls, and conjuring up zombies through blood sacrifices
Photograph: David Levene/David Levene

The scene in Port-au-Prince on 14 January 2010. At 16.53 local time on January 12, a magnitude-7 earthquake, with its epicentre near the town of Léogâne, about 15 miles west of Port-au-Prince, wreaked unprecedented devastation on the most densely populated areas of a country almost uniquely poorly equipped to deal with any major natural disaster. The authorities have estimated that at least 3 million people were affected: at least 230,000 died, 300,000 were injured and more than 1.5m were made homeless. About 250,000 homes and 30,000 commercial buildings were wrecked. The presidential palace, parliament building and Port-au-Prince cathedral, as well as the central prison, were hit, as was the HQ of the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti (85 UN staff died). The rescue effort was badly hampered by disrupted transport and communications networks; morgues were filled with tens of thousands of bodies, which had to be buried in mass graves Photograph: Jorge Silva/REUTERS

An aid worker helps a Haitian mother weakened by cholera breastfeed in November 2010. A cholera outbreak has killed some 3,500 people and is proving difficult to control as hundreds of thousands of Haitians continue to live in temporary camps with atrocious sanitary conditions. One year after the earthquake, despite billions of dollars of donations and aid pledges, about 1 million people are still living in tents and little of the debris has bene cleared up. Even major aid groups are critical of the overall relief effort, with Oxfam saying Haiti's recovery is 'at a standstill' owing to 'a crippling combination of Haitian government indecision, rich donor countries' too-frequent pursuit of their own aid priorities, and a lacklustre Interim Haiti Recovery Commission". The UN, however, says the immediate emergency relief operation delivered fast, life-saving food and medical assistance to huge numbers of survivors Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images