The only world leader of any note to turn up for Haiti's bicentenary party in January, prophetically, was Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. He'd seen the obvious parallels in a black country that had successfully thrown off colonial rule. He took a lot of flak for it in the South African press. He took some in Haiti too. They shot at his helicopter. He can't have foreseen he might be asked to return the hospitality quite so soon. Jean-Bertrand Aristide begins his exile back in the continent where Haiti's sad story began. He was its best hope in 200 years and its worst disappointment.
The events in this article took place at the beginning of the coup. I flew into Haiti on the day of the largest mass demonstration against Aristide's rule. The Artibonite Resistance Front, aka the Cannibal Army, had taken control of Gona•ves, a city in the north. There was a lot of intimidation by government-sponsored thugs. The chancellor of the university had had his legs smashed in his office; students barricaded themselves on campus; and the Oloffson, the spookily gothic hotel in Port-au-Prince made famous by Graham Greene's The Comedians, was empty except for passing tight-lipped evangelical missionaries sipping fruit juice on the veranda, and voodoo covens spitting rum in the tangled garden beneath them. Hanging over the city was an expectation of change. The barometer of anger and retribution was rising; it was insufferably hot, close and dirty. There was drumming and screams in the night. Port-au-Prince was as mad as hell and it was its birthday. Blow out the candles, the petrol bombs and the burning roadblock and make a wish, Haiti.
Two centuries ago the divinely named Toussaint Louverture, a latter-day Spartacus, raised up a black army of slaves and beat Napoleon's grand army, thereby joining that tiny elite club — along with Hannibal, the Zulus and the Ethiopians — of African armies that have beaten western ones in battle. But the Haitians alone went on to win the war and form a third of the island of Hispaniola into the first and oldest black republic in the world. So why isn't this the biggest global feelgood, politically correct whoopee anniversary of the year? Why isn't there a miniseries and holiday programmes and delegations of western left-wing politicians parading their collective white-arsed guilt, junketing in solidarity? Well, mostly because it's bloody frightening; really, properly, deeply scary.
Haiti is a political and economic dead man walking, and it has been for most of its 200 years. The colonial powers in the Caribbean made sure that no damn slave republic was going to prosper — bad for business. So Haiti has staggered from one corrupt, bankrupt, vainglorious, mad government to another. Poor, friendless Haiti has been cleaved by self-imposed racism between black and mulatto, private armies of thugs and the pervasive influence of voodoo. Ten years ago, Aristide swept to power for a second time — his first crack at the job in 1990, when he was elected in Haiti's first free elections, had been spoilt a bit by a military takeover. A one-time liberation theologist priest, he was going to be the Caribbean's Mandela — part Gandhi, part Eva Peron. He became an embattled, paranoid recluse who suspended parliamentary elections, ruled by increasingly irrational diktat, had his own death squad, and was widely believed to be fundamentally corrupt, steeped in drug money. The anger, the heat of betrayal in the streets, had reached boiling point.
Thirty-three coups and two elections sounds like a political joke. It's Haiti's CV. Politics have always been a seesaw of violent regime change followed by ruthless consolidation that inspires violent change punctuated by occasional foreign intervention. The Americans have tipped up three times, once staying for more than a decade. The French, with a solipsistic vanity, imagine that partially Francophone Haiti is in their sphere of influence. Each new regime scrapes ever more frantically at the empty barrel. Haiti has nothing to offer the outside world except the threat of refugees, and precious little to offer Haitians. There is 70% unemployment and the worst Aids infection in the new world, a problem of sub-Saharan despair. With nobody to stop them or help them, Haitians take to internecine violence of a Hammer Horror ingenuity.
Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and the skintest bit of the poorest country in the western hemisphere is Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum of 250,000 God-and-mammon-forsaken souls on the seashore at the edge of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The one thing everyone who knows about Haiti agrees on, the top piece of advice they all give you, is: don't go near the City of the Sun, it's just too dangerous. Nobody's tried to solve its problems, only exploit them. Even Haitians, who are born living dangerously, say that the city is desperate, its main industry kidnapping, its only law gangs of nihilistic youths.
It was advice I was happy to take after a week in this country. And then Louis, my driver and guide, a weary, prematurely aged man with more worries than joys, quietly mentioned, apropos of nothing, that he could take me to Cité Soleil if I wanted to go. "But wouldn't that be suicidally foolish?" I whimpered. He shrugged: if I wanted to, he'd take me. I so wish he hadn't said that. Leadenly I took the offer to the photographer. We don't want to go, do we? I mean, poverty worldwide has an ugly sameness, a characteristic it shares with uncountable wealth. And, frankly, us going wouldn't make the slightest difference to the inhabitants or anyone else for that matter; no story is worth risking your life for. Being a photographer, Gigi said simply: "It's what we do; it's not our job to make a difference. We witness and we report." Damn, damn, damn. I wriggled on the hook for a week, but I knew we were going.
From atop the surrounding hills, Port-au-Prince looks like God aimed the ethereal kitty litter at the sea and missed. It's a pale splatter of mud brick, breeze block and corrugated iron set in a plate of congealed, dried sludge. In passing I should mention that Haiti is a first-rate, Hydra-headed ecological disaster. The richest soil in the Caribbean is being blown into the ocean. The crumpled land is a dusty, dun-coloured, cracked lino. It's easy to pick out the border with the Dominican Republic, because that's where the green starts. That's where the money starts.
Picking my way through the streets of Port-au-Prince, I'm prodded by the twin conundrums of late capitalism. Why is it that the poorest travellers have the most luggage, and that the people with the least make the most rubbish? Rubbish is Port-au-Prince's leitmotif; a passing Martian would say that the manufacture and marketing of filth was the city's principal industry. Nowhere has the accumulation and hoarding of garbage reached such obsessive, constipated zeal as in Haiti. Filth flows through the streets and alleys and down the canals and through the squares like slow, slimy magma; rubbish creeps in through doors and windows, absorbing homes and parked cars. People live in and on it, like grubby, glistening surfers. The abiding essence of Port-au-Prince is its smell. Fumes from thousands of exhausted carburettors and the sweet stink of gutter decay and warm piss. Despite all this, they are an astonishingly handsome people. We honk and stutter our way through town past the dock, where market stalls are cut-open sea containers full of contraband. Past the charcoal market, where the barges bring in the charred remains of Haiti's hardwood forest. Past the rolling, smoky rubbish dump that's the size of Rutland, and on to the end of a narrow alley that peters out to nothing. Here, Louis stops the car and we walk across no man's land to the City of the Sun.
In the roofless wreck of a breeze-block hut is a gang of boys, the oldest probably in their twenties, the youngest, five or six. Louis talks quickly and softly in Creole. They stare at us with blank faces; I take off my sunglasses and smile winningly. Two lads in their early teens slide off a wall and walk ahead: our guides and bodyguards. We slither over a field of effluent toward a stand of beaten corrugated huts on the banks of a river of sickly effluvia. We slide and shuffle to the dark side of the sun. I'm something of a passing slum expert — a tourist of poverty, a misery day-tripper — but let me tell you, nothing, nowhere, not the squatter camps of Cape Town, the favelas of Rio, the famine centres of Sudan or the hideous Stalinist gulag of Kaliningrad come close to the squalor and deprivation of this place.
This is a city built on sh**. That's not a euphemism: it's a stinking, sick dung mire that stretches as far as the eye can see, riven with streams of diarrhoeic runny shite that splatter the beaches and leak out to sea. It's like the battlefield of some gastric Somme, with sunshine. Nothing grows here but shredded plastic and disease. It's so disgusting and inhospitable that there are barely any flies. Naked children sit and play in slimy holes, their houses rusted corrugated lean-tos that teeter and clank; occasional brick sheds squat with black, paneless windows.
The next thing you notice about the City of the Sun is how quiet it is. Slums are generally raucous, energetic places, but there are no roads here, no traffic, no electricity, no generators, nobody to venture out for fun or companionship; no shops, no business. In the shade of a hut, a man with a cleft palate and harelip sits on a brick and bangs a nail into a square of tin, over and over. He's making coconut graters. The boys laugh at him.
This place is where Aristide's most ardent support came from. They grasped at him for a saviour. It's from here that he recruited his muscle, but now there's anger and resentment. One of my guides points at the picture of the president on his faded free T-shirt, and searches for an English word, jabbing his chest. "F***er," he says, "big f***er man, okay."
