Haiti is not a place for the squeamish or the unseasoned traveler. Attendez derriere la ligne jaune - Wait behind the yellow the sign says when you manage to find your way through the chaotic two and three headed snaky lines and get up to the glass fronted airport cubicles of the Haitian immigration officers. Surprisingly, the immigration officials waited patiently, for the incoming visitor or returning Haitian. But no one stayed behind the line. The line was not even yellow. It was more of a jaundiced ochre, trampled over by hundreds of feet of laden travelers. Waiting for the luggage is yet another Haitian experience - the conveyor belt resembles a chaotic Dambala (African snake god) going round and round, a humped back snake misshapen by cello taped and stringed up broken cardboard boxes, oversize and travel weary suitcases, even large bottles of potable water clothed in soiled linen. Sorry to greet you in this condition, a sign apologizes above the hot, crowded steamy baggage area with one ineffectual fan swirling the heat around unevenly, we are in the process of rectifying it. Signs of rectification were hard to identify in the arrival lounge. Armed with one state of the art laptop computer, three cameras and two smallish suitcases, our response of vacance to the customs' officer conventional question What eez the purpose of your vizeet to 'Ayti was understandably greeted skeptically. He looked over our heads to the search officer, pleez opaan ze baggaages. She rustled through the spare packaging of clothes and essentials and helped politely to close the suitcase as he waved us royally on. I remembered my sister's comment from her visit a few years ago. Despite their depressed living conditions, she had found Haitians to be a polite and extremely kind people. So far so good. You manage to find a path through customs into another set of indeterminate lines, pass the exit door held open by a large rock stone on one side. A yellow hot midday sun against a sea of black faces, most of them self employed porters vying and trying your attention, struggling to get a hand on your baggage. Others shouting taxee taxee, others waiting for relatives or friends and obscuring an escape route. Yet there was some method in this madness, the Montana had come to Mohammed. The hotel driver had turned up to meet us. I had come to Haiti, accompanied by my husband, to carry out research for my book on Caribbean iconography. Minus one or two islands here and there, over the last two decades I had traveled throughout most of the Caribbean, including to the Dominican Republic which adjoins Haiti. Haiti was still unknownterritory within the Region. Columbus had claimed the entire island for the Spanish crown back in 1492, calling it Hispaniola or little Spain. The island was later called Santo Domingo by the Spanish, who began introducing African slaves into the colony from 1503. By 1635 the French had settled the western side and of course translated the name into their tongue, Ste Domingue. A campaign of terror through poisoning against white colonials led by maroon Francois Makandal began in 1750. The real war however, was fought consistently from 1791 to 1803, with indescribable bloodshed and intrigue, plots and counterplots, between white colonials and white planters, between small planters and big planters, between white planters and mulattos, and against the mulatto and black population. The events in Ste Domingue were spurred on by the revolution in France in 1789 for liberte, equalite and fraternite. The French and the British became strange bedfellows in the attempt to suppress the uprisings in Ste Domingue. Despite the odds the black slaves and some of their half brothers, the mulattos, had fought and won the first successful slave revolution. In 1803, in a gesture of defiance and vision, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the black generals, ripped out the white from the French flag, symbolically tearing out the white control, and with independence in 1804 returned the name given to the land by the Tainos, Hayti - the land of mountains, to itself. …