There exists, much more than shared imaginaries, a subterraneous connection between Africa and Haiti that endures despite the distance of centuries. It was Aimé Césaire, the Martinican thinker with whom Senghor and Léon Damas of French Guiana forged the idea of Négritude as students in France in the 1930s, who credited Haiti as the root of an independent black aesthetic. After his own visit to Haiti in 1944, Césaire famously proclaimed that it was in Haiti that Négritude 'stood up for the first time'. The implicit meaning in Césaire's assertion was that when the enslaved Africans who were brought to labour on the plantations in French Saint-Domingue triumphed against their colonists in 1804 and created the independent free State of Haiti, their victory was also an African victory. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti's first ruler in 1804 put it simply when he said that these African revolutionaries had 'avenged America'.  
Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines and their successors were the pioneers of the 'rehabilitation' of Africans that Senghor noted in his address in Haiti. As the first independent black republic, Haiti was then and is just as much now viewed from various perspectives as a reflection of all that was considered good and bad about Africa. For more than two hundred years, travellers to Haiti have remarked freely on the striking similarities between Haiti and African nations: the language, habits, customs and attitudes of its majority population are all