# The nineteenth century call  
Africa has always been the nucleus of Haitian self-imagination. At independence, two out of every three Haitians were born in Africa (Casimir, 2000). The very act of returning the former French colony to its Indigenous name, Haiti, - Ayiti in the original Taino spelling - was a defiant one, an erasure of the colonial hold and the damage that came with it. The first constitution of Haiti proclaimed all Haitians as blacks. Racial prejudice was a foreign concept, an imposition of the European mind as rationale for its abuses of the African body.  
If blackness in 1804 was associated with Africanness then Haiti had proudly accepted itself as the vindication of Africans. European observers disturbed over Haiti's existence - a land without slavery or colonial rule; a living challenge to all presuppositions of black infantilism - would treat the country as a laboratory to prove or disprove the perceived incapacity of black rule. More than this, Haiti's failings would be held up as justification for colonialism in Africa - a promotion of white control of blacks to save them from a dangerous primitivism. This psychological symbiosis between Haiti and Africa was profound. The burden Haiti carried in its first half century was to be an example for Africans across the diaspora. From Mississippi to Mombasa, what Africa's daughters and sons could accomplish was to some degree reliant on how Haiti developed.  
The views of racist observers of Haiti's progress since 1804 sharpened in Arthur de Gobineau's influential 1854 racist treatise Essai sur l'inégalité des races bumaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). To the extent that Haiti figured it was considered as exemplary of African backwardness. In Haiti there were mostly blacks,  
who although only their grandfathers knew Africa were still under the influence of it [...] their supreme joy is laziness; their ultimate reason is murder [...]. The history of Haiti, of democratic Haiti, is a long relationship of massacres (Gobineau, 1967, p. 76).