presented as African in origin and presentation. It is for these reasons that for most of its independent life Haiti has been viewed, as one National Geographic writer said, as 'West Africa in the West Indies'(Scofield, 1961, pp. 227-259). There exist good reasons why this moniker has had such durability. The comparisons are clearly rendered on the surface of Haitian daily life. But the view is inaccurate. It presupposes a fixity of experience impossible to sustain given the violence of slavery and the trepidations of centuries of tumultuous national history. More problematic still, it does not sufficiently account for the ambiguous and complex ways in which Haitian intellectual discourse wrangled with the place of Africa in the nation state.