These tributes were not mere words of emotion. Colonialism, and the inhuman trade in African bodies since the fifteenth century, brought black people from Africa to the Caribbean and also cut off their direct contact with their homeland. Divided and brutalized on plantations, they were forced to keep Africa in their minds as they created something else in a foreign place. The roots were always there. In Haiti, as writer Gérard Jolibois pointed out in an essay dedicated to Senghor, the ethnic origins of Haitians can be traced back to Senegal and West Africa: Wolofs, Serer, Fula, Mandinka and especially the three principal ones, Senegalese, Congos and Aradas. Haitian culture, most of all the Vodou religion, 'preciously protects' these memories of the homeland (Ibid.).  
This history accounts for the striking similarities between West Africa and Haiti ('Caribbean Africa') that Senghor commented on eloquently on his visit. Haitians, he stated in his public address in Port-au-Prince, 'were the first to refuse to abandon themselves to act like other races [...] to distant Africa your people had indeed succeeded in bringing with them "the rage of life", this power of creation which, in the twentieth century has invaded all the arts' (Ibid.).