Haiti
POPULATION 7,063,722
VODOUIST 80 percent
CHRISTIAN (ROMAN CATHOLIC, PROTESTANT) 93 percent
OTHER (JEWISH, SANTERIAN, RASTAFARIAN, MORMON) 7 percent
Country Overview
Introduction
Haiti occupies the western third of Hispaniola, the second largest island in the Caribbean. Its original inhabitants were Taino Indians, whom the Spanish first encountered during Columbu'ss initial voyage in 1492, then enslaved, and, finally, decimated—all within a generation. After the Taino genocide the island became a Spanish colony with plantations worked by African slaves, who were first imported in about 1512. Haiti became a French colony in 1697, and a century later it became the second independent republic in the New World and the only nation in history to be born out of a successful slave revolt (1791–1804). Although French slave law (Code Noir) required that slaves be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, most had continued to practice some form of African ancestral religions, which by the end of the eighteenth century had coalesced into a religion called "voodoo" by terrified white colonists. By the end of the Haitian Revolution, most Catholic priests, along with most white settlers, had disappeared from the island. The Catholic Church was reinstated as the official state religion via a Vatican concordat in 1860, and soon afterwards Episcopal and then Baptist missionaries arrived from the United States.
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