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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, some history that many of you may not know that's being brought to the surface thanks to a remarkable series in the New York Times. Haiti, a small impoverished country in the Caribbean, in case you don't know, has a long and hard history of ups and downs.

The focus is often on the country's lack of means. We often refer to Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. What's rarely discussed is what led to its socioeconomic status. Little is known, by most people, about the history of the debt that Haiti paid their French enslavers for their freedom, a price they still pay today. The New York Times has published a, so far, five-part collection of articles about the debt, the loans, and payments over a significant portion of Haiti's already struggling economy.

While neighboring Latin American countries built schools, roads, water systems, and hospitals, and more, Haiti, unable to pay for such things, was left behind. Citizens today suffer from low education levels, high poverty rates, and limited to no access to necessary resources such as healthcare compared to other countries in our hemisphere. Now, this is a history and status well-known to many Haitians themselves, less so outside the country or outside the Haitian diaspora.

With us now, Catherine Porter, international correspondent for The Times, and Selam Gebrekidan, investigative reporter for The Times based in London to discuss their article How a French Bank Captured Haiti. Catherine and Selam, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Catherine Porter: Thanks for having us.

Selam Gebrekidan: Thanks for having us.

Brian Lehrer: By way of background, you want to tell people some of the basic history-- Either of you. You wrote the article together, so I'll let you sort out who answers the questions. Some of the basic history of France's colonization of Haiti and slavery there compared to the way the US developed it under the British.

Catherine Porter: Sure, I can tackle that one. Just so you know, we are two of four people who worked on this, so we want to make sure that people know we weren't the only writers.

Brian Lehrer: You want to identify yourself just so people show your voices apart?

Catherine Porter: Yes. This is Catherine Porter. I'm a journalist with The Times like you say. I'm normally based in Toronto but here I am in New York right now. The history of the French slavery, the slave trade when it came to Haiti. Haiti is, as most people might know, part of an island, the Hispaniola and the Caribbean. It was actually colonized a bit later than some of the other surrounding islands.

By the time the French came and set it up, it was closer to the dawn of the 1700s, a little bit before that. They imported basically a very brutal form of the slave trade. Slaves there didn't last very long. It was hugely very quickly profitable colony called Saint-Domingue in which over a matter of a hundred years, they were shipping the majority of sugar that was being produced or consumed in Europe was produced in Saint-Domingue, and same thing goes for coffee.

While it was colonized late, it became this huge industrial complex in terms of factories for sugar and coffee, and it was all on the backs of slave labor. In fact, historians say that Saint-Domingue was the most productive colony and also the most brutal. Slaves, 1/3 of enslaved people who arrived died along the way, but they didn't survive for very long. In fact, the whole system was set up to just repopulate them with new imports continually.

That went on until 1791 when there was the modern world's largest slave rebellion in Haiti, in which case, the slaves-- Mostly enslaved people, there were some free people of color too, but mostly enslaved people rose up. They beat the French. They not only beat the French on the ground but within 10 years, Napoleon sent a huge battalion and they beat Napoleon. They declared the first Black country of the Americas.

Brian Lehrer: Selam Gebrekidan, maybe you want to take the next question. The article says, "Haiti became the first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid the families of their former masters for generations." A lot of our listeners have never heard that before. This is like reverse reparations, I guess. You call it also a ransom. Can you describe who had to pay whom and how?

Selam Gebrekidan: Right. When we were researching the story, we tried to find other historical precedents in which the victors of a war, let alone the people who had fought for their freedom paid their former masters or losers in a war in case of reparations. In the case of the modern world, we found that Haiti was the only country with that history.

A few decades after the Haitians had won their independence through bloody wars, the French came back with warships and demanded payment for presumably lost property. Haiti could not afford that sum so it had to borrow from French banks, the consortium of French banks mostly based in Paris. It also had to empty out its coffers in order to start paying that indemnity.

The indemnity that the French requested or demanded on threat of war was for 150 million francs, which is a huge sum even by that time. That started a spiral of debt in 1825, and the indemnity, which the French requested and the loan that Haiti had to take out, together, historians call that the double debt. That was only paid off in 1888. That's not to mention other loans that the Haitians had to take in the meantime in order to build infrastructure projects to pay part of the original double debt as well. That's where it started in 1825.

Brian Lehrer: This double debt, ransom, and the loan to pay, how was that enforced? Why did Haiti have to pay for their freedom?

Catherine Porter: I'll take that one. This was an astounding story that the Declaration of Independence of Haiti. At that time, it was literally an ocean of enslavers all around it. No other country, even countries that Haitians had supported like new Latin American countries, none of them would acknowledge Haiti's independence. Britain didn't want to acknowledge it. It had Jamaica right nearby, it had Barbados, it had all the other colonies.

The United States was very opposed to acknowledging it. In fact, didn't even acknowledge Haiti as an independent country until after the civil war or till the civil war because they feared that it would inspire a similar revolt among American slaves in the south, so it was frozen out. It couldn't turn to anyone to protect it. It was facing a war, which this was a country that was already crippled after more than a decade of revolutionary war, and it had no friends to turn to.

It took on this enormous-- Agreed to pay this enormous debt to pay off the former masters, and so the actual indemnity on paper was for reparations for those people who lost property. When we looked into the archives, and looked into the debates, and looked into the pages from the commission that was set up to decide how much each family and France should get, we saw that it wasn't just for a plot of land, but it was for the human property also.

You have these descendants of formerly enslaved people in Haiti who are paying mostly through coffee taxes for generations to the descendants of their former enslavers mostly in France.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on this for our two guests from The New York Times. Haitians and Haitian Americans in the audience, do you know this history? Do you think it's affected you or your family or the places where you have roots? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Who's visited France, and did you ever wonder who helped fund the construction of the Eiffel Tower or anything else in this context? How much do you know about the role of France in Haiti's present-day economy?

French people listening too, did you know about the tumultuous financial relationship between these two countries after independence? Do you think France should pay reparations now? What should France do to compensate for their depletion of Haiti's economy over the many years? We want to hear from you if you're Haitian, if you're French, anyone else with an interest. Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet a comment or a question @BrianLehrer. Let's take a phone call. Here's Roland in Albany, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roland.

Roland: Hi, good morning. First, I want to thank them for the article. It first infuriated me, then had me in tears, then infuriated me again. The fact that this is not discussed or taught in American schools, or French schools, or English schools, it's just been so offensive in my entire life.

My paternal family is from the Barbados, and what happened to Haiti, and I've been to Haiti with my children in Dominican Republic, and even at eight, nine years old, they say, "Daddy, what happened?" Just the difference between two places on one island, it's just so outrageous. The fact that Haiti had to pay France for its own freedom. I know they say they paid for their independence, but because they were going to bomb it to smithereens. Every American schoolchild should be taught this. It should be part of the curriculum as much as 1619.

Most Americans don't even realize that the Second Amendment was put in, not because of fear of a tyrannical government, but for fear that in counties in the south where Blacks outnumbered whites, 10 and 20 to 1, if there was ever a slave revolt, the white people were going to be in serious trouble. That's why they couldn't recognize Haiti because it would encourage something.

I wrote a short story years ago about a mythical Black state, where the Blacks had risen up, realized that they outnumbered the whites dramatically, and took over, basically, entire confederacy. That was the thing that so scared the whites, that Haiti was their worst nightmare. While working on that paper, I went to Pernambuco in Brazil and found a diary of a slave owner, who wrote that he had confessed to his God and to his priests he had committed rape, saying he believes he was going to hell, and he was sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Roland, thank you very much. Well, there's so much in there, Catherine and Selam, maybe the central question besides the narrative of some of the things that happened is why isn't this taught more in the schools? Why does it take a New York Time series in 2022 to bring this more into public consciousness? Do you have any answer to that?

Catherine Porter: No. Our colleague Constant Meheut, who is based in Paris, looked into the curriculum in France, and you'd think that this would be taught in France, but it's not. In fact, only 10% of kids in France learn anything about Toussaint Louverture, who was one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, who was captured by Napoleon's troops, was kidnapped essentially, and he ended up dying in a prison in France up in the mountains without ever having had a trial. They never learn about that, let alone the debt. It's just not taught.

Our job here was, we knew that this is not history that we have written. This has been written before. The old thing that-- We worked with many historians and our series is based on the scholarship of more than a century of historical research. What we did that's different is that we tabulated the payments. Selam had mentioned the 150 million francs. When you read history books, they mention Fr1]50 million was later reduced to Fr90 million, but we knew that there was also there's loan. With loans, there's interest fees, as we all know, there's late payments.

Our colleague, Constant, went to archives across France and tabulated how much year by year, the Haitian state paid. We try to also assess how much of its proposed budget is published budgets that took up. That's what we feel like we've added to the scholarship that we can say that over those years, the Haitian government spent an equivalent, the cost of this was an equivalent of what today would amount to $21 billion to $115 billion to their economy if that money had stayed in Haiti.

Of course, we were working with economists, there's a whole bunch of calculations you put in that what-ifs, but if the Haitian economy had grown at its really, really weakened state, the same state it was growing, and that money had stayed in Haiti, it would be $21 billion. If that money had sparked the economy to grow, and the Haitian economy had grown at the same rate as the average rate of Latin America during those years, it would be $115 billion.

Brian Lehrer: Have you had any response from the government of France, because there's an implication here that that money should be restored, some of it in some way now that you've calculated it in this way?

Selam Gebrekidan: Not yet. We have not gotten any response from the French government, but one thing is one of our stories deals with credit, industrial, and commercial, which is a big French bank that was involved in setting up Haiti's National Bank in the 19th century and siphoned off much of the country's resources to France. The parent company of the bank has now said that they are going to bring together researchers from Haiti and France to look into that history to research it.

Brian Lehrer: Yannick in the city, you're on WNYC. Hello, Yannick.

Yannick: Hello, Brian. I'm a long-time listener. I'm Haitian, my name is Yannick Man. I bet I am very sick. I know that history about the French made the Haitian bid all this money. I think they should pay all the money back right now. Why? Because the Haitians are in a situation that this is embarrassing. It's sad, mainly sad for the people, for the children. It is really, really sad.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. You two are journalists, you're not in the business of campaigning for the French government to do anything. Do you get any sense, or is it too early that people will run with this information and take up that mantle in an activist way?

Catherine Porter: We seem to be going back and forth. Like you said, our job is really to document, to research. We put it out in the public domain now. We don't know, we have no clue what will happen with this. I have to say, one thing that was really exciting for us is that we translated all five parts of our series into Haitian Creole, and that's the first time that The New York Times has done that in its history. We did that because it's about Haitian people. It's about Haitian history. I've been to Haiti more than 30 times, I can tell you, when you're on the streets of Haiti, people speak Creole.

Although in school, they learn French, the vast majority of people do not speak French regularly. They're not necessarily comfortable with it unless they're super educated. We wanted this to be for Haitians, and they should be able to read it. We have heard just a huge response in Haiti from journalists there and activists, but also from school teachers, and just collective farmers. We've heard stories of people reading it aloud. There's a diaspora group, a bunch of them in Miami that are setting up a reading club that they're going to gather once a week to read it. That really makes us happy that this story is resonating for people.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Here's Raphael in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hello, Raphael.

Raphael: Hello, good morning. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you for calling.

Raphael: I happen to be from the other side of the island, the Dominica Republic, but almost like everyone else, we have family struggling on both sides. The question that I have is the impact that that agreement between whether it was in Haiti and the French government, how did it impact the other side of the island given that Haiti had occupied the other side of the island from 1832 to 1844, and these payments were in effect at the time? [crosstalk] Go ahead.

Catherine Porter: That's a really interesting question you're asking. They made their first payment and 25 they defaulted. The Haitian government could not pay anymore, literally a slump set emptied its treasury, it had taken out this crippling loan. It wasn't until 1838 that it started repaying again and it paid very regularly.

As you know in 1843, the president of Haiti was chased out of the country and one of the reasons was, as you mentioned, the Dominican Republic and conquering of the other side of the island but at that point, the two countries separated again. In our research, we didn't really look at how this affected that side of the island. If it did at all, it'd be really interesting to see but we looked sort of more generally as to what it did to the coffers of the country, what percentage of the government budget it took up, and what it meant on the ground, because during this era of what was the Belle Époque in France, even in Costa Rica in the 1870s, 1860s, there was a huge infrastructure projects were happening around the world.

Electricity was going in, people were building large sewage systems, water treatment systems, and none of that was happening in Haiti. It missed out on that development boom because it had just been strangled in debt.

Brian Lehrer: Raphael, thank you for your call. Well, we're just about at a time. I do want to give you a chance to respond to the criticism that's come from Dr. Keisha Blain at Brown University, who tweeted that she did not believe historians were properly cited and we've got some tweets about that asking you to respond. You and your colleagues published a bibliography of sorts, titled The Ransom, which is the series, a look under the hood, listing primary and secondary sources. How did you decide who to include in the list of your sources and what do you say to the critique that you left important people out?

Selam Gebrekidan: Oh, we have been listening to the criticism ever since we published the story. We published the source documents, I mean, so bibliography of sorts, and because it is not an academic paper, our bibliography did not take the same format as well but what we tried to do in that document is to give credit to historians and researchers whose work was really important to our understanding of the topic.

Basically, these historians gave us the essential building blocks for the entirety of the project. We read quite a number of books, many of which did not make it into the list because we couldn't list them all. We spoke to quite a number of historians and researchers and as so often happens in journalism, we tend to talk to more people than we can quote or refer to by name in an article.

To my understanding, this is the first time that The New York Times has published, or one of the very few times that The New York Times has published a source document linked to a project acknowledging the body of work that we're relying on. We're not saying that we were the first ones to learn about the debt, what we're trying to do is build on existing scholarship and bring new findings, for example, the tabulation of the debt data, which we have also published separately on GitHub, any historian, researcher, interested reader can go and download the data set over there and also understand how we came about finding it and how we did our calculations. That's what we've tried to do with the under the hood document.

Brian Lehrer: Catherine, anything to add to that? I said Keisha Blain, I hope it was clear that as an example. She's prominent, she's been on the show. I mentioned her tweet in particular, but it's other historians as well making this complaint. You want to have the last word?

Catherine Porter: Well, I think Selam said it beautifully. Look, we publish the document and this happens a lot with journalists. I interviewed dozens of coffee farmers, I interviewed dozens of coffee traders in Haiti and politicians and diplomats, experts, historians that are just not in the story. We are super grateful to all the input we had from just so many academics, and we're sorry that people have hurt feelings or not. In this, we did the best we could.

Brian Lehrer: Catherine Porter, international correspondent for The New York Times, and Selam Gebrekidan, investigative reporter for The Times based in London. They've been here discussing their article How a French Bank Captured Haiti. Thank you so much for this remarkable reporting.

Catherine Porter: Thank you for having us.

Selam Gebrekidan: Thank you for having us.

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