WANT a sobering example of what happens to a richly productive agricultural economy when revolutionary Blacks slaughter or drive away White farmers and destroy the crops and livestock, so setting in process a national legacy of decay, destruction, carnage and chaos?

No better prototype of this exists than that of the erstwhile French colony of Saint-Domingue, the semi-island in the Caribbean better known today as the zombieland of Haiti. Few politico-economic orders in history have marked an equally dramatic rise and fall in national fortune: though SA, under the ANC/SACP, now threatens to emulate it.

Haiti was discovered by Columbus in 1492. After the Spanish killed off all the native Americans who lived in Haiti (by 1512) they imported African slaves to work in the plantation economy. In 1697, Spain ceded what is now Haiti to France: an area of 10 748 sq. miles.

By the 1770s, Haiti had eclipsed other French colonies of the Caribbean in wealth. Sugar exports were greater than those of any other territory in the world: so great that Haiti supplied France with all its needs. This gave France a huge surplus, of which it sold two-thirds to half of Europe at an enormous profit. Haiti’s soils were fertile, extensive and well-irrigated, its plantations well managed.

By 1789 Haiti was the glory of the French colonies, "the jewel of the Caribbean, the single richest colony in the world," as Bernard Diederich wrote. The prosperity of the colony was such that dollarwise its imports and exports exceeded those of the entire United States where, in the same year, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated for his first term as president. At its western extreme Cap Francois (now Cap Haitien), a city of 25 000 with fine public buildings and theatres of stone and brick, was properly known as "The Paris of the Antilles."

On May 15, 1791, France’s National Revolutionary Assembly voted full equality with Whites to all male mulattos born of two free parents. Though this affected a mere 400 men, it was to inspire the first violent and fiery insurrection of Blacks. The word fury is not just figurative. A fire had been kindled among half a million Black slaves that would not be extinguished till the last of the colony’s 40 000 Whites and the majority of free Blacks and mulattos had been killed or driven from the island.

In August, 1791, the lid blew off the colony. Rioting slaves became a great mob that ran amok, uprooting, torching and destroying. Before long Haiti was dominated by roving slave bands. Everywhere there was devastation. In Paris the Revolutionary Assembly had placed itself squarely on the side of the Blacks. It was hinted that the emancipation of the slaves was near at hand.

The Whites fully realised that they faced total extermination should the Blacks take control. The colonists now talked of secession from France. All normal business in Haiti ceased. The Whites began arming themselves against the Black revolution they feared was about to engulf them. Orders came from Paris that the slaves should crush any outbreak of White resistance.

That was too much for most Whites, who gave up and left, often with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. They were the lucky ones. Soon great fires could be seen in the countryside. The Negroes were burning the canefields and slaughtering all those Whites and free Blacks unable to flee in time.

Undermanned and under-equipped militia went into the interior on reconnaissance patrols. Few returned. The stories survivors brought back were chilling. The men were at once hacked to death, but the women were gang raped by their slaves before being tortured to death, along with their children. In some cases the women were thrown on top of the bodies of their husbands, fathers or brothers, then raped.