In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag created when the white band was solemnly removed from the French tricolore.
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