Payson Roundup

Editor:

France now has the opportunity to step to the plate and provide amends to the Haitian people. For more than 80 years they hauled marketable Africans from French West and French Equatorial Africa to Haiti to be sold on the slave market primarily in the United States.

Haiti was the forward depository to drop the Africans like a wholesale house. Several times a month, ships would haul the slaves to Mobile or New Orleans to be sold to U.S. buyers. An estimated 200,000 Africans were transported to Haiti by the French and when the Civil War ended and slavery ended some 85,000 Africans were still in Haiti.

The French left these people in a strange land without any education and governmental infrastructure. Some French companies have profited on the backs of Haitians with the very cheap labor the Haitians provided.

Coffee, tobacco and sugar are the principal commercial products Haiti can provide. The valuable forest products of Haiti (in the past) were removed by French and U.S. companies leaving the land raped of rosewood, mahogany and teakwood.

Paul R. Gonnerman