The majority of Afro-Haitians are descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the island by Spain and France to work on plantations.

Since the Haitian Revolution, Afro-Haitians have been the largest racial group in the country, accounting for 95% of the population in the early 21st century.

Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sighted Quisqueya on December 6, 1492, and named the place La Isla Española (“The Spanish Island”), later Anglicized as Hispaniola.

The French imported African slaves in the 1600s, two hundred years after the first enslaved people were bought from Africa by Spain and France to produce sugar, coffee, cacao, indigo, and cotton.

[3] France had many colonies in the Caribbean including Martinique in which slavery supported a plantation economy that produced sugar, coffee, and cotton.

During the mid to late 1700s, enslaved Africans fled to remote mountainous to join the maroons, meaning 'escaped slave'.

On 1 January 1804, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue with its overwhelmingly African population as well as the mulatto and black leadership and renamed the island nation of Ayiti, meaning (Land of High Mountains) in the Taïno language.

[6][7] Others in Haiti were brought from Senegal,[8] Guinea (imported by the Spanish since the sixteenth century and then by the French), Sierra Leone, Windward Coast, Angola, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and Southeast Africa (such as the Bara tribesmen of Madagascar, who were brought to Haiti in the eighteenth century).

[12] According to The World Factbook, 95% of Haitians are primarily of African descent; the remaining 5% of the population are mostly of mixed-race and European background,[1] and a number of other ethnicities.

[17] Culture, religion and social organization are the result in Haiti of a process of syncretism between French and African traditions, mainly Dahomey-Nigerian.

This probably originated in Benin, although there are strong elements added from the Congo of Central Africa and many African nations are represented in the liturgy of Sèvis Lwa.

The Tainos were influential in the belief system of Haitian Vodou, especially in the Petro cult, a religious group with no counterpart on the African continent.

French is taught in schools and known by about 42% of the population,[19] but spoken by a minority of black and biracial residents, in Port-au-Prince and other cities.

Currently the music heard in Haiti's Compas genre is a little softer than the merengue, and combines Congo rhythms with European and Caribbean influences.