Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti by Hesketh Prichard

In 1899, this British author was the first white man to cross the interior of the black island republic since 1803, the year before Haitian independence was declared.

Much of what he says could describe Haiti in the present day—from the ramshackle slum cities, never rebuilt since the 1842 earthquake, the hilarious “army” and its hundreds of “generals,” the Voodoo cult and witchdoctors whose superstition rules the island—and the extreme backwardness of the society in general—it is all there in sometimes amusing, and often horrifying detail.