Ayiti (land of mountains) is the original Taino name for what is now known as the island of Hispañola. When General-Governor Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared what was then Saint Domingue a free and independent Black Nation in 1804, he changed the name back to Ayiti, in an act that W.E.B. Dubois, among many historians, believed was an “attempt to symbolically disrupt centuries of European empire and brutality”.