Firmin answers Gobineau from Paris

Antenor Firmin published De l'egalite des races humaines in Paris in 1885, thirty two years after Arthur de Gobineau brought out the Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines in the same city. Firmin attacked the ranking of human races directly, writing that the doctrine of racial inequality had no philosophical or scientific ground and rested on one group's exploitation of another. He was among the earliest scholars of African descent to take up the question at that level, and his book stayed obscure for the better part of a century. Firmin was not a marginal man at home. He served as minister of foreign affairs under President Louis Florvil Hyppolite and was the favourite of the intellectual elite who had backed the Liberal party of the eighteen seventies and eighties. Six years after the book appeared, he was the official who refused an American demand for a lease of the harbour at Mole Saint-Nicolas.

In 1888 the New York Times told its readers that a revolution would be welcomed with fierce joy by what it called the black savages of the interior, who stood ready at the first signal to come down on the towns and, maddened by rum, to commit every outrage imaginable. The same paper later described a highly emotional population with little beyond tribal rule and superstition to guide it, and therefore open to demagogues. Bellegarde-Smith sets those sentences beside the New York Times of 2010, whose columnists explained the country through cultural inferiority and the influence of Vodou, and beside a Wall Street Journal piece of the same year resting on the claim that culture matters and race does not. He treats the vocabulary as the visible surface of a colonial discourse running since the late eighteenth century, and notes that the paper had kept a resident correspondent in Haiti from the late nineteenth century into the late 1950s.

Monseigneur Guilloux was archbishop of Port-au-Prince from 1870 to 1885, and he wrote that the numerous parishes deprived of priests were crying out for pastors, each competing to be first to have its own curate, and that satisfying them all proved impossible. He read the demand as evidence of Catholic hunger. By the time he arrived the Church had been present in the territory for the whole history of slavery, and the population already held its own reading of Christianity, in which the rites, the saints and the symbols had long been annexed to the purposes of Vodou. Masses and ceremonies for the dead sat inside the framework of Vodou religious life. Being Catholic and serving the spirits became a single reality that still marks the country. Only a thin layer of privileged families entered the assimilation the missionaries had in mind.

The Jamaica International Exhibition opened in 1891 under Governor Henry Blake. Kingston was hung with wreaths and triumphal arches, fireworks were set off, and visitors came in from the countryside and from abroad over the fourteen weeks it ran. Haiti had attempted the same thing ten years before. The Haitian Exhibition of 1881, staged under Lysius Salomon, failed to raise the foreign interest in Haitian agriculture that its organisers wanted. Jamaica hoped for more and got less than it spent, since the show ended as a financial loss. The colony counted tourism and foreign investment as the real return. Royal Mail steamers arriving weekly were joined by United Fruit ships bringing visitors from Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Government money then went into hotels, and the Myrtle Bank, the Constant Spring and the Queen's became the places tourists stayed. Both islands were being drawn into an American commercial system, from opposite ends of it.