Civic instruction enters the Haitian school programme

Civic instruction entered the official school programme in Haiti by a decree of 26 July 1896, under the ministry of P. M. Appolon. The same subject had only reached the school programme in France around the middle of the nineteenth century, so Haiti was not far behind. Claire Heureuse, a woman with no schooling at all, had spent her life teaching by example that the nation comes before the household, and the state took another ninety years to make the point part of a curriculum. Ninety two years separate the declaration of independence from the decree. For a country whose schools were few and whose teachers were fewer, putting civic instruction on the official list was a statement about what a Haitian child was supposed to become, made at a moment when foreign creditors and foreign gunboats were a normal part of national life.

On 18 May 1896 the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy against Ferguson and made segregation lawful for the next fifty eight years. The case had been organised by the Comite des Citoyens of New Orleans, a body drawn mostly from families descended from Saint Domingue, whose president that year had himself been born in Haiti. Louisiana had passed a Separate Car Act in 1890 to divide passengers on the railways. Rodolphe Desdunes and his son Daniel first tested it on a journey between states and won. The committee then sent Homere Plessy to test it on a journey inside Louisiana, and that case went up to the Supreme Court and was lost. The date chosen for the announcement was 18 May, which is Haitian flag day.

Holman Bentley finished the Kikongo New Testament in 1893. Four centuries had passed since the king of the Kongo was first baptised, and in all that time no gospel had been put into the language, though a catechism had. Bentley worked closely with a young man called Nlemvo, whom the mission regarded as its first convert and who, Bentley wrote, helped him with all his literary work. Nlemvo's uncle, the man who had brought him to the mission as a boy, kept a small brass crucifix he prayed before and had it fixed to the wall by his bed when he was dying. He was known by a Kikongo word meaning believer, a recognised category of person who required crosses and holy water at a funeral. Twice at Sao Salvador, Bentley recalled, someone stood up after the sermon to tell the congregation to listen, because this was what their old relatives had told them.

Henry Hesketh Bell landed in Dominica in September 1899 as the island's new chief executive. He took the restoration of the plantation system as a personal challenge, made no allowance for anything particular about the Caribbean, and for six years used every means available to attract a new European born planter class, applying tactics he said had worked in Asia. He also built roads and communications. His skill as a lobbyist convinced people in Dominica and in London that the whole package would work, and the word peasant was pushed out of official consideration again, staying out after he left for Uganda in 1905. New planters bought thousands of acres and revived limes for export. The value of lime exports quadrupled between 1900 and 1919. Bell had misjudged the island's labour market. Lime production turned down in the 1920s, partly because of world prices and partly because cultivators had folded citrus into the working routine they preferred, and the new planters drifted away.