Oswald Durand tours Haitian poetry in a Port-au-Prince review

On 20 September 1905 Oswald Durand published Tournee Litteraire in the review Haiti Litteraire et Sociale, a survey of the country's poetic inheritance. Durand was the obvious man to write it. He had spent his life making a literature for a place whose educated readers were trained to look to Paris for anything worth reading, and his song Choucoune, written in Creole, had gone into the language so thoroughly that most Haitians who sang it had no idea who wrote it. The purpose of the survey was national. If Haiti was going to be argued for abroad, and in 1905 it was being argued about constantly, then it needed a body of work of its own to point at, catalogued and named. Educated Haitians of the period were locked in a long dispute about whether the country possessed a civilisation. Durand's answer was a list of poets. That is a stronger reply than most of the essays printed alongside it, because a list can be checked.

The earthquake that hit Kingston in January 1907 was the worst seismic disaster in the northern Caribbean since Cap-Haitien in 1842. Two thirds of the city went down. Brick buildings put up to replace wooden ones after the fire of 1882 collapsed on the people inside them. Survivors walking the streets afterwards greeted each other by asking whether the other was alive. Fire followed and took what the shaking had left. Hundreds of the dead were buried in the May Pen cemetery under numbers pinned to rough crosses. The Myrtle Bank Hotel, full for the winter tourist season, was partly destroyed. The injured were carried to overcrowded hospitals on drays, there was looting, and the racecourse at the upper end of the city filled with tents where rich and poor camped for months. Many Jamaicans left the island. Haitian exiles in Kingston lost their businesses, among them Callisthenes Fouchard, whose Hotel Royale was wrecked.

The Maji Maji revolt spread across German East Africa with no planning and no central command. What held it together was religion. Priests scattered through the territory carried a common message, and the maji of the name was water sprinkled on the body that was said to turn German bullets aside. Belief of that kind united people across ethnic lines who had no other reason to act together, and the first attacks caught the Germans completely unprepared. Then colonial firepower told, the water was disproved in the most direct way available, and the movement started to come apart. Through 1906 German columns burned crops and villages, and the revolt was finished early in 1907. Twenty six thousand Africans were killed. Perhaps fifty thousand more died in the famine the burning produced. Afterwards the Germans spent money on development and mission schools, and farmers in the former rebel districts took up cotton willingly, which suggests the grievance had been the coercion rather than the crop. Tanganyikan nationalists half a century later took the revolt as their founding example.

At the start of the twentieth century Haiti had 594 public schools, a figure that had shrunk to 465 by 1913. The private system moved the same way, from 82 schools in 1905 to 53 ten years later. The numbers meant little in practice, because the state of politics made it impossible to allocate money to schooling at all. By the time the American occupation began the public system was near total ruin, the literacy rate for the country stood well below ten percent, and in the countryside almost everyone was illiterate. A 1931 survey of rural schools found rooms with hardly a bench, possibly no blackboard, certainly no maps, and a teacher who was illiterate and could not perform the four arithmetical operations. The census of 1950 put illiteracy at around ninety percent among Haitians over fifteen, ninety three percent in rural districts, and ninety seven to ninety eight percent in some of them.