Haiti has 594 public schools, and seven years later 465

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.

Dumarsais Estime was born at Verrettes in the Artibonite on 21 April 1900, a black provincial with no family standing, and he was schooled by the Christian Brothers at Saint Marc before moving on to the Lycee Petion in the capital. Mathematics was his subject in the classroom until he crossed President Borno and lost the post and the platform together. The elections of 1930 returned him as a deputy. He rose to preside over the Chamber and then to hold cabinet office under Vincent, remembered by colleagues as silent, surly and tireless. Senator Alphonse Henriquez called him a motor in a pair of trousers. Katherine Dunham, who knew him closely, wrote that his brusqueness covered a timidity underneath, and that his head looked too large for his body in the manner of Benin bronzes and Bambara masks, where the sculptor puts the spirit and intelligence of a man in the head. When he took the presidency in 1946 the Griot generation read it as their own arrival, and Rayford Logan called it the advent of the noir elite.

In January 1906 L'Etoile Africaine ran articles on the Pan-African movement then taking shape. The movement was six years old, dating from the London conference of 1900, and it had almost no institutional existence yet: a handful of meetings, a few journals, letters passing between men in the West Indies, the United States, west Africa and Europe. A paper in Port-au-Prince publishing its arguments was one of the connections that made it a movement at all. Haiti's place in this was peculiar. It was the reference point everyone in the network cited, the proof that black self government existed, and it was at the same time a poor country under mounting American pressure whose own newspapers were reading about the black world elsewhere. The journal's name states the position it took. The link ran both ways, and Haitian intellectuals were consumers of Pan-African thought as well as its favourite example.

The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 as a settlement between British settlers and Afrikaners, and the white population as a whole defended the position that settlement handed it. Between the wars every mainstream white party developed racial segregation further, along with influential lobbies including Anglican missionaries, some arguing that it secured labour and white supremacy, others that it shielded Africans from modern life. Wartime growth pulled thousands of Africans into the cities and the National Party campaigned on white fear. In 1948 it won under D. F. Malan on apartheid, a word meaning separateness. The Population Registration Act of 1950 sorted everyone into white and non-white, the second category subdivided into Coloured, Indian and Bantu, a linguistic term now put to work as a racial one, then subdivided again by tribe. The Group Areas Act fixed where each group could live and broke African unity by design. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 gave African children schools built to teach them their place.