Race and education share a headline in Le Matin

On 1 July 1907 Le Matin published Race et education, examining the relation between racial identity and how children ought to be taught. The question was live because Haiti was trying to construct a school system almost from nothing, and the great majority of Haitian children had never sat in a classroom. Into that gap came the argument about method. One position held that the French curriculum, Latin and rhetoric included, was the guarantee that Haitians were the equals of anyone, and that lowering it would concede the case the foreign press had been making for a century. The other held that a course of study designed for the sons of Norman lawyers was useless to a child in the Artibonite who needed to read, count and farm. Both positions could be stated in the racial vocabulary of 1907, which is why the article exists at all. The dispute was never settled. Haitians were still having it a hundred years later, in Creole, about the same schools.

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.

Shortly before four on the afternoon of Friday 4 December 1908, Callisthenes Fouchard stood on the deck of the SS Oteri in Kingston harbour and looked at the heaps of crushed brick still lying along Harbour Street two years after the earthquake. He had spent five years of exile in the city running the Hotel Royale, a guesthouse for foreign visitors and for other Haitian exiles. Eleven months of revolution had just brought down the military government of Nord Alexis, and Fouchard was going home to claim the presidency. He told the well wishers who saw him off that the revolution had been started in his favour and that his government would be a liberal one. Seventy five Firminists sailed from Jamaica that same month to press the claim of Antenor Firmin. Two days after the Oteri left, the fallen Nord Alexis landed at the same Kingston dock, where he spent his last days.

Early in 1908 Antenor Firmin landed secretly at Gonaives with fifty six followers brought from Kingston and St Thomas, among them Jean Jumeau, meaning to raise a revolution against President Nord Alexis. They had the example of Boyer Bazelais and the Liberal exiles, who had shaken Salomon's government from the same coast in 1883. The plan collapsed within days for want of weapons, ammunition and local support. Jumeau was captured and shot. Firmin went to ground with a Cuban who had made his home in Haiti during the 1890s and who backed the movement, and afterwards took refuge in the French consulate at Gonaives. Alcius Charmant, one of the party, went back to Kingston and published a letter accusing Firmin of sending men to die undefended on the strength of promised arms that were never there. Alexis answered the landing with summary executions of suspected sympathisers, and the New York papers ran headlines about a massacre feared in Haiti.