Dorsainvil blames the elite for having no solidarity

J.C. Dorsainvil published Des idees collectives on 8 January 1908, an analysis of the social forces shaping Haitian society, and his conclusion was that the country was held back by a want of solidarity among its own elite. The charge was not abstract in that month. Nord Alexis had just declared himself president for life, deep in his eighties, and the revolt that would drive him out of the country before the year was over had already begun to form. Haiti had run through a long series of presidents installed by armed men from one region and removed by armed men from another, and every round rewarded the faction that moved first and punished anybody who waited. Dorsainvil called the result a failure of collective ideas. A governing class that cannot keep an agreement among its own members cannot keep a government either, and the men writing in the reviews about national psychology were describing a machine they belonged to. Eleven months later Nord Alexis sailed for Jamaica.

On a Sunday morning in 1910, in a Baptist chapel of people of colour in the northwest of Washington, a pastor was promising the worst of disasters to members of his flock whose conduct had drawn down the anger of God. He asked whether, if Christ appeared before them, they would not crucify him too, as the Pharisees of the present day, and hand him over to the hatred of the crowd like new Pontius Pilates. A voice begged for mercy. He went silent for a full minute, then pointed straight in front of him and cried out that Christ was there. The congregation turned as one towards the empty place. A woman rose, wailed, and began to dance and sing, then a second and a third, until two thirds of the room were leaping in a circle and shouting for mercy at the tops of their voices. It lasted half an hour. An American friend explained it afterwards: they were happy.

South Africa needed African labour in the mines and needed Africans confined to the reserves when the mines had no use for them. The pass system did both jobs, and it also produced the earliest sustained organised protest on the continent outside Islamic North Africa. In 1912 a group of educated men founded the South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress in 1923. Its reach was narrow at first, though it worked with Indian and Coloured organisations and laid ground for something larger. Mass action came from elsewhere. In 1919 huge demonstrations against the pass laws showed what popular participation could look like, and in 1920 some forty thousand mineworkers struck. That industrial strength made the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union possible, founded in 1919 and claiming a hundred thousand members by the middle of the decade. Internal splits broke it before the decade ended. The worker consciousness it exposed had been formed in the compound and down the shaft.

Dumarsais Estime taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycee Petion. Duvalier married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and they had three daughters and a son, Jean-Claude. He worked with American public health missions in the 1940s, went to the University of Michigan in 1944 for public health training and failed it, then followed Estime into government as director general of public health and rose to minister. When Estime fell he went into opposition and then underground, from 1954 to 1956, which he afterwards called his years in the maquis. Clement Barbot said he carried a worn copy of The Prince in his pocket through that period. To Washington he looked ideal: a civilian, a doctor, modest in his habits, no richer for having held office. He wore a black suit, white shirt, dark tie and black homburg behind heavy round spectacles, which foreigners read as the uniform of a careful family physician. Haitians read it differently. That is the dress of Bawon Samdi, the lwa who keeps the gate of the cemetery.