A school opens in Port-au-Prince to keep German children German

A German school opened in Port-au-Prince in 1912. Its declared aim was the Germanising of the descendants of German families established in the country. The wording concedes the problem the school was built to fix. German merchants had been arriving since the middle of the nineteenth century and had done what foreign traders in Haiti were obliged to do. Haitian law barred foreigners from owning land, so they married Haitian women, and their children were Haitian by birth and frequently Haitian in language, religion and loyalty. Within two generations the community that handled a large share of the country's import and export trade was raising children who spoke Kreyòl in the yard. The school was an attempt to arrest that drift. It belonged to a wider effort to hold German commercial and cultural weight in the republic at the moment when the United States was pressing hardest for control of Haitian customs. Two years later Washington was told that German houses moved about eighty percent of Haitian commerce.

Guilbaud kept pushing on education under Tancrède Auguste and got very little in the towns and nothing in the countryside. Sir Harry Johnston, the British explorer and colonial analyst, had visited Haiti in 1910 and set out why. The Budget général, handsomely printed, carried a section for the Department of Public Instruction laid out in a detail he compared to Switzerland or Germany. Most of that structure existed on paper. The money voted for it reached the pockets of officials or never left the treasury at all. Johnston doubted that any rural school existed, though five hundred were provided for, and thought that where one did it functioned as a small income for someone unfit to teach. About two and a half million of Haiti's three million people could neither read nor write. This is the shape the postcolonial state kept taking: European architecture on the page, and underneath it an arrangement for moving public money among the governing few.

Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Eternal Life Spiritual Church in New Orleans in 1918, the first of the Spiritual churches of that city. The form was protective. With Vodou practice exposed to prosecution, a congregation with a spiritualist name was legally safe, and the churches carried Vodou, Pentecostalism, spiritualism and Catholicism together: elaborate altars to ancestors, saints and spirit guides, women serving as priests and as mothers, prophecy and healing performed in ecstatic trance. Catholic Creoles of colour used a second cover, the seance, in which a medium delivered detailed messages in French from the dead. Rene Grandjean, born in France and resident in Haiti for several years, kept written records of those Creole seances. Zora Neale Hurston, working in the city in this period, put the arrangement plainly: the practice was in disrepute and parts of it were illegal, so a spiritualist name protected the congregation and worked as camouflage.

Under its charter the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti owed the government its revenues only at the close of the fiscal year, while the government needed cash every month. Cincinnatus Leconte asked for a supplementary convention to keep the old arrangement running. The bank refused, hinting that a monthly allowance might follow some form of control over the customs. Its New York group, run by Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, assured the State Department that no such thought had crossed anyone's mind. A convention was patched together anyway, and honest collection under Leconte and Tancrède Auguste left the government square with the bank and more than eight hundred thousand dollars in hand when the 1913 fiscal year closed. The bank opened a second front instead. It held ten million francs in gold meant to retire the debased paper gourdes, was lending that gold at twelve and a half percent, and would not give it up. When the assembly closed the loopholes, the bank called in loans and stopped making new ones.