Haiti issues its first official document in Kreyol after a century

Girard closes his survey of the language landscape with two dates that measure the exclusion. The first official Haitian document in Kreyol dates only from 1915, more than a century after independence, and it was not until the constitution of 1987 that Kreyol became a fully official language alongside French. He contrasts this with the present, where Kreyol is a source of nationalist pride across the Caribbean, and insists that it was nothing of the kind in the revolutionary period, least of all for Toussaint. Colonial-era Kreyol texts are scarce because the language was oral, and most of what survives from the revolutionary decade consists of word-for-word official translations produced by non-Kreyol speakers, including renderings of decrees by Sonthonax, Hedouville, Bonaparte and Leclerc, all four of them Europeans. He adds that these renderings read as stiff legalistic French dressed in Kreyol words, which is why they tell us so little about how the language was actually spoken.

Caperton had 400 men ashore in a city holding at least 1,500 of Rosalvo Bobo's Cacos, the remnants of the Reforme faction and what was left of the army. The Comite Revolutionnaire belonged to Bobo and was pressing the National Assembly to elect him. When the deputies asked whether they might proceed to an election, the admiral put them off. On 2 August he reported to Washington that the Cacos were professional soldiers under chiefs who sold their services to whoever offered most, that all Haitians feared them, that they effectively decided who governed, and that Congress had been about to elect Bobo out of fear until he stopped it. The Comite went on as though nothing had changed. It jailed a senator named Joseph Dessources for criticising it, and the Americans ordered him released. It took over the telegraph offices and filled the wires with messages for Bobo, and Caperton took charge of communications. It began drawing government money, and Caperton moved every gourde into a blocked account.

Refused formal meetings by Harding and the rest of the American government, the Union Patriotique delegation was received in 1921 by the leadership of the NAACP: its president W. E. B. Du Bois, its secretary James Weldon Johnson and its treasurer Addie Hunton. The two organisations had been working toward each other for two years. In 1920, while Washington hesitated over sending any commission to look at the occupation, the NAACP sent Johnson to Haiti for two months of its own inquiry. He published the results in the Nation. American marines, he wrote, were steeped in colour prejudice, and they raped and assaulted Haitian women so often that the acts went unrecorded as crimes at all. Johnson then made the comparison that gave his reporting its force. What was being done to Haitians resembled what was being done to Black Americans at home in the same decade. The occupation ran on the racial logic that sanctioned lynching in Mississippi, exported under a flag and a treaty.

In 1913 the physician and teacher J. C. Dorsainvil published Vodou et névrose in Port-au-Prince, the first attempt to explain Haitian religion by the methods of European science. Borrowing from the French psychologist Pierre Janet, he treated spirit possession as a dissociative state and named it a racial psychoneurosis, a collective disposition laid down by slavery and colonial rule. He supported this with philological and historical work tying the Haitian pantheon to Dahomean sources in West Africa, and argued that those inheritances formed the substratum of the national mind. The purpose was defensive. Foreign writers were describing Haiti as a country of savages, and Dorsainvil handed them a rational account of what the drums were doing. The price of the defence was the diagnosis, which conceded that the religion of the majority was an illness. Jean Price-Mars took that apart within a generation. The book still stands at the head of the ethnological movement that made African inheritance a subject in the Americas.