A manifesto splits Haitian literature into yesterday and tomorrow

In July 1925 Antonio Vieux and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin published an essay in La Nouvelle Ronde titled the literature of yesterday and tomorrow. It called for an artistic movement that would abandon European imitation in favour of national authenticity. The two words at its centre, imitation and authenticity, went on to organise Haitian cultural argument for the next forty years. The difficulty sat inside the manifesto. Its authors had been educated in French, wrote in French, published in a review modelled on French reviews, and addressed readers trained since childhood to measure Haitian work against Paris. Naming the problem did not exempt them from it. Thoby-Marcelin spent the rest of his career working the question out in practice, eventually writing novels of peasant life with his brother Pierre. What the essay achieved immediately was to hand younger writers a programme, a vocabulary and an enemy, which is generally what a literary generation needs before it produces anything.

American farmers had ploughed marginal land and bought tractors to feed the world during the war. The number of motor vehicles on farms multiplied fivefold in the war years to about eighty five thousand, and by the end of the 1920s nearly a million farmers were driving them. Nine million work animals were slaughtered as machines replaced them, releasing thirty million acres of pasture for wheat, cotton and dairying. When world production returned to its normal channels after the armistice of November 1918, the surplus had nowhere to go. Cotton fell from a wartime high of thirty five cents a pound to sixteen cents in 1920. Corn fell from a dollar and a half a bushel to fifty two cents, wool from nearly sixty cents a pound to under twenty. Prices improved a little after 1921 and did not recover fully until war returned in 1939. Foreclosures rose and owners became tenants.

Competition for work and for access to the colonial economy hardened ethnic identity, because solidarity in a scramble means sorting people into groups and caricaturing the ones you are outside. The mines had begun with migrant labour: men on short contracts who came from the countryside, took the wages and went home, described as urban tribesmen raiding the industrial economy. From the 1920s the contracts lengthened and companies settled workers with their families near the shafts, which produced a permanent urban working class. Johannesburg was the largest case, built on gold. Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi and Salisbury grew through the same years on people walking in from the countryside. Reid calls this migration the most important single theme in Africa's modern social history. New arrivals kept village ties and rebuilt rural custom in town, and competition kept ethnic loyalty useful. The towns also mixed everyone together, and intermarriage and shared work produced urban cultures of their own. Women found in them some distance from the authority of the homestead.

Sir Francis Watts reported on agricultural conditions in Dominica in 1927 and recommended a Peasant Information Bureau under an appointed Peasant Adviser, charged with supervising the cultivation and export of crops grown by small proprietors. The bureau opened the following year and one of the island's most prominent planters, J. C. MacIntyre, took the post of Adviser under the local executive. On 17 October 1928 the administrator asked the Colonial Office for permission to move five hundred pounds from Loan Board funds to the bureau to set up a Vegetables Growers Association. It was granted. MacIntyre drafted the by laws himself. The associates would be the peasants, whom he described as more or less illiterate and whose attendance at meetings he called undesirable; they would be represented by the heads of their local centres, and the Adviser would sit as chairman, treasurer and secretary at once. Ninety years after abolition the word peasant was finally respectable in Dominica, and the first institution built around it kept a planter at its head.