Haitian scouting begins while marines run everything else

The Scouts d'Haiti were founded in 1926. The movement itself had begun in England in 1907 under Robert Baden-Powell, and by the 1920s it had troops on every continent, so the Haitian branch joined something already large and already respectable. The date is worth marking because of the setting. In 1926 the United States Marine Corps had been in Haiti for eleven years and held the customs houses, the treasury, the road programme and the only armed force in the country. Almost every institution a Haitian child would meet answered in the end to an American officer. Scouting did not. It gathered boys for camping, first aid, knots and the small ordinary work of a troop, and the men and women running it were Haitian. The organisation outlasted the occupation, the presidents who followed it, both Duvaliers and everything since. Haitian civil society has spent two centuries pressed between governments that wanted no rivals and foreigners who wanted no obstacles. A children's club that has survived a hundred years of that is a serious thing.

As chancellor of the exchequer in 1925 Winston Churchill returned Britain to the gold standard at the prewar rate of four dollars and eighty six cents to the pound. The rate was too high. It made British exports dear and imports cheap and threatened to drain the Bank of England of gold. Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reasoned that cheaper money in America would stop the flow of gold from London to New York and steady an international financial system still recovering from the war, so the Federal Reserve flooded the American banks with liquidity in 1927. His reasoning was sound and the side effect was enormous. The same cheap money financed the speculative borrowing that carried the New York stock market into the sky. Hoover called Strong a mental annex to Europe, which is also a statement about where he thought the blame belonged.

By the 1930s African dissatisfaction with mission education was general. In South Africa the Zionist churches, which had white roots in the late nineteenth century, grew through the interwar years by folding African religious practice into Christian belief. Zionists accepted polygamy and gave women prominent roles. The mission school had no answer for people whose incomes had collapsed, and the doctrine it taught had begun to sound wrong: a white Christ, a salvation and an equality that appeared to be handed out selectively, and a demand for unconditional loyalty to the colonial state routed through the Church. Independent congregations multiplied in direct proportion to hardship. One was founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1934 by a group of unemployed men. Political argument travelled inside religious language. The Watchtower movement went into the mining compounds of southern Africa, recruited workers, offered a spiritual account of compound life and told them that at the second coming they would be among the elect. It built the first worker consciousness those compounds had, in the only vocabulary on offer.

Haitian men avoided the main roads to escape the labour draft. Women could not, because they were the market sellers, the caregivers, the landowners, the shopkeepers and the domestic servants whose work required travel. American records and Marine photograph albums are full of pictures captioned as the typical country woman on a burro. Some men used that familiarity for cover. The Caco general Theophil toured the north recruiting while dressed as a market woman, travelling with a burro. General Petit Severe, wanted by the authorities in Cap-Haïtien, came and went from the town as he pleased in the same disguise, moving seven burro loads of rifles across the Dominican border. The performance made attacks on American officers possible. Visibility cut the other way as well, and girls and women travelled in groups for safety. Madame Benoît, wife of the Caco leader, went regularly to Mirebalais, Lascahobas and Port-au-Prince for supplies in the company of other market women, riding a bay mule and carrying a revolver under her dress.