La Revue indigene opens its first issue with the peasant family

The first issue of La Revue indigene, dated July 1927, carried a text called Ainsi parla l'Oncle: la famille paysanne, moeurs locales et survivances africaines, running from page 31 to page 41. The newspaper L'Haitien reprinted it on 18 August of the same year. The magazine was the organ of a group of young writers in Port au Prince who held that Haitian writing had to be built out of the life of the country's own cultivators rather than borrowed from France, and putting that text in a first number placed the peasant household at the centre of the programme. The piece had begun as a lecture given five years earlier at Primavera. It went into the volume that appeared the following year as an appendix, and an abridged English version was printed in the Bulletin of the Pan American Union in February 1944 under the title Kenscoff Twenty-five Years Ago.

Prices broke on Wednesday 23 October 1929 in a wave of selling that moved over six million shares and wiped out about four billion dollars on paper, with the ticker running two hours behind. On Black Thursday, 24 October, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded, losses reached nine billion by noon and the ticker finished four hours late at eight minutes past seven in the evening. On Tuesday 29 October, 16,410,000 shares changed hands, a record that stood for thirty nine years. The slide went on for three more weeks. Buying on margin had multiplied gains on the way up and it worked the same way in reverse, since a small fall in a price forced the loan to be called and the stock to be sold. By the middle of November some twenty six billion dollars, roughly a third of the value recorded in September, had gone.

Growing for export did not make African villages rich. Households had to divide their land between food and cash crops while imported European manufactures undercut whatever they might have made themselves. Farmers set neither the price of what they sold nor the price of what they bought, and by the end of the 1920s a handful of European firms, the enormous United Africa Company chief among them, controlled the West African import and export trade. Between the wars the terms moved steadily against the grower. In the 1930s farmers had to plant more of the export crop and less food simply to meet the tax, which exhausted soil and produced famine, as in Niger in 1931. Growers organised. In 1929 Igbo women in Nigeria attacked the offices of the trading companies over falling export prices, and dozens died in what is remembered as the Women's War. Gold Coast cocoa farmers held their crop back until the price should rise, and the firms bought elsewhere and waited for the tax collector to do their work.

France governed Lebanon and four Syrian states from 1920 to 1943 under a League of Nations mandate that obliged it to publish annual accounts. Those reports have been reassembled into comparable budget series. In 1928, once the cost of the Armee du Levant is counted, 74 percent of everything the mandate spent went to administration, the judiciary and security. Education took 3.8 percent and health 1.5 percent. Infrastructure and support for production took 15.6 percent. In French North Africa the same categories ran at 9.1 percent for education, 6.7 for health and 49.8 for infrastructure. Schools and clinics in Lebanon were left to missionaries and private bodies, which produced a system that served Christians well and left the Muslim population badly short. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because it is the same arithmetic Haiti met from the other side: money raised locally, spent on the apparatus that raised it, and gone.