The writers and the marchers came out of the same houses

The authors of La Revue Indigene praised the African ancestry of Haitians and rejected French culture as the foundation of Haitian thinking. Jean Price-Mars gave the position its full statement in 1928 with Ainsi parla l'oncle, which put the peasant majority at the centre of the nation and treated farming practice and Vodou as proper objects of study rather than as shame. The argument did not stay in print. In 1929 students struck at the American-run agricultural school at Damien. Opposition politicians and the occupying officers alike lost patience with Louis Borno, whose presidency depended on American support. In 1930 women filled the streets while the Forbes Commission was in the country. The literary movement and the political one were made of the same people. The families that supplied the writers had supplied the women who raised money to send the Union Patriotique delegation abroad, and the streets that had held two hundred marchers behind Malbranche-Sylvain were about to hold ten thousand.

Half a million black Americans had already left the rural South for northern factories during the First World War. When Congress choked off European immigration in 1924, northern industry needed new hands, and by the end of the decade another million African Americans had left the old slave states for the Northeast and the upper Midwest, along with about half a million Mexicans, who were exempt from the new quotas. They found work in metal shops, car plants and packing houses. Only about a hundred thousand black Americans lived west of the Rockies. The political effect showed in 1928, when the Chicago alderman Oscar De Priest became the first black member of Congress since Reconstruction and the first ever from a northern district. The same quota law and the same factory demand shaped where Caribbean migrants could go in these years.

From January to September 1931 Melville Herskovits and Frances Herskovits travelled in Dahomey, Nigeria and the Gold Coast, working mainly in Dahomey, the kingdom on the Bight of Benin whose people the colonists of Saint Domingue had called Arada. An initial grant from Elsie Clews Parsons paid for the trip and Columbia and Northwestern universities carried it afterwards. Their chief interpreter was Prince Rene Aho Glele, a member of the family that had ruled the kingdom, and the French Residents of the districts of Abomey and Allada opened doors for them. The journey matters on a Haitian timeline because the deities, the ceremonies and most of the African vocabulary of Haitian Vodou come out of this region, and because Herskovits built the study of African survivals in the Americas from material gathered here. He arrived already carrying a knowledge of the Maroon communities of Surinam.

Ainsi parla l'Oncle, essais d'ethnologie, was printed at Compiegne in France in 1928, four preliminary pages and 243 pages of text. Its preface is dated Petionville, 15 December 1927, and states the aim: to raise the value of Haitian folklore in the eyes of the Haitian people. Haiti had then been occupied by the United States for thirteen years, and educated Haitians had spent a century trying to be coloured Frenchmen, in a country where the word African was the most humiliating thing one could say to a compatriot. The book took the beliefs, songs, tales, dances and ceremonies of the peasantry, traced them to Dahomey and the Kongo, and handled them with the apparatus of ethnography. It gave a generation of Haitian writers a defensible reason to look at their own country. A second edition appeared in New York in 1951, a Spanish translation in Havana in 1968, a third edition in Montreal in 1973, and an English translation in Washington in 1984.