Price-Mars tells Haitians their culture is African and legitimate

Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928. He had been born on 15 October 1876 at Grand-Riviere du Nord, had trained as a physician, and had spent his adult life watching the colour line inside Haitian society do damage that no foreign enemy had needed to inflict. The book's claim is short. The two things that most plainly mark Haitian life, the Vodou religion and the Kreyol language, come out of the African past by way of colonial slavery, they are a legitimate inheritance, and Haitians should hold them rather than hide them. That was written while marines occupied the country and while American racial contempt was busy confirming the light-skinned elite in its own contempt for black Haitian custom. Price-Mars also told his readers to take pride in the only slave revolt in the Americas that finished the job. A generation of black intellectuals took the book as a charter. One of them was Francois Duvalier, who turned it into a justification for dictatorship while its author was still alive to object.

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.