Price-Mars tells the elite to stop scorning its ancestral inheritance

The book took peasant culture as its object and was among the first to handle Haitian vodou and religious custom in a scientific manner, its author describing the work as an attempt to bring popular Haitian thought inside the discipline of ethnography. It chastised the elite for denigrating peasant values and told readers to love their ancestral heritage and treat it as an intangible whole. The account is not uncritical. Price-Mars is said to have glossed over much of the reality of peasant life and to have begun a romanticisation of the African inheritance that his heirs continued. What made the book consequential was the inclusiveness of its cultural nationalism, which supplied the next generation of nationalists with their premise, including the young men who would build a very different politics on it.

The New York Stock Exchange estimated in 1929 that twenty million Americans owned stock, and Frederick Lewis Allen used that figure in the popular history he published in 1931. It was wildly wrong. The chief actuary of the Treasury calculated that about three million Americans, under two and a half per cent of the population, held securities in 1928, and brokerage firms reported 1,548,707 customers in 1929. Pension funds did not yet exist to give workers an indirect stake. So the crash by itself did almost nothing to the finances of the ordinary American, who owned nothing to lose. Stock prices recovered about a fifth of their losses by April 1930 and no major bank or company had failed. Kennedy's point is that the crash and the depression are two different events, and that the most careful students of 1929 have never demonstrated a causal link running from one to the other.

African mine workers began striking in numbers once they stopped being migrants and started being residents. The 1927 walkout at the Shamva mine in Southern Rhodesia was run by Nyasa men who had lived on the property for years and had worked out how it functioned. On the Northern Rhodesian copper belt the pits sat close together, so news and plans moved between them, and the big stoppages came in 1935 and 1940. The second of those landed while the Royal Air Force was fighting over southern England. The miners knew nothing about that battle and everything about the fact that Britain could not do without copper, and the terms they extracted proved the point. No trade unions existed to call any of it. The organising ran instead through the Watchtower church and through Mbeni dance societies, formed for amusement, which split members into rival teams with uniforms and mock official titles borrowed from the men in the offices. Women danced and organised alongside men. Mbeni members served as go-betweens during the copper belt strikes.

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.