The depression teaches colonial Africa to distrust the market

The world depression of the 1930s cut the prices paid for African export crops, and the farmers who grew them for European buyers drew the obvious conclusion about the system they had been recruited into. Across the continent people formed self help associations with economic, religious and ideological purposes. Craftsmen who refused wage employment set up small workshops of their own. Any single one of these bodies was a nuisance to a district officer and nothing more. Taken together they amounted to a withdrawal of consent from colonial rule. What frightened the administrations was the prospect that peasants would stop selling into the market altogether, which would end the export earnings and the tax revenue in one stroke. So the colonial state went into the business it had claimed to leave to merchants. Marketing boards were created to fix the price paid to the grower and to handle exports. Agricultural departments began instructing farmers on technique. Rule by administration expanded, and the machinery it built was inherited later by nationalist governments.

Borno and Russell never mastered the Haitian press. Papers edited in the French polemical tradition attacked the occupation with a freedom the courts protected by refusing to convict editors. One journal spent part of 1925 running a daily notice counting down the days until the sanitary service would move Borno's remains to the city dump. Another advised readers to poison him. A preventive detention law of 1922 put Jolibois fils in and out of prison so often that the American diplomat Dana Munro thought he preferred it there, and Ernest Chauvet of Le Nouvelliste was locked up periodically and by one account enjoyed himself, devouring whole roast turkeys and drinking champagne. The courts went unreformed. Murder cases ended in acquittal on the plea that the victim had been a lougawou, since the penal code itself named sorcery a crime and treated zombification as real. The Garde was then turned on Vodou, arresting Haitians for preparing manje pou lesen. No senior American ever grasped that they were prosecuting the national religion.

The original occupation treaties said nothing about education, an omission Rayford Logan called almost inexplicable, and the Service Technique became the American attempt to repair it. What existed in 1915 was two systems. Government schools enrolled about thirty thousand pupils, largely on paper, staffed where staffed at all by appointees who could not read. Religious schools, mostly Catholic, taught about twelve thousand and belonged to the elite, apart from a hundred or so presbyterial schools where Breton priests gave a few thousand peasant children the rudiments. Three obstacles stood in the way of anything better. The peasantry saw little use in it. The elite feared what an educated Black majority would do, and feared more that such a majority might prefer foreigners who fed them to Haitians who did not. And teachers taught in French, the language of advancement, to children who spoke Kreyol. Dantes Bellegarde then made Haitian education a national redoubt against further American encroachment. Keeping peasants illiterate suited everyone with the power to change it.

In 1925 a young man of the Haitian elite studying engineering at Zurich sent the Union Patriotique a letter asking to be enrolled. He was a grandson of the former president Tancrede Auguste and his name was Jacques Roumain. He returned to Haiti in 1927 and threw himself into the intellectual resistance, launching the literary magazine La Revue Indigene. When that folded in 1928 he founded a plainer paper, Le Petit Impartial, which called itself an organ of the masses and spoke for a student body he had created, the Ligue de la Jeunesse Patriote Haitienne. No American and few Haitians knew that the Communist Party had recruited him in France. His constituency was a generation of elite students whose inherited pride in French culture and inherited contempt for both American materialism and Black Haitian life had been ground down by fourteen years of occupation. When members of the Ligue defaced the statue of Dessalines in 1929, a Garde officer reported that these young people were against everything, Dessalines included.