Vincent tells Haitians their minds are too backward for a vote

At Les Cayes on 18 December 1938 Stenio Vincent told an audience that Haitians would no longer choose their presidents by plebiscite, that the mentality of the people was too arrested for democracy, and that the elite lived in their own country as tourists. He praised the forced agricultural labour Toussaint Louverture had imposed and recommended it for the twentieth century. Ferdinand Mayer, the American minister, reported to Washington that the tone of the speech was Hitlerian. Haiti spent almost the whole of Vincent's rule under a constitutional state of siege. The press was controlled, mail was opened, public assembly was forbidden, and the fund for the secret police grew five times over. Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after the marines left, the administration was as venal as any on earth. The succession was settled abroad. Elie Lescot, the Haitian minister in Washington, sat on Trujillo's payroll and had been telling the State Department since 1938 that he differed with his president. When the American legation withheld its blessing in March 1941, Vincent discovered he was ill. Fifty six of the fifty eight scraps of paper in the urns carried Lescot's name.

Europe in 1945 was exhausted and no longer the centre of anything, squeezed between the United States and the Soviet Union after four centuries of preeminence. That made African colonies more valuable in strictly economic terms. Britain leaned on its African possessions harder than it ever had, opening fresh areas to trade, investment and production. Eastern and central Africa became important sources of raw materials for a country short of everything, and those materials sat outside the dollar zone, so Britain could rebuild without depending wholly on American credit. A pattern follows. Portugal, the weakest of the colonial economies, kept its empire until the 1970s precisely because it could not manage without the commercial crutch. Britain, the strongest by the 1950s, gave up political administration soonest, because its economic recovery and its influence let it keep the substance while shedding the cost. In Lisbon economic control required political control. In London and Paris it did not. The two visions belonged to different centuries.

Comhaire-Sylvain published while her fieldwork was still running. The first piece to appear, Vocabulaire des croyances paysannes, listed the words rural Haitians used for the things they believed in. She laid it out in columns like a dictionary, setting each Haitian Kreyol term beside a word from Dahomey with a similar sound and a similar sense. Dahomey, in what is now Benin, was one of the coasts that supplied Saint-Domingue with captives through the eighteenth century, and the vocabulary had crossed with the people. Printing the comparison in parallel columns made the claim difficult to argue with, since a reader could run a finger down the page and see the correspondence for herself. The venue mattered as much as the method. This did not appear in a learned journal. It appeared in a feminist newspaper, in front of the women of the capital, at a moment when the capital was still being taught that its Kreyol was a corruption of French.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain spent February and March 1938 writing up Kenscoff, the village in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, for the paper La Voix des Femmes. Four articles came out of it. They covered how people there worked the land, what stories and beliefs they held, and how they buried and remembered their dead. The paper belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, the women's league founded in 1934 to press for civil and political rights, and its readers were largely schooled women of the capital. What Comhaire-Sylvain handed them was fieldwork. She had trained as a linguist, and she reported what she had watched and heard: the hours women worked, the words they used, the graves they kept. Haitian feminist writing had until then argued mostly from principle. These four pieces set a different pattern, which was to start from the lives of women who would never read the article.