Haiti gives its written record a house

In 1940 the national library was founded in Port-au-Prince, giving the written heritage of Haiti a permanent address. What that address was worth depended on who you were. Under the colony it had been forbidden to teach an enslaved person to read. After independence schooling was conducted in French while roughly nine Haitians in ten spoke only Kreyol, and literacy stayed among the lowest rates in the hemisphere. So a collection of French books in the capital served a small fraction of the country whose heritage it held. The rest of Haiti kept its past somewhere else. The peasantry carried it in songs, proverbs and stories told at night. Vodou carried its theology in ceremony and in the memory of the people who serve the spirits. Both are archives. Neither has shelves. The founding is worth marking anyway, because a state that builds a library is declaring what kind of country it means to be, and Haiti was declaring itself a republic of letters.

After the war colonial governments went into crop production themselves. State marketing boards in British West Africa fixed prices to prevent a repeat of the 1930s collapse, and substantial public money was made available for colonial development for the first time. African growers saw the arrangement clearly enough. They were paid a small share of what their crops fetched, and the surpluses piled up in good years went into large capital projects instead of back to the farmers who had produced them. Capital-intensive schemes favoured machinery and settler experts over African smallholders. The groundnut scheme in Tanganyika laid out plantations on North American prairie lines. The ground was too dry, the soil too thin, the machinery no match for the climate, and it cost British taxpayers millions. French investment in Niger River dams for cotton failed similarly, as farmers there grew sugar and rice for local sale. Officials also compelled farmers to dig erosion trenches, rotate crops and cull cattle. These measures politicised the countryside and handed nationalist leaders a constituency.

Elie Lescot's inauguration ran ten thousand gourdes over budget because the war had put up the price of French champagne. He was born in 1883 at St.-Louis-du-Nord into a respected Capois family; his grandfather had been magistrat communal of the Cap for life. The American Armour had marked him as a future president as early as 1934, noting that from Trujillo's point of view he was the perfect choice, a son of the North where the Christophe tradition of discipline held. Lescot governed to that description. On 6 June 1941 he took the title of Commander-in-Chief, putting the Garde Presidentielle and the capital's police under his own hand and leaving the chief of staff paperwork. Through that summer his government raided ounfo and smashed the drums and sacred objects inside them. In October he abolished the prefectures for six regional delegues holding sole local authority. Haiti declared war on Japan on 8 December, then on the European Axis, and on Christmas Eve on Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. In January 1942 the legislature voted him extraordinary powers for the duration. On 23 February he suspended the constitution and told the Garde that saboteurs were to be tried, condemned and shot.

Elie Lescot was inaugurated president of Haiti on 15 May 1941, after Stenio Vincent resigned. He was born on 3 December 1883 into a light-skinned family at Saint-Louis du Nord, and he reached the office through the diplomatic service, having represented Haiti in the Dominican Republic and in Washington. He admired Roosevelt and the Good Neighbor Policy, and after Pearl Harbor he declared war on Germany at once. Haiti's part in the war was raw materials and a base for the American Coast Guard. His government also signed on to an American agricultural programme that expropriated peasant land for rubber and sisal and produced food shortages in the countryside. A devout Catholic, he pressed the suppression of Vodou, setting himself against the religion of most of the population and extending a persecution the Catholic Church had run since the concordat of 1860. His sons made money out of property seized from Germans during the war. Trujillo finished him by publishing the size of the bribes he had paid him.