Lescot fills the state with men of his own colour

Elie Lescot took over from Stenio Vincent as president of Haiti in 1941. Nicholls records what he did with the machinery he inherited. The senior ranks of the administration went almost exclusively to mulattoes, the light-skinned minority that had held most of Haiti's official power since the nineteenth century. The pattern was not subtle and was not intended to be missed. At the same time Lescot's government backed the campaigns against Voodoo that the Catholic clergy were running, which struck at the religion the great majority of Haitians actually practised. Both policies pointed the same direction and landed on the same people. The black middle class had been growing in size and in confidence through the years since the American occupation ended, and a single administration now locked it out of office and insulted what it believed. Nicholls treats the alienation of that class as the fact about Lescot's presidency that mattered most, because those were the men who took the country in 1946.

Postwar politics in Europe changed official thinking about what colonies were for. The Attlee Labour government in Britain broke with much of prewar social doctrine, and from about 1947 London began moving away from indirect rule through chiefs toward bringing in the educated African elite that had been pressing for entry since the 1930s. The French also started planning a gradual transfer, though they expected strong patron and client ties and a qualified autonomy rather than full independence. Where Europeans had settled, the plans were different. The Colonial Office envisaged special constitutional powers for white settlers in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia to guarantee their position and their economic dominance. One man, one vote was not under consideration. The planners of the late 1940s assumed former colonies would stay under metropolitan influence and that the handover would be very slow. Portugal and Belgium contemplated only cosmetic reform. Britain and France wanted moderate African leaders who would protect the interests being left behind, and no communists anywhere.

SHADA removed peasants from their land by force. Houses were pulled down and fruit trees decades old were cut at the base. By 1943 the company had cleared 47,177 acres. At its greatest extent it held over 100,000 hectares of Haitian ground, which is close to the reach of the plantation system the revolution had destroyed nearly a hundred and forty years earlier. Rubber now stood where cane had stood. The land was worked for export under foreign direction, the people on it drew wages for labouring on fields they had owned, and the logic was the one their ancestors had fought a thirteen year war to break. What had changed was the empire giving the orders and the crop it wanted. Depletion ran through the soil first and then through the people living on it, since a family stripped of its trees and its plot has nothing left to draw down except itself.

A year after the campaign that proclaimed Haiti a hotbed of magic, Jacques Tourneur's film I Walked with a Zombie reached the screen. Its premise was that zombies kept until then by priests had taken advantage of the disorder to escape, so that anyone walking in the countryside risked meeting one at the edge of a cane field. The figure of the living dead, brought back from the grave and stripped of will, carried the terror of the picture. The timing is the interesting part. A Haitian government campaign against the religion supplied the raw material for an American entertainment about that religion, and the film then circulated back as evidence of what Haiti was. For those who serve the spirits, being made into a zombie is the worst punishment there is, since it reduces a person to a slave, which is the exact condition the religion grew up against.