Price-Mars and Roumain get a state institute for African Haiti

In 1941 the Haitian government put its backing behind Jean Price-Mars and Jacques Roumain, who founded the Institut d'Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince that year. Price-Mars had spent two decades making the indigeniste case, that Haitian culture rests on African foundations and that an elite taking its bearings from Paris was describing a country it did not live in. Roumain was a writer of the younger generation. The institute turned that argument into an institution with premises, a budget and a claim on the state. Once the study of African traditions inside Haitian practice was official work, the Haitian arts movement had somewhere to stand, and it could reach across the differences of class and culture that had kept the capital and the countryside in separate conversations. The timing is the striking part. The same government was breaking up Vodou ceremonies in the countryside while paying for the scholars who studied them. The contradiction was productive for a few years and it was never resolved.

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.

The Axis powers had cut American access to rubber coming out of the Philippines, and in 1941 Elie Lescot agreed to make Haiti the answer. The instrument was the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, known as SHADA, a joint agricultural programme with the United States. Hevea rubber trees were to be brought from the Philippines and grown in Haiti. Alongside them the scheme planted cryptostegia vines, a second source of rubber, and took lumber out of the southeast of the country. All of that required land and it required labour. Both came from the Haitian peasantry, who held the ground the trees were to occupy and who would do the clearing and the planting. The structure should be recognisable. American capital directing Haitian land and Haitian work toward an American requirement is exactly the arrangement of the occupation that had ended six years earlier. The difference in 1941 was that the instructions came through a Haitian president rather than a Marine general.

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.