The state bans Vodou as religion and funds it as folklore

Elie Lescot inherited two things from the Vincent years that pointed in opposite directions. One was the campaign against Vodou, run with the Catholic clergy, which raided temples and destroyed what it found in them. The other was a rising scholarly enthusiasm for Haitian folklore, for the dances, the songs and the beliefs of the peasantry, studied and defended above all by Jean Price-Mars. The two could coexist because officials drew a line between spiritual practice and public performance. A ceremony held for the spirits was superstition to be stamped out. The same drumming and the same steps, described in an ethnographic paper or staged for an audience, were national culture. Haitian intellectuals in the capital lived on both sides of that line with varying degrees of comfort. Price-Mars's daughter Marie-Madeleine moved in the circle of women organising for rights in these years, so the contradiction was not a distant one. It ran through the family.

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.

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.