A year out of SHADA, Jeanne Perez goes back to look at the cut forest

SHADA, the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, was a wartime venture set up to grow rubber and other crops for the United States. It cleared land on a scale Haiti had never seen, felling trees across thousands of hectares. Jeanne Perez had worked for the company, writing the copy that presented the clearing as progress. In 1945, a year after she left that job, she travelled with her sister to the country near the Foret des Pins and wrote that the forest had been painfully exploited by SHADA. The sentence is short and it does two jobs. It records the deforestation as a fact about the land. It also records her own part in it, since the Haitian and American partners had used journalism to keep public objection quiet while the cutting went on. She had helped build the story. She went back and looked at what the story had been covering.

French rule in North Africa ended in two places within a single year. In Morocco the nationalist protest was led by Sultan Sidi Muhammad, and fighting in the Spanish-held part of the territory added pressure the French could not absorb. They withdrew in 1956. Tunisia arrived at the same point in the same year. Its Neo-Destour party had spent the early 1950s pulling itself apart in a quarrel between Bourguiba, who wanted terms, and Ben Yusuf, who wanted more than terms. The French tried force against the protest and inducements to the politicians. Bourguiba's side won the internal fight and took the country to full independence. Richard Reid argues that these movements had advantages their neighbours to the south lacked. Islam supplied a long tradition of political argument. The territories had borders and identities centuries deep. A rising pan-Arabism connected them to the Middle East and to a world larger than the continent. Nationalists below the Sahara had to assemble all three of those things while they organised.

In February 1944 Francois Duvalier published an article on the stadial evolution of Vodou in the bulletin of Haiti's Bureau of Ethnology. In it he credited Jean Price Mars with proclaiming to the Society of History and Geography what he called an essential truth: that 1804 issued from Vodou. His own reasoning, he added, had been bound to arrive at the same conclusion. Duvalier was then a doctor and an ethnologist, thirteen years away from the presidency. The formula compressed the whole indigenist reading of Haitian independence into a slogan, and it gave the future dictatorship a claim on the religion of the majority and on the founding event of the country in one move. Once in power he presented himself as a spiritual father and encouraged the identification. The intellectual equipment was assembled well before there was a regime to use it.

Diederich explains how he came to be in the middle of this story. Sailing for the South Pacific, he put into Port-au-Prince, left the sea to hunt for a stolen camera, fell for the country, worked briefly at an American owned casino and in 1950 founded an English language weekly, the Haiti Sun. Stringing work for American and British media followed. He describes the period from the late 1940s to the middle 1950s as a time when the country had more than charm, and later contrasts it flatly with what came after, calling the seven years from 1957 a nightmare in which friends and colleagues were killed or vanished while he filed reports abroad, often anonymously, and censored himself at home to avoid joining the disappeared. The paper is also the source for many of the dates in this book, since he covered the arrivals and departures himself.