Lescot cuts the marriage fee from twenty gourdes to half a gourde

In 1945 President Elie Lescot announced a sharp reduction in the national marriage tax. People called it the Marriage Tax Law. Where a rural couple had faced fees of at least twenty gourdes to be married, the charge became half a gourde everywhere in the country. Lescot told the nation that the measure would strengthen marriage and would give civil status to children born in Haiti, and that peasants who could not previously afford the fee would now have the means. Most Haitian couples lived in unions the state did not record. Their children had no birth registration, no legal father and no inheritance claim a court would hear. Lowering the fee looked like relief for poor households. It was also the government reaching into arrangements that had stayed outside its files since independence, because a household that marries at the registry becomes a household the state can count, tax, conscript and govern.

Colonial governments began organising local elections, and the elections built the movements that ended the colonies. In Cote d'Ivoire in 1944 cocoa and coffee growers set up the Syndicat Agricole Africain, whose first aim was the abolition of forced labour. The union put its weight behind its leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who won a seat in the Assembly in Paris and got the corvee abolished. In Paris he joined with other West African deputies to build the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, the main bloc pressing for reform across French Africa. In Senegal a wider franchise let Leopold Senghor found a party rooted in the countryside, breaking the towns' hold on politics. Between the mid 1940s and the mid 1950s voters in French West Africa went to the polls repeatedly, for the National Assembly in Paris, the Assembly of the French Union, the Grand Councils at Brazzaville and Dakar, territorial assemblies, referenda and constitutions. Belgium did the reverse in the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, sealing them off from every one of these developments, and their transitions were the worst on the continent.

The National Assembly met in the Palais Legislatif on 16 August 1946 to choose a president. Garde officers sat in the galleries and in the chamber with submachine guns across their laps, the palace band played, and all five of the Garde's armoured half tracks stood across the street. Senators and deputies wrote names on paper slips. Dumarsais Estime, a lower middle class noir from the Artibonite backed by Major Magloire and financed by the distiller Alfred Vieux, led the first round with 25 votes against 8 for Bignon Pierre-Louis, 7 for Edgar Nere Numa and 6 for Colonel Calixte, the rest scattered among the many parties founded that year. After a recess the second ballot gave Estime 32, Numa 14 and Pierre-Louis 10, and he was declared elected. The half tracks led his car to the cathedral for a Te Deum past silent crowds. Lavaud then returned executive power to an elected president, seven months after taking it. Estime told him the army had been at once the head that commanded and the arm that carried out, and had kept its word.

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.