The United Nations adopts Haiti as a test case and finds no money

In 1947, while the United Nations was still working out of temporary offices at Lake Success, Haiti's delegate Ernest Chauvet persuaded Secretary General Trygve Lie that Haiti should be the organisation's demonstration case for technical aid to poor countries. Lie was pleased to have one and sent experts in health, agriculture, education, public administration and finance. They surveyed the country from Cap-Haitien to Les Cayes, sounded the coastal waters, visited schools, and found that French spoken with a Scandinavian accent conveyed little to coffee growers behind Grand-Goave. A year later they produced 327 pages. Malaria, yaws, tuberculosis and parasites were to be eliminated. Twenty-six recommendations covered agriculture. Mining was to be pressed despite Haiti having almost no minerals. There should be hydroelectric power and windmills, swamps should become fish ponds, and the schools should be reorganised. General Russell could have dictated most of that list during the occupation twenty years earlier. When the government asked about funding in late 1948, it learned that the United Nations had none, and that none of the banks named in its place would supply any either.

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.

The oldest movement in sub-Saharan Africa that can fairly be called nationalist was at the southern end of the continent. The South African Native National Congress was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress in 1923. Elsewhere, politics on the scale of a whole territory was rare before the Second World War. It worked in small colonies that resembled a precolonial state, and it worked in Tanganyika, where Swahili was spoken widely enough to carry a message from one end to the other. The Tanganyikan African Association was founded in 1929 with branches across the territory. The war pushed matters forward through hardship and sharpened political awareness. Colonial schooling, restricted as it was, produced elites who meant to build European style nation states in Africa and who then had to close the distance between themselves and everybody else. Women organised and campaigned, and were promised an equality that independence did not deliver. Nationalism had to supply an identity for peoples a European mapmaker had grouped together. It usually failed.

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.