A new city on the seashore, and a theatre for the drums

A whole new district was built along the seashore of Port au Prince in 1949 for the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the capital, and the Bicentennial Exhibition opened there. Inside it stood an open air theatre, the Theatre de Verdure, which became the centre of the movement to perform Haitian folklore and traditional music in public. The end of the Second World War and the exhibition together produced a rush of tourists. Troupes formed to meet it and took their names straight from the temple: Dambalah Dance Troupe, Aida Troupe, Erzuli Dancers, Dantor Dancers, Macaya Folk Group. They worked with the yanvalou, the ibo, the petro and the nago, all of which belong to the sacred repertoire of the religion. The singer Lumane Casimir came out of this moment and was loved by tourists, politicians and the general public alike. She died young and in poverty, and no Haitian government has since rehabilitated her memory.

In 1950 King's College London awarded a doctorate to Kenneth Onwuka Dike of Nigeria for a history researched through oral tradition, the first of its kind. Until then the African past had been treated as unrecoverable because it was unwritten. Dike showed that it could be worked on with evidence, and African history became a scholarly field. Literature moved at the same time. Camara Laye published L'Enfant noir and Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, both of them handling a pre colonial past that colonial schooling had trained its pupils to forget. The confidence was real and so was the wreckage around it. Ethnic, regional and religious blocs were already fighting over the space the colonial state would vacate, and many of those quarrels dated to the nineteenth century. The years of Dike's doctorate and Achebe's first novel were also the years of the South African race laws, of insurgency in the Portuguese colonies and the Belgian Congo, and of the wars in Algeria and Kenya.

On 29 June 1950 the United States played England at Belo Horizonte in the World Cup. England had some of the best players in the world and the American side were part timers. The only goal of the match was a diving header by Joe Gaetjens, born in Port-au-Prince, who had moved to New York in 1947 and who turned out for the Americans under a rule admitting men who had declared an intention to become citizens. It is still the most famous upset the tournament has produced. Gaetjens went home to Haiti afterwards and ran a dry cleaning business. In July 1964 the Tonton Macoutes took him away and he was never seen again. His brothers had joined an exile movement against Francois Duvalier. No charge was laid and no body was recovered. The man who scored the goal Americans still talk about was killed by the secret police of the country he was born in.

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.