Haiti builds a town on the border and Trujillo closes the road

By October 1949 the Haitian budget had reached thirteen million dollars, lifted by a good harvest and by the first income tax in the country's history, which Dumarsais Estime had imposed on an elite that did not thank him for it. Nearly five percent of that budget went on one project. Belladere was a small post on the road in from Santo Domingo, and the state rebuilt it as a model town with a bank, a theatre, a town hall, a restaurant, a hotel and a new church. There was no economic case for any of it. The point was to outshine Elias Pina, the Dominican town on the other side of the line. Rafael Trujillo watched the buildings go up and said nothing. A few weeks after the opening he shut the highway and sent all traffic through Jimani and Malpasse instead, and Belladere emptied out. Haiti had spent one twentieth of its revenue on a shop window that a neighbour closed with a single administrative order.

The rate of illiteracy in Turkey stood at ninety per cent in 1927 and 1928. By 1935 and 1936 it had fallen to eighty per cent, and from 1950 onwards it settled around sixty per cent. Secondary schools expanded forty one times between 1927 and 1960 and university enrolment grew at about the same rate, so the effort went into the upper levels. In 1960 the villages still had 1,455,254 children in elementary school out of 2,372,778 of school age, while the towns had 823,947 out of 945,624. Villages were small and scattered, schools and teachers were expensive, and there was no settled idea of what mass education was for. Education at the higher levels became a marker of status, and some conservatives openly doubted whether spreading primary schooling was wise, proposing instead to train a technical elite abroad and hand the country to it.

Britain, France and Belgium handed over power in their African colonies between the late 1940s and the 1960s, and even the transfers that went smoothly left the new states badly equipped. Schooling under colonial rule was open to a minority until the final years, so most citizens could not read, could not follow what their government was doing, and had no practical way to hold anyone to account. The men who took office had been pushed through training programmes assembled at speed once independence was agreed. Civil society, the associations and newspapers and courts that make a government answerable, had never been allowed to grow. Reid warns against reading the instability that followed as nothing more than colonial failure. The conflicts over who controlled land, revenue and office ran back into the nineteenth century, before any European flag went up, and they resumed once it came down. Colonial neglect made those older quarrels worse. I keep these decades on a Haitian timeline because Haiti reached the same position in 1804 and met the same problem: a sovereign state, a population kept illiterate on purpose, and a ruling class assembled overnight.

Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo in 1949. The novel follows Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte through the revolution and its aftermath, and it holds Vodou, revolutionary violence and European reason in one frame. In the prologue Carpentier set out what he called lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real, arguing that the ordinary substance of Caribbean life already contains what the European surrealists had to manufacture in a studio. He had visited Haiti in 1943 and seen Sans Souci and the Citadelle, and the trip gave him both the setting and the argument. That prologue became the founding statement of magical realism, the mode that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a generation after him carried to the rest of the world. The line runs from a ruined palace in the Haitian north to a Colombian village to the international bestseller list. Haiti sent out a revolution in 1804. In 1949 it sent out a way of seeing.