Les Griots gets its summing up from one of its own

The journal Les Griots had run since 1938 as the organ of a movement that put African inheritance at the centre of Haitian self description. Its editors included Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier, and its argument was that the ruling class had spent a century performing a French identity while the majority of the country lived by an African past. On 29 July 1949 Henock Trouillot published a commemorative piece in the last numbers of the journal, taking stock of what the school had contributed to national consciousness across two decades. The timing matters. Dumarsais Estime was in the palace, noirisme had become state doctrine, and the men who had written for a small ethnological review in the 1930s were now close to power. Eight years after Trouillot wrote the summing up, one of the journal's founders became president of Haiti. The obituary of a literary movement was also the opening paragraph of a political one.

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.