Manigat casts Salomon as the builder of a black civilisation

Leslie Manigat's study of Lysius Salomon presented the National Party of the 1880s as an attempt to build a black civilisation in the Caribbean. Salomon was president from 1879 to 1888, a black politician from the south who had spent decades in exile. He founded the national bank, reorganised the schools, brought Haiti into the Universal Postal Union and distributed state land to peasants. Manigat gives those measures a larger reading: a black state demonstrating in public that it could administer itself and produce a culture of its own. Manigat was a serious historian who later held the Haitian presidency himself for four months in 1988, and what he produced here is a legend in the strict sense, a story a group tells about where it came from. In this telling Salomon stands before the Haitian masses as the figure of black regeneration. Later politicians found him a very convenient ancestor to claim.

Paul Magloire signed a Point Four agreement with the United States in July 1950 covering soil conservation, cattle, irrigation, drainage and sanitation. He took over the Artibonite scheme that Estime had begun and borrowed fourteen million dollars from the Export Import Bank, adding six million of Haiti's own, to build a dam at Peligre two hundred and twenty five feet high. Finished, it would irrigate eighty thousand acres and eventually deliver forty thousand kilowatts. He planned three hundred miles of road, including blacktop from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, and seven million dollars of new wharves at the Cap. All of it went into a five year plan costed at forty million dollars. Foreign capital was courted and some of it came, with Reynolds Metals opening bauxite mines at Miragoane in 1953. Magloire also broke the unions. He shut the Parti Socialiste Populaire in 1951 for striking against American firms, closed Fignole's MOP with it, and silenced both their papers.

In April 1950 the Ligue feminine d'action sociale held the first national congress of Haitian women, at the invitation of the commission organising the bicentennial exposition of Port-au-Prince, with Lucienne Heurtelou-Estime, the president's wife, in the chair. It brought together delegates from forty four Haitian women's associations and thirty two delegates from seventeen foreign and international organisations, which had never happened in the country before. Alice Garoute, already dying, came in person on 10 April to present the register of women's grievances. In October delegates put the demands to several thousand people at the Massillon Coicou open air theatre, and on 4 November they filed petitions carrying thousands of signatures from both sexes with the constituent assembly, then went to Gonaives and stood watch for the whole length of its proceedings. The right to vote and to stand for election was won. Haitian women did not exercise it until the municipal elections of 1955.

Louis Maximilien published Le Vodou Haitien in Port-au-Prince in 1945 with a chapter arguing that the religion rested on metaphysical ideas still alive in Africa which could be lit up by ancient Egypt, by Herodotus and by the Greek and Roman mystery traditions. Milo Rigaud published his own study in Paris in 1953 and tied Vodou cosmology to ancient Egypt as well, along with European magic, cabala and freemasonry. The genealogies were invented. Their effect was real. Learned priests in Port-au-Prince read both men, took the arguments to heart, and began working masonic and cabalistic material into their own temples. A history written to give the religion a respectable antiquity became part of what the religion actually did. Anyone reading Haitian ritual for African survivals after the middle of the twentieth century is reading practice that two Haitian writers had already altered.