A Marxist reading of Haiti puts class underneath colour

Etienne Charlier published Apercu sur la formation historique de la nation haitienne in 1954. He applied Marxist analysis to the country's past and argued that Haiti's ideas, its laws and its quarrels about colour all rested on an economic foundation. Class conflict was primary in his account. Colour, he allowed, moved to the centre in particular periods of political struggle, which meant it could not be dismissed as an illusion and could not be treated as the engine either. The book landed in a decade when colour was the organising language of Haitian politics, with the noiriste generation lately in power and the mulatto elite regrouping around Magloire. Emmanuel C. Paul took the other side, and the two men fought it out in Le Jour and Le Nouvelliste over how to read the revolution. Charlier was a light skinned member of the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie writing that the grievances of his own colour group were secondary.

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.

Several film crews recorded the re-enactment, and in the autumn of 2012 Le Glaunec found an excerpt in the archives of a Haitian and Caribbean documentation centre in Montreal. It runs a little over three minutes, is narrated in English and appears to have been made for American audiences. The narrator calls the soldiers of the indigenous army a band of patriots fighting for freedom and frames the battle as a continuation of the American war of independence and its language of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The author reads this as an act of translation that makes the Haitian war intelligible to a foreign public by subordinating it to an earlier one. The footage shows a handful of French figures overwhelmed by hundreds of half naked fighters, a soldier of Rochambeau waving a white flag, and the horse of the actor playing Capois lying dead. It has apparently not been shown since 1954.

A writer signing as H.P.J. published two columns in the Daily Gleaner in Kingston in June 1955. The first, on the eighth, said that proposals to change the marketing system came from harassed Marketing Department officials who were listening to small farmers whose system was collapsing, while consumers paid high prices that never improved the producer's lot. The second, on the twenty third, said that few higglers in any category made much money, and that their willingness to work for tiny margins had blocked the growth of greengrocers with telephones and delivery vans. The two charges pull against each other. In one the trader takes too much out of the chain. In the other she takes so little that no better paid trade can establish itself. Jamaica had no formal plan to abolish higglering at the time. The criticism came from middle class townspeople in conversation and in the press, some of whom also complained to visiting researchers about the rudeness of market women.