Two French priests are expelled over a name left out of prayers

On 16 August 1959 the government expelled Etienne Grienenberger, superior of the Holy Ghost Fathers, and Father Joseph Marrec. The charges were that they had supported enemies of the state and that they had left the president's name out of public prayers. Both men were French, which was not incidental. The Catholic hierarchy in Haiti was staffed almost entirely by French clergy under an agreement with Rome dating from 1860, it had backed Louis Dejoie against Duvalier in the 1957 election, and it had spent a century trying to suppress the Vodou that the president celebrated as the true religion of the Haitian people. A church run from abroad and staffed by foreigners was the one institution in the country with an authority Duvalier could not appoint or dismiss. The two expulsions began a fight that ran for two years and ended with an archbishop deported, a Haitian bishop flown out of the country and the president excommunicated.

The world of 1945 was a different place. Indian nationalist advances suggested an empire in retreat and encouraged movements on both sides of the Sahara. Japan, during the war, had beaten European powers across Southeast Asia and taken Singapore from the British with startling ease, showing that a non-European state could humble them, though Japanese conduct toward occupied populations destroyed any standing it had as a liberator. The United States mattered most. Franklin Roosevelt disliked European empire and pressed for a decolonisation timetable. After his death that priority slid down the American agenda as the Cold War took over. Washington's concern became keeping poor countries out of communist hands, and European empire could be recast as protection for peoples thought vulnerable to it. The United States went on preaching against colonialism while supplying military aid to Portugal's fascist government fighting Marxist guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique. The Soviet Union declared itself anti-colonial by nature and from the 1960s offered African movements diplomatic backing and weapons.

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.

In 1955 agricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar and sisal made up 88 percent of the total volume of Haitian exports. By 1977 they made up 46.7 percent. Assembly plants in the towns grew over the same years, and yet three million four hundred thousand people still lived from farming, on holdings divided and divided again. The mechanism behind the fall was the marketing chain. Two separate networks carried goods from the most distant mountain garden to Port-au-Prince and abroad, one for export commodities and one for food eaten inside the country. On export crops the intermediaries, the importers, the speculators and the state took up to 50 percent of the value, which is why peasants lost interest in growing coffee, the principal crop. On food crops a very large number of intermediaries took 25 percent between them, and nobody attended to the food side at all.