Istwa Nou

Price-Mars at the League's podium did two things at once. His presence showed the leaders were willing to have class, colour and cultural privilege attacked in their own hall. His argument gave them something else. In his account, rural women embodied a cultural authenticity that educated women had to respect and take in, which turned peasant women's bodies and customs into the ticket by which elite women entered the land of origins. Trouillot, Matthew Smith, Ramsey and others have shown how easily the celebration of African ancestry sat beside contempt for the people who practised it daily. Here the harm ran from women to women. Price-Mars also did the useful work of treating Haitian women as Black women inside a patriarchal order, with common ground across class, and he named schooling as the way out of domestic mistreatment and a shrunken civic life. He asked far less of men. He explained multiple partnerships as an inherited African trait and said nothing about the marriage contract that left a wife subject to her husband. That silence pushed the League toward family law.

Maurice Dartigue had just finished at Columbia's Teachers College and had a reputation in rural and industrial schooling. His wife Esther Dartigue, a founding member of the League, is the likely reason he was on the programme. She admired his support for teaching the early grades in Kreyòl and for replacing French textbooks with English ones, and she was impatient with how slowly the elite responded to rural education. Dartigue and Price-Mars both offered education as the leveller: women would earn political rights by proving they could think and produce. Men faced no such test. Dantès Bellegarde closed the series from a long way to their right. He had been ambassador in Paris and Washington, had spoken at the second Pan-African Congress, and counted Du Bois and Rayford Logan as friends. He believed in Western liberal thought and wanted Haitians admitted to Western society as equals. His public quarrels with Price-Mars were famous, which is probably why both were invited by the secretary general, his daughter Fernande. Bellegarde-Smith reads those debates as one question: what is a Haitian in the modern world.