Istwa Nou

Guilbaud kept pushing on education under Tancrède Auguste and got very little in the towns and nothing in the countryside. Sir Harry Johnston, the British explorer and colonial analyst, had visited Haiti in 1910 and set out why. The Budget général, handsomely printed, carried a section for the Department of Public Instruction laid out in a detail he compared to Switzerland or Germany. Most of that structure existed on paper. The money voted for it reached the pockets of officials or never left the treasury at all. Johnston doubted that any rural school existed, though five hundred were provided for, and thought that where one did it functioned as a small income for someone unfit to teach. About two and a half million of Haiti's three million people could neither read nor write. This is the shape the postcolonial state kept taking: European architecture on the page, and underneath it an arrangement for moving public money among the governing few.

The National Assembly chose a new president within days of the explosion. Tancrède Auguste was fifty-six, a mulâtre from Cap-Haïtien, and he farmed a good sugar estate at Châteaublond, the ground the international airport occupies today. Like every man of consequence at that moment he was a Consolidard, from the faction formed around the consolidation loan scandals of the 1880s. Henry Furniss, the American minister, kept confidential files on Haitian public men, and Auguste came out well in his: small, well built, a man of force with real influence over the country around Port-au-Prince, widely liked, and the founder of free schools on his own plantation, paid for out of his pocket, with attendance required of his workers' children. The cabinet showed who had put him in. The lawyers J.-N. Léger and Edmond Lespinasse held the power, joined by Rosalvo Bobo, whom the consul at the Cap called a charlatan in medicine, and by Guilbaud, Leconte's education minister, who had written in verse that a man who wants liberty must put his son in school.