Istwa Nou

Dumarsais Estime was born at Verrettes in the Artibonite on 21 April 1900, a black provincial with no family standing, and he was schooled by the Christian Brothers at Saint Marc before moving on to the Lycee Petion in the capital. Mathematics was his subject in the classroom until he crossed President Borno and lost the post and the platform together. The elections of 1930 returned him as a deputy. He rose to preside over the Chamber and then to hold cabinet office under Vincent, remembered by colleagues as silent, surly and tireless. Senator Alphonse Henriquez called him a motor in a pair of trousers. Katherine Dunham, who knew him closely, wrote that his brusqueness covered a timidity underneath, and that his head looked too large for his body in the manner of Benin bronzes and Bambara masks, where the sculptor puts the spirit and intelligence of a man in the head. When he took the presidency in 1946 the Griot generation read it as their own arrival, and Rayford Logan called it the advent of the noir elite.

Judging Dumarsais Estime by his enemies produces contradictory answers. The mulatre elite had held the presidency for twenty-one years and had just lost it, and Estime and Daniel Fignole both denounced those families in public as inauthentic Haitians. They were frightened and bitter. At the same time Fignole and the crowds of Port-au-Prince, standing to Estime's left, treated the August vote as a swindle, since Colonel Calixte, the candidate they favoured, had received almost nothing. As in May, the Mouvement Ouvriers Paysans went into the streets, smashing lights and fittings, pulling down utility poles, breaking whatever stood in the way, and falling back to La Saline when there was nothing left to break. This was the first black presidency since the American occupation began. It placed Estime where Salomon and Hyppolite had stood in the previous century, holding a treasury too small to satisfy either side, needing to reward enough supporters to survive and frighten enough opponents to last.

The National Assembly met in the Palais Legislatif on 16 August 1946 to choose a president. Garde officers sat in the galleries and in the chamber with submachine guns across their laps, the palace band played, and all five of the Garde's armoured half tracks stood across the street. Senators and deputies wrote names on paper slips. Dumarsais Estime, a lower middle class noir from the Artibonite backed by Major Magloire and financed by the distiller Alfred Vieux, led the first round with 25 votes against 8 for Bignon Pierre-Louis, 7 for Edgar Nere Numa and 6 for Colonel Calixte, the rest scattered among the many parties founded that year. After a recess the second ballot gave Estime 32, Numa 14 and Pierre-Louis 10, and he was declared elected. The half tracks led his car to the cathedral for a Te Deum past silent crowds. Lavaud then returned executive power to an elected president, seven months after taking it. Estime told him the army had been at once the head that commanded and the arm that carried out, and had kept its word.