Haiti

UNESCO at Marbial

The fundamental problem in Haiti is a problem of education. In this country of over three million people (there has never been a satisfactory census, and the population has been variously estimated), a little over ten per cent are literate. These are the urban "élite," who are likely to know two or three languages (as well as the local Creole), and who have never done manual work. The illiterate ninety per cent, in their lath-and-mud huts thatched with banana leaves, inhabit an African jungle dominated by voo-doo divinities, where even the conception of a Haitian government is difficult for them to grasp. When one of these peasants comes in to the polls and indicates his choice of a candidate, it is no trouble for the official recording the votes to write down any name he pleases, and if the voter can read a little, it is almost as easy to get him drunk so that he will not notice what has been written. It is obvious that the political life of Haiti cannot make very much sense so long as these conditions prevail; and wherever, in any field, in Haiti today, you encounter a serious person, young enough not to be imprisoned in the Francophile culture of the nineteenth century, who is trying to do something for his country, you find someone who is working to diminish the difference between the illiterate and the educated classes—either by understanding the peasantry better, by teaching them to read and write, or instructing them in agricultural methods, or by extirpating the diseases that prey on them.

A conspicuous example of this is the experiment begun by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in August, 1948, which aims at all these kinds of improvement. This project was originally conceived by a young Haitian, Emmanuel Gabriel, a former school inspector in Port-au-Prince, who had

gone to England after the war on a British scholarship to study education and who had attended a UNESCO conference in Paris in October, 1946, at which plans were discussed for supplying technical assistance to governments that were members of the United Nations. M. Gabriel communicated with the Methodist missionary in Port-au-Prince, Pastor H. Ormonde McConnell, an able and active man, who had become a leading figure in the educational field in Haiti. He suggested to Pastor McConnell that he go to President Estimé and propose to him that Haiti apply to get the benefit of UNESCO assistance. The application was made, and the Haitian government was invited by UNESCO to choose a suitable place to conduct an educational experiment.

The locality chosen was Marbial, in the valley of the Gosseline River, which flows from the hills into the Bay of Jacmel (near the town of Jacmel on the south coast), a community of about thirty thousand, impoverished and peculiarly unfortunate in being alternately starved by protracted droughts and inundated by terrible floods. The only access to Marbial is by way of an abominable road, full of holes that recall the craters of a bomb-riddled high-

way in Europe. This runs along the Gosseline River, and river and road together make the main artery of Marbial life. Here, walled by infertile mountains, where the whitish volcanic rock shows through the vegetation, in the sprawling and shallow murky stream, among the pale stones and pale mud, the blue-black males bathe, the swollen-bellied children play, the women rinse out their washing, and the horses and cattle are watered. This is also the water the people drink.

Along the road one sees their only commerce: little displays that are sometimes on stands under roofs of dried palm or banana leaves, sometimes simply laid out on the ground, and that include ripe bananas, bottled syrups, queer phalliform loaves of white bread that suggest the primitive features of the voodoo rites, and some brown and sticky confection that looks like pralines or peanut brittle. The small children hold on the tops of their heads, clasping their hands above them, single oranges or calabash gourds; the women balance great trays or baskets with mixed loads of tinware and bottles, or a brown cow's head with one ear wagging. Their beasts of burden are usually donkeys, which have sometimes had diseased ears cut off (to call somebody "a crop-eared donkey" seems to be a serious insult). These are likely to hold up passing cars by balking in the middle of the road, from which they have to be gradually budged by the pulling of barefooted girls in one-piece dresses and big flat straw hats, or of older women puffing pipes.

The men do not do much carrying, but men and women alike are often seen with the West Indian poultry that, as food, as sacrificial offerings, and as contestants in the most popular sport, play so large a role in their lives. They tie a bird's legs together and

The Reporter, May 23, 1950

29

C. ISHII

carry it as if it were a parasol, with one hand clasping the legs and the rest tucked under the arm. These fowl are extremely beautiful, with an infinitely varied mixture of bronzy greens, yellows, and reds, often combined with white. They seem to be the only aesthetic objects that these drably clad peasants possess. The roosters are bred for feroceness and very highly prized, since cockfighting, with dancing and voodoo rites, furnishes all the people's amusement and their drama. The people are accompanied by famelic dogs and lean black pigs which they lead on ropes.

The UNESCO headquarters is announced by signboards lettered in the phonetic Creole that is taught in the UNESCO school. "Sous Onesko" means "UNESCO spring" [source]. The "Katié Général" includes a "Bibliotèk," a "Siènema," a "Pepinié," an "Atélie Tisaj," an "Atélie Séramik," and a "Sât [center] Koopérativ." It is a little more difficult for the visitor who is not familiar with Creole to recognize in "A non aprân li ak écri," "Let us learn to read and write." Creole is a mixture of the dialect spoken in the French maritime provinces that created the colonial trade, sometimes preserving locutions current in the seventeenth century, when the French were getting a firm hold on Santo Domingo (as the whole island was then known), and the Negro languages of West Africa, from which the slaves were brought. It was

necessary for the slaves in the early days to improvise as quickly as possible some means of communicating with their masters as well as some means of understanding each other when their African languages differed.

The result was a tough little tongue, laconic and perfectly logical, worked out from lowest common denominators. The curious thing is that, fixed in this early period, it has become, with local variations, the popular language everywhere in the French-speaking West Indies as well as in Guiana and Louisiana. It is also much spoken by educated Haitians even when they are talking among themselves, though they have to resort to French when they want to deal with abstract conceptions, which cannot be expressed in Creole. The broadcasts in Port-au-Prince are often made in this invertedly macaronic language of Creole supplemented by French. On the one hand, in Haiti, you have classical French, the language par excellence of formulas, becoming continually staler as the destiny of Haiti in our hemisphere alienates it more and more from France. "The French say we talk like books," M. Gabriel said to me; and it is true that the Haitian press at times produces unintended comic effects through dressing up petty events in an insipid ceremonious garb that suggests the high stocks and tight breeches of the era of the Haitian Revolution. On the other hand, if the Creole-speaking people are to be taught to read and write, why start them with French, a language of which they have had no experience and which, in their present phase, is intellectually far beyond them?

The opposition to the teaching of Creole has come to be regarded in Haiti by the more progressive elements as one of the symptoms of an

insightful conservatism which, fearing the eventual recalcitrance of a better-educated peasantry, does not want it to be taught anything at all. The objection one sometimes encounters, that the phonetic method used is based on English sounds and disqualifies the student from learning French, is ascribed to the same instinct.

The movement, in any case, is only just getting under way. One of the obstacles it has to contend with is the fewness of Creole texts. The Haitians who have written down folk tales in Creole have used various forms of French spelling, and such original exercises in Creole as the amusing adaptation of La Fontaine by the poet Georges Sylvain have been intended for literate readers. Pastor McConnell, at the beginning of the 1940's, founded a Creole newspaper, and had some Creole textbooks printed, but the paper stopped for lack of funds after two and a half years, and the textbooks have not been reprinted. Today you will find at Port-au-Prince, in the basement of the Centre d'Art, an American UNESCO worker—a Negro girl from Massachusetts, a college graduate and former social worker—making a shorter, less sophisticated version than that in Sylvain's La Fontaine of "La Cigale et la Fourmi" (the moral of which is felt to be needed), with charming illustrations by the Haitian G. F. O. Remponeau, and preparing a little tract to explain that the disease of yaws is not an affliction imposed by an angry and malignant spirit but is due to the depredations of a very small kind of animal, from whose attacks one can defend oneself.

Nor has the method of teaching Creole been definitely settled yet. The method of Pastor McConnell has begun by teaching sounds and syllables, which are later put together in words, but M. Gabriel, who has studied with

The Reporter, May 23, 1950

30

I. A. Richards, is replacing this method at Marbial by one derived from Basic English, in which sentences are the primary units. It has already been found possible by McConnell's method —unexpectedly to skeptical conservatives—to teach students to read and write in from two to three months.

Here, at any rate, in a little white building that is hardly more than a shelter, are two schoolrooms hung with charts and maps, on one of which the United States figures as "Etazini." There are two hundred children now in this UNESCO school. In Marbial there are, all together, three thousand children of school age—that is, between seven and fourteen. Many of them live in remote areas, where UNESCO ultimately hopes to set up what it calls "feeder" schools. The children will be taught only the rudiments of reading and writing and simple arithmetic, along with "fundamental hygiene." Efforts to teach them French are likely to become stalled in the mere memorizing of isolated passages which they do not understand.

There are ten teachers at the main center: four for the primary school, one for adults, five for the crafts. These crafts consist of basket weaving with sisal fibers, beautifully clean and white, making combs out of cowhorn, molding pottery from the pallid mud, and constructing simple wooden furniture. There has as yet, though it is badly needed, been little agricultural instruction—but a nursery has been begun with small plantings of tobacco, pistachio, and eggplant.

There is also a small dispensary, to which a doctor comes once a week and where a nurse and a male assistant give the patients injections and dressings when the doctor is not there. Before the UNESCO center existed, there was no way to get medical attention except—what was rarely done—to pay a doctor to come out from Jacmel. The local witch doctors, it seems, have some skill at setting fractures and know a few effective herbs for minor ailments, but are otherwise completely helpless. Of the patients who come to this clinic, twenty per cent have syphilis and sixty per cent the probably related and hardly less disastrous yaws. This latter disease, with its running sores, rapidly debilitates its victims, so that they become incapable of effort and a dead loss to the community.

When the UNESCO people first came to Marbial, they found the peasants so undernourished that it was out of the question to teach them before they were adequately fed. So canteens were set up, and the people given work on the buildings and roads, to enable them to earn money. Some who have observed the experiment have arrived at the gloomy view that even such improved irrigation as the region is susceptible of would not raise the subsistence level to a point where the natives could benefit much. It is encouraging, however, that the people do seem to want education, that they have been eager in attendance at the center.

From the opposite side of the project, the side which is offering assistance, there are difficulties to be got over, too. First of all, there is a religious question. The natives of Marbial, though they actually practice voodoo, are nominally divided about half and half between the Catholic Church and various Protestant sects. The representative of the government on the

project has been a fanatical Free Methodist, Arthur Bonhomme, whose father founded in Port-au-Prince an independent Methodist church, not acknowledging the authority of the Methodist mission. M. Bonhomme was sentenced to jail in 1937 for complicity in a plot to assassinate the Chef du Garde Présidentiel of President Vincent, and, while serving his term, read the Bible and had a profound religious experience. He came out preaching a red-hot doctrine, and possessed by a fervent mission to have the Gospels translated into Creole (a project that is now being carried out). In 1946 he became head of the Comité Pour la Diffusion de l'Enseignement par le Créole, and so was assigned to the UNESCO experiment. But the Catholics took alarm at an undertaking which, during the absence of the UNESCO director, was supervised by a militant Protestant, and which was known to have been initiated by the resident Methodist missionary.

To make matters worse, the UNESCO school, though its teaching was of course nonsectarian, was originally lodged in the Protestant church. The local Catholic priest has obstructed the work to such a degree that, in order to placate this opposition, it has been necessary to move the school and to detach M. Bonhomme from the project entirely.

As throwing light on the peculiar difficulties encountered by a disinterested attempt to improve the condition of

The Reporter, May 23, 1950

31

the Haitian people, it may be worth-
while to include an account of my re-
turn from Marbial with a party which
included Pastor McConnell, M. Gab-
riel, and a young man from the United
States State Department. We had come
to Jacmel by plane, and it had taken
not much more than half an hour. Get-
ting back was another matter. Every
resource failed. They had told us at
the airport in the morning that it would
be possible for us to charter a plane,
but now they said that the weather was
unfavorable. Nor was it easy to find a
car. When we arrived, we were sup-
posed to be met by a command car
which would take us to Marbial, but
this vehicle, which had been con-
demned as unfit for use on the road
along the dangerous north coast
(where it had half fallen over a preci-
pice) and which had just been aban-
doned for several days in the bed of the
bridgeless river (where it had gotten
stuck in crossing), turned out now to
be in such very bad shape that we were
obliged to borrow a truck from a hos-
pital.

We could not, however, take this to
Port-au-Prince, so an attempt was
made to fix up the command car,
under which six or seven men were
seen lying for about two hours. The
man who had met us and was supposed
to look after us faded quietly away
from time to time and finally disap-
peared altogether. Our attempts to
hire a car at the town garage did not
result in anything definite. The truth
was, as we came to understand, that
nobody wanted to make the trip. The
proprietor of a little hotel, in the café
of which we were waiting, invited us
to look at his bedrooms, which were,
he said, specially suited to Americans.
Then we were chilled, the State De-
partment man and I, as our compan-
ions imparted to us a further suspicion
for which we had not been prepared.
There was, it seemed, some reason for
believing that our trip had been sab-
otaged from the beginning by M.
Bonhomme's people—of whom our
greeter was one—who had originally
been employed by him and who re-
sented his having been removed.

Later in the evening, however, the
command car was made to run, and a
mechanic from the garage consented
to drive us to Port-au-Prince, though
only after making us wait while he

went home and changed his clothes in
order to be dressed for the city. When
we had started and saw what the road
was like, we weren't sure that the
reluctance of the drivers had neces-
sarily been due to sabotage. The won-
der was, in fact, that anybody had been
willing to embark at that hour in that
old piece of rickety junk, which seemed
ready to fall to pieces at every jolt of
the much-jolting road.

We broke down about every fifteen
minutes and had long waits among the
nocturnal banana groves, while the
driver, who did not have a flashlight,
tinkered by the flame of small flares
held for him by boys from roadside

farms. It was proposed to turn back
to Jacmel, but the man from the State
Department had an engagement that
evening, and Pastor McConnell, an
Ulsterman, displayed a very British
spirit in not wanting the Jacmel peo-
ple to see that we had been defeated.
Buses, coming from the other direction,
found us blocking the road, and the
drivers would get out to help. We
finally persuaded one of them, by of-

fering him forty dollars, to drive us
to Port-au-Prince after his passengers
had been delivered. This bus was
called *La Sainte Famille*, and had a
colored print of its patrons pasted up
facing the driver. The passengers, as
is common in Haiti, sang in chorus to
beguile the journey. The driver and
the man who spelled him always called
one another "mon cher" and showed
everybody the quiet courtesy that is
characteristic of Haiti.

At one point this driver ran over a
dog that was lying in the middle of
the road and uttered a short "ha ha"
as he heard its howls of pain. The bus
was jammed, inside and on top, with
the passengers, their baggage, and
great sacks of potatoes and yams, which
were gradually unloaded in the sleep-
ing town. At last we started back, and
the true rigors of the trip were revealed
to us: We had had only bumpy going
before. The road from Jacmel to Port-
au-Prince is inextricably involved with
the Gosseline River, which it crosses,
by our actual count, more than eighty
times and with the bed of which it is
sometimes identical, so that you have
to forge upstream like a ferryboat.
These aquatic phases alternate, at reg-
ular and frequent intervals, with ex-
cursions into the mountains, where you
run along a narrow pass, on one side
of which drops a precipice.

When we would emerge from the
bed of the river, there were usually
stones in the tires that had to be dis-
lodged by long pounding. But the wild
country in the moonlight was exhilarat-
ing, and the ups and downs of the road
kept one alert, like a roller-coaster.
During the final stage of the journey—
after the worst was over—the driver
several times went to sleep, with the
result that the bus made sudden
swerves that might have landed us in
a tree or a house if the watchful Pastor
McConnell, who was sitting in the
front seat, had not waked him up in
time. We arrived at about 3:30.

A few days later one read in the
paper a long protest by M. Bonhomme,
addressed to the Secretary of State of
National Education. He was answer-
ing an announcement by the Secretary
that, dating from December 31, all
activities connected with the Marbial
project were *pro tem* to be suspended.
The man at Jacmel who had fallen
down on the problem of our transpor-

The Reporter, May 23, 1950

32

tation had, I learned from another
source, been relieved of his UNESCO
duties. M. Bonhomme was complaining indignantly that the staff at Marbial center had not been paid for months and that he had been forced to meet expenses out of his own pocket. In rebuttal, one heard it said—unjustly, it may very well be, but in Haiti inevitably—that he had been handling the funds so recklessly that it was thought inadvisable to give him more.

In any case, a new director, an Eng-
lishman from Mauritius, has now been
installed at Marbial, with M. Gabriel
as assistant director.

Between the rivalries of Haitian poli-
tics and the dissensions within the U.N.
itself, the vagaries of the Gosseline
River and the activities of the yaws
bacilli, the struggles of the Christian
churches and the prestige of the voo-
doo divinities, it may seem that the
experiment at Marbial is rather a pre-
carious thing. The United Nations has
published a three-hundred-page re-
port, with editions both in English and
in French; on the mission to Haiti of
"a team of experts . . . set up" at the
request of the Haitian government,
"in consultation with four specialized
agencies, namely, the Food and Agri-
cultural Organization, the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, The United
Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization, and the World
Health Organization, which were re-
quested to nominate experts in their
service who could participate in the
United Nations Mission as members
conversant with the various problems
in the field of agriculture, credit or-
ganization, education, and health, hav-
ing a bearing on the general problem
of economic development of under-
developed countries." This mission
was undertaken "in implementation
of" the following aims: "(1) To exam-
ine the problems of and the conditions
affecting the economic development of
Haiti primarily in the fields of agricul-
ture, industry and related activities,
having regard to the inter-related eco-
nomic and social problems bearing, in
particular, on the improvement of
health and education; (2) In the light
of this examination and in taking
cognizance of related government pro-
grammes or plans, to formulate pro-
posals as to practicable measures, in-
cluding those of a public finance

nature, designed to promote the eco-
nomic development of the country;
(3) To appraise the needs in terms of
organizational arrangements and tech-
nical assistance implied by the meas-
ures proposed."

One does find, of course, in the re-
port a good deal of factual informa-
tion, but the description of actual con-
ditions and of the remedies proposed
by the mission is all more or less in this
pompous, polysyllabic, and generaliz-
ing vein. In contrast to three hundred
pages of it, the Marbial center seems
tiny, and the twenty-seven-thousand-
dollar annual budget that is all that the
United Nations combined with the
Haitian government has so far been
able to afford, a meager expenditure.
Nevertheless, there are real forces
working for Marbial: on one side, the
sincere desire of certain idealistic
young Haitians, who have been well
trained in modern techniques and who
do not share the mentality of the politi-
cians, to see their people become some-
thing more than a diseased, under-
nourished peasantry manipulated by a
spendthrift élite; and, on the other
side, the interest of the United States,
as emphasized by Truman's Point Four,
in providing new markets for its prod-
ucts by raising the standards of back-

ward countries. The mention of "meas-
ures of public finance" in the survey
quoted above reminds us of the bank-
ing interests that, along with the stra-
tegic ones, brought the United States
into Haiti. But "capitalist" govern-
ments today, as well as educators and
engineers, are obliged to talk in terms
of aims like those of the Socialists and
Communists with whom these govern-
ments are now competing. The pub-
licity put out by UNESCO in connection
with its Haitian mission is curiously
reminiscent—by its abstract formula-
tions as well as by its declared objec-
tives, though the jargon is a little
different—of the literature of the
Communist Party in the days when
it was preoccupied with "the toiling
masses."

It will be interesting, in any case, to
see how far Marbial will get. Of the
two other similar experiments that
UNESCO has undertaken, one in China
and one in British East Africa, the first
has been made impossible by the Com-
munist successes in China, and the sec-
ond has been given up for reasons that
are left obscure by the UNESCO reports
on the subject. —EDMUND WILSON

*(This is the second of three articles on Haiti.)*

The Reporter, May 23, 1950

33

Views & Reviews

Il Duce and Il Truman

Five years ago, when President Roosevelt died, Mussolini was at his headquarters in northern Italy, still grimly playing at being a chief of state—although for the nineteen months of its existence his “Italian Social Republic” had been a ghost and Il Duce himself a dummy for the German General Kesselring.

Thanks to the survival of the ex-
Duce's office documents, we are able to
reconstruct his first reaction to the
death of his arch foe: He barked an
order for an intelligence report on the
effect of the change in American
leadership.

He got it five days later, on April
17, 1945, which was reasonably subito
under the circumstances. The Axis
was practically done for, but the tech-
nical appurtenances of power die
slowly. Bureaucracies coast along on
the momentum of professional opti-
mism. With the great Roosevelt dead,
perhaps. . . . The Fascist Ministry for
Foreign Affairs had ground out an offi-
cial "analysis" for Il Duce's guidance,
ignoring the deceased and concentrat-
ing hopefully upon the probable course
of Harry S. Truman. It still lay in the
file basket of a secretary when a forag-
ing O.S.S. team raided the premises
ahead of the advancing Fifth Army,
scooped up every paper in sight, and
hustled the lot south for study.

The Fascist assessment of the new
President was remarkable for a single
reason: It was based upon one of the
most ludicrous errors in the annals of
any intelligence service. Since neither
Mussolini nor Hitler was fated to sur-
vive the next month, the error did not
persist long enough to affect the course
of history, but otherwise it might have.
The document is not only a curiosity
but also a splendid example of the
kind of warped information upon
which totalitarian rulers are apt to
base their most earth-shaking deci-
sions. It casts light upon a mystery of

our generation—why dictators often
act so dumb.

The memorandum is typewritten on
three sheets of fine, heavy white paper
(extremely rare in wartime Italy), the
special stationery of the Ministero de-
gli Affari Esteri, and it bears the
printed heading "Appunto per il
DUCE." This means "Especially for
the DUCE." In Italian bureaucratic
jargon, an appunto is a report with
some of the quality of "private" or
"exclusive." The data contained are
attributed to the Historical Office of
the Ministry.

Since the new President was scarcely
familiar even to his own countrymen,
and a complete stranger to internation-
al chancelleries, the appunto begins by
explaining how it happened that this
fellow Truman (il Truman) could
become President all of a sudden while
no one was looking. With reasonable
accuracy, it tells how at the Chicago
convention of 1943 (sic) the opponents
of the former Vice-President, "Senator"
Wallace, had decided to "give him the
boot (dargli lo sgambetto)"; and how
Senator Truman, although not "a po-

litical figure of the first class," had been
chosen "in the last hour" as the sub-
stitute most acceptable to Roosevelt.

Next it identifies Senator Truman as
the leader of an important investigat-
ing committee. The reader will prob-
ably recall the two sets of Congressional
probers that dominated the immedi-
ately pre- and post-Pearl Harbor news
from Washington. Over in the House,
the Special Committee on Un-Ameri-
can Activities (the "Dies Committee")
kept wires sizzling with sensational
allegations of a Communist conspiracy
to overthrow the government. In the
Senate, the Special Committee to In-
vestigate the National Defense Pro-
gram ("Truman Committee") was
quietly building its chairman a reputa-
tion as an effective, if undramatic,
watchdog against graft and inefficien-
cy in the conduct of the war. In
Mussolini's appunto, however, the story
is given in these words:

"At the time of his election to the Vice-Presidency, *il Truman*”— no—where is there mention of the President’s full name—“was known solely for the fact that he had presided over the commission of inquiry, created

The Reporter, May 23, 1950

34