1912–1913: (Guilbaud’s Sisyphean Labor and Sir Harry Johnston’s Verdict): Yet for all Guilbaud’s efforts and the new president’s support, gains were little e…

1912–1913: (Guilbaud’s Sisyphean Labor and Sir Harry Johnston’s Verdict): Yet for all Guilbaud’s efforts and the new president’s support, gains were little enough in the towns and nil in the countryside. Sir Harry H. Johnston, the British explorer and colonial analyst who visited Haiti in 1910, described the problem with devastating clarity: large sums of money were appropriated annually in the Haitian budget for schools, but this appropriation was one of the many cruel tricks played on the Haitian people by its government — in the beautifully printed Budget général, under the Department of Public Instruction, there was a cadre providing for education with a detail and completeness worthy of Switzerland or Germany, yet much of this organization existed only on paper, and the funds appropriated for this splendid purpose found their way into the pockets of government officials or possibly never left the Treasury. Johnston doubted whether any rural schools existed at all, despite the fact that five hundred were provided for in the budget — if they existed, they did so as a means of providing petty sustenance for some totally incompetent person. The plain fact remained that something like 2,500,000 out of 3,000,000 Haitians could not read or write. Johnston’s damning comparison — a budget worthy of Switzerland, schools worthy of oblivion — captured the structural fraud at the heart of the postcolonial state that Fanon would later diagnose: the national bourgeoisie’s characteristic substitution of the forms of modernity for its substance, producing institutions whose architecture was European but whose function was the redistribution of resources among the governing class, while the peasant majority for whose benefit the entire apparatus was nominally constructed remained, as they had been since 1804, outside the circle of the state’s concern.