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1940-00-00

1940-00-00: (The National Library Established in Port-au-Prince, an Institutional Home for the Written Heritage of a Nation Whose Majority Population Had Bee…

Haitian

1940-00-00: (The National Library Established in Port-au-Prince, an Institutional Home for the Written Heritage of a Nation Whose Majority Population Had Been Systematically Denied Literacy): In 1940, the national library was established in Port-au-Prince, creating an institutional home for the written heritage of Haiti. The library’s existence was itself a statement about what kind of nation Haiti aspired to be: a republic of letters in a country where the colonial system had forbidden the enslaved from learning to read, where education was conducted in French while ninety percent of the population spoke only Kreyòl, and where literacy rates remained among the lowest in the hemisphere. The library preserved the written record of a nation whose most important stories, the oral traditions of the peasantry and the spiritual narratives of Vodou, had always been transmitted through voice.