D'Haiti a l'Afrique, Itineraire De Maurice Dartigue , Un Educateur Visionnaire

Charles Pierre -Jacques, D'Haiti a l'Afrique, Itineraire de Maurice Dartigue , un Educateur visionnaire (Editions Images, Montreal, 2002., pp. 172. This is short book about the work of Maurice Dartigue, Haitian eductionalist who rose from teaching, and a top civil service job to be Minister of Education. Agriculture and Public Works )(1941-46) in Haiti, and subsequently worked with the United Nations (in New York) and with UNESCO in Paris from the late 1950s through to the 1970s. The author, a great admirer of Dartigue, and himself an educationalist in a similar field to Dartigues', is anxious to point out that this work is not a biography of Dartigue, but a statement of his educational ideas, principles and policies in Haiti and Africa. Maurice Dartigue's wife had previously published a biography of her husband (see Esther Dartigue: An Outstanding Haitian, Maurice Dartigue, 1994). Pierre-Jacques' work suffers from his near total indifference to the personal life of Dartigue which could have illuminated his educational principles and especially the opposition he encountered in Haiti. For instance Dartigue's persistent friendships with white Americans educators in Haiti and the USA, and his white wife, herself pro-American in her cultural orientation, meant that he could not be a noirist exactly at a period when this movement became very prominent in Haiti's political and intellectual culture. Yet Maurice Dartigue's work took him close sympathetically to the ordinary country people, perhaps closer than some of the urban noirist scholars. The book falls naturally into two parts because Dartigue's public career falls clearly into two segments: first the years in Haiti as student, civil servant and Minister of Education, Agriculture and Public Works ( mid 1920s to 1946); and afterwards as employee at the recently founded United Nations, and still later as an education expert with UNESCO, with particular responsibility for education programmes in some parts of West Africa and the Congo. (This book review for this special Issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Haiti will concentrate on the Haitian side of his career). It is interesting to note that Dartigue's elevation to professional status in these two international bodies did not come without a period of anxious apprenticeship and job insecurity . In other words he was not drafted triumphantly straight from exile in New York (1946) into significant positions in these international bodies. He had to prove his worth in junior positions. If Dartigue, described as a coloured middle class Haitian , had disappeared into insignificance in New York as yet another Haitian exile, he would still have been remembered as one of the outstanding Haitian educators of the 20th century. The author suggests that he ranks with two previous Ministers of Education, Eli Dubois of the 1860s and Dantes Bellgarde during World War one. But would Pierre-Jacques have written such a book if Dartigue had not become an international civil servant? Perhaps not. Dartigue's career went beyond Haiti: the opportunity to assist in shaping the United Nations' concepts of development in Africa and still later of carrying UNESCO's gospel of educational planning to Africa was a big achievement for an Haitian . Dartigue's shift to the international arena had all the romance and the glamour of a West Indian, a descendant of slaves from Africa, returning to roots as the carrier of an expertise which was not in sufficient supply in West Africa. Of course educated West Indians had done this from the 19th century, and not only as religious missionaries. But Dartigue went to Africa as a secular, modernizer, as a planner of development, a magical word in the post- World War 11 era. Dartigue was the right man in the right spot when UNESCO turned its attention to the internationalizing of education planning as the key to the development of newly independent states all over the world. It as an era in which important people believed in the possibility of development for underdeveloped nations. …

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