Jean Price-Mars, father of Haitian indigenism, was born 150 years ago.

From Grande-Rivière-du-Nord to Paris

An orphan of his mother at a very young age, he grew up with a Catholic grandmother and a Protestant father. He completed his secondary education at the Lycée Grégoire in Cap-Haitian and then at the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince. In 1896, a scholarship allowed him to study medicine in Paris, where he also took courses at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France.

A diplomat and elected official

Upon returning home, he served in Berlin, Washington, and Paris, where he was minister plenipotentiary from 1915 to 1916. He was a deputy from 1905 to 1908, senator from 1930 to 1935 and again from 1941 to 1946, and ambassador to Santo Domingo in 1946. He later became minister of foreign affairs under the presidency of Léon Dumarsais Estimé.

Thus spoke the uncle

In 1928, his most famous book, Thus Spoke the Uncle, was published. In it, he argued that Haitians carry a dual heritage, French and African. In 1941, he founded the Institute of Ethnology in Port-au-Prince. Close to Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, he participated in the Négritude movement. In 1956, he was unanimously elected president of the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists, in Paris, and became the first president of the African Society of Culture.

He received the Caribbean Literary Prize in 1965 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Dakar. Jean Price-Mars died on March 1, 1969, in Pétion-Ville.