Half a million indentured workers reach the British Caribbean

Between 1838 and 1924 planters in the British West Indies brought in an estimated half a million indentured labourers from India. David Lowenthal reckoned one sixth of them were Muslim, which puts something near eighty thousand Muslims into the eastern Caribbean over those decades. Most stayed in the British islands. A number moved into Haiti across the years, and they are one likely route by which Islamic words and signs entered Haitian ritual objects in their later forms. A mosque stands near Cap Haitien, probably built by a missionary group active in Jamaica since early in the twentieth century. Another community nearby says that what it practises is Mandingue service rather than Vodou. Neighbours report that its members eat no pork and pray at sunrise and at sunset. In 1997 Renald Clerisme recorded one of their funeral ceremonies on video, and the phrase Allahu akbar is clearly sung on the tape.

On Saturday 7 May 1842 the Septentrional fault in northern Hispaniola moved. Witnesses said the ground worked for several minutes and came in two distinct shocks, the second doing most of the harm. In Port-au-Prince people ran out of the downtown buildings into the streets, and the coat of arms above the Senate entrance fell and shattered, which onlookers read as a sign that the government would come down too. Tremors went on through the weekend, and a heavy one broke up mass on Sunday 8 May. Reports reached the capital from Puerto Plata, Gonaives and Saint-Marc, and from Falmouth in western Jamaica. A mountain near Saint-Marc was said to have split in two. James Hartwell, a British missionary in Port-au-Prince, wrote to England wondering why the capital had been spared. At Gonaives the government house, the arsenal, the treasury and the prison collapsed, sixty prisoners escaped, and a fire the next evening burned much of the rest.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

The first Pan-African Congress met in London in July 1900, convened by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, with delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and the United States. Haiti was represented by Benito Sylvain, a journalist and diplomat from Cap-Haitien who had worked in Paris and served the Ethiopian emperor Menelik. The congress issued an address to the nations of the world warning that the problem of the twentieth century would be the colour line, a formulation W. E. B. Du Bois carried into his own writing three years later. Haiti's presence in that room carried weight. For delegates who came from colonies with no self government, a black republic that had beaten a European army was the standing proof that the argument could be won. The congress commanded nothing and legislated nothing. It named the central question of the century a few months after the century opened, and it did so with a Haitian at the table.