Five campaigns to burn the temples, the last one demanding an oath

Between 1864 and 1941 the Haitian government and the Catholic church ran repeated antisuperstition campaigns, in 1864, 1896, 1912, from 1925 to 1930 and from 1940 to 1941. The method did not vary: destroy the temples, burn the sacred objects, imprison the priests. The last of them went furthest. In 1941 every Catholic was required to declare in public an oath of rejection, renouncing the practice forever and naming it a satanic cult. Priests went out on horseback with the army behind them, attacked the temples and built great bonfires of the things they found inside. Thousands took the oath. The campaign announced to the world that Haiti was a nest of sorcery, which was a peculiar message for a government to broadcast about its own population, and it supplied the American film industry with exactly the confirmation it wanted.

Holman Bentley finished the Kikongo New Testament in 1893. Four centuries had passed since the king of the Kongo was first baptised, and in all that time no gospel had been put into the language, though a catechism had. Bentley worked closely with a young man called Nlemvo, whom the mission regarded as its first convert and who, Bentley wrote, helped him with all his literary work. Nlemvo's uncle, the man who had brought him to the mission as a boy, kept a small brass crucifix he prayed before and had it fixed to the wall by his bed when he was dying. He was known by a Kikongo word meaning believer, a recognised category of person who required crosses and holy water at a funeral. Twice at Sao Salvador, Bentley recalled, someone stood up after the sermon to tell the congregation to listen, because this was what their old relatives had told them.

In 1864 the New Orleans paper L'Union became La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orleans. Louis Charles Roudanez stayed active in it and Paul Trevigne, another descendant of Saint-Domingue refugees, ran it as chief editor. They argued for black suffrage in editorials, political articles, fiction and poetry, and they printed an English edition and posted it to members of Congress in Washington. Two years before, they had opened a campaign to desegregate the public schools and the streetcars of the city. They set up the Louisiana chapter of the National Equal Rights League, founded the Friends of Universal Suffrage in 1865, and came back in 1867 for civic equality, voting rights and access to public facilities. Trevigne pushed hard for the desegregation of Masonic lodges as well. The families doing this work descended from people who had left Saint-Domingue during its revolution, and in Louisiana they were pressing the claim that revolution had made.

Alexander W. Moir gave his inaugural speech as the newly arrived chief executive of Dominica to the local assembly on 25 July 1872. He asked how an island with over twenty seven thousand inhabitants could leave so much land uncultivated, and supplied his own answer: the evil of squatting was not unknown, and a commendable and rapidly increasing class of peasant proprietors was in existence, which left men free of the necessity to labour and able to give or withhold their work at pleasure. It was the first acknowledgment by a Dominican official that the island had a peasantry and that the peasantry owned land. His audience was the shrinking group of immigrant planters and the coloured elite who controlled the elected House, a group London had decided needed supervision. The Colonial Office had just folded Dominica into the federal colony of the Leeward Islands and Moir was the first executive under the new title. His presidency lasted less than a year.