A former British consul publishes the cannibalism story and it never dies

In 1881 Spencer St John, who had served as British consul in Haiti, declared in print that Haitian religion involved cannibalism and human sacrifice and that it was the principal reason for the regression of Haitian civilisation. He had held an official post, which gave the claim an authority no traveller's tale could carry. Others took up the theme. In 1910 Hesketh Prichard described Haiti as a strange graft of Parisianism and savagery, noting the attachment of the educated class to French language and culture while concluding that a population dominated by superstition had proved incapable of governing itself. The chicken sacrifices of the ceremonies, these authors added, were accompanied by what were called kids without horns, meaning babies. Nothing in this required evidence. The stories embedded themselves in what readers took to be the character of the race, and they set the terms on which the United States would shortly discuss the country.

Baptist missionaries reached the lower Congo in 1878 and 1879 and were welcomed at Sao Salvador by Pedro V. They built their church beside the ruined cathedral and in the early 1890s took stones from it for the walls, which to Kongolese eyes implied a continuity the Europeans did not intend, since the ruins were still the burial ground of generations of rulers and the central shrine of the kingdom. In August 1885 Henry Richards wrote from the station at Mbanza Manteke that the people were coming up in such numbers that services had moved outdoors and that more than seven hundred had converted, with a mass burning of images. Something similar happened at Sao Salvador a year later. The men who carried the new preaching outward included a blacksmith called Dom Miguel Ndelengeni and a young man at Stanley Pool named Ntoni, which is the Kongolese form of Anthony.

Arnold Toynbee, lecturing in 1884, produced the analysis of the industrial revolution that later writers worked from. Its essence for him was the replacement of medieval regulation by competition, which made the revolution a social event before it was an economic one. Eighty years later Ronald Hartwell defined the essential character of the same thing quite differently, as a sustained rise in the rate of growth of total and per head output at a pace that broke with everything before it. The two definitions travel together in most accounts, since freedom from old constraints was supposed to produce the growth. In the twentieth century the growth half took over, because every new state in the world was being told that the road to wealth ran through an industrial revolution of its own. Haiti heard that advice as often as anyone, and the word revolution in it carries this nineteenth century English cargo.

By the eighteen seventies the island carried two independent republics, the Haitian in the west of French origin and the Dominican in the east of Spanish. Haiti held about one third of the territory and a population put at five hundred and fifty thousand, with some authorities saying only four hundred and fifty thousand. The Dominican Republic held two thirds of the territory and a hundred and fifty thousand people. That gave the whole island roughly seven hundred thousand inhabitants across thirty thousand square miles, twenty three to the square mile, on land reckoned capable of supporting seven million. Of the Haitians, no fewer than five hundred thousand, ten elevenths of the total, were of purely African descent, women outnumbered men, and the population was widely believed to be falling rather than rising. People of mixed descent numbered about a hundred and seventy five thousand. The language in the east was Spanish and in the west a French patois.