A president's hat falls off, and he rides to Jacmel anyway and dies

On 24 March 1896 Hyppolite mounted an expedition against Merisier Jeannis, his insurrectionary adversary at Jacmel, and never reached him. Gripped by a sudden apoplexy on the road, he fell from the saddle and died. Largey shows the historical event surviving in two songs. One has his son calling out that the fallen hat is already a bad omen and the president answering that the army is at the city gate and he has to go, then names the saints who refuse to intervene, including Saint Jacques Majeur, the senior Ogou. The other, better known, keeps only the falling hat and asks whoever is behind to pick it up. The mechanism Largey names is distillation: the second song strips the narrative to the omen and leaves the audience to supply the rest.

Dahomey had been the dominant power on its stretch of the West African coast since the 1720s. French forces conquered it between 1892 and 1894, and the kingdom stopped existing as a political entity in 1900, when the French removed its last king. A degree of institutional continuity survived through rituals performed at the royal palace in the capital city of Abomey, which became a museum. The defeat also loosened the rules about what could be spoken. The origins of the royal clan had been guarded as a secret held inside the dynasty, and no account of them appears in any European source written before the monarchy was destroyed. Within about a decade of the conquest a French colonial official named Le Herisse published what became the classic version of Dahomian traditional history, taken from a single informant, Agbidinukun, a brother of the last independent king Behanzin who served the French as a district chief. What the palace had kept turned into a printed book.

On 18 May 1896 the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy against Ferguson and made segregation lawful for the next fifty eight years. The case had been organised by the Comite des Citoyens of New Orleans, a body drawn mostly from families descended from Saint Domingue, whose president that year had himself been born in Haiti. Louisiana had passed a Separate Car Act in 1890 to divide passengers on the railways. Rodolphe Desdunes and his son Daniel first tested it on a journey between states and won. The committee then sent Homere Plessy to test it on a journey inside Louisiana, and that case went up to the Supreme Court and was lost. The date chosen for the announcement was 18 May, which is Haitian flag day.

Henry Hesketh Bell landed in Dominica in September 1899 as the island's new chief executive. He took the restoration of the plantation system as a personal challenge, made no allowance for anything particular about the Caribbean, and for six years used every means available to attract a new European born planter class, applying tactics he said had worked in Asia. He also built roads and communications. His skill as a lobbyist convinced people in Dominica and in London that the whole package would work, and the word peasant was pushed out of official consideration again, staying out after he left for Uganda in 1905. New planters bought thousands of acres and revived limes for export. The value of lime exports quadrupled between 1900 and 1919. Bell had misjudged the island's labour market. Lime production turned down in the 1920s, partly because of world prices and partly because cultivators had folded citrus into the working routine they preferred, and the new planters drifted away.