The bishop of Cap-Haitien declares a pitiless war on the country's own priests

In 1896 the bishop of Cap-Haitien condemned the religion of most Haitians in terms he chose for their violence. It was responsible, he said, for violations of the purity of the faith, for offences against the saints and for outrages against God himself. Whatever the cost, he went on, the tumour had to be removed, and a pitiless war had to be waged against the army of brigands, the bokor, whose mere existence disgraced the country. Eradication campaigns had begun soon after the first African captives were landed and had continued through the colonial period; what changed after independence was only that the state conducting them was Haitian. A bishop describing a large part of his own flock as a tumour is worth reading twice. The people he wanted removed were the ones who buried the dead, treated the sick and held the rural communities together in a country with almost no doctors.

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.

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.

Cultivators rioted at the village of La Plaine in Dominica in 1893. Coloured politicians were at the same time protesting about abuses of executive power, and the Crown appointed Sir Robert G. C. Hamilton to inquire into the island's affairs. His report appeared in 1894 and treated the peasantry as an established class of owner occupiers, produced by the demands of the labourers and by the planters' own inability to keep their estates in order after slavery ended. Hamilton wrote that this class had turned its attention mainly to growing what Dominicans called provisions. His favourite phrase was peasant proprietor. The cultivators did not use it. In the list of grievances the La Plaine district sent him they called themselves the small landowners, and elsewhere they said small owner, small proprietor or simply small man. One planter told the inquiry that a labourer stops developing the moment he becomes a peasant proprietor. Three years later the commissioner C. O. Naftel adopted Hamilton's vocabulary and applied it backwards, writing that the class had arisen within a few years of abolition.