A schoolteacher from Verrettes enters the Chamber for the Artibonite

Dumarsais Estime was born in 1900 at Verrettes, a town in the Artibonite valley, to Alcine Estime and Florencia Massillon. The family was rural and black, with no money and no standing in Port-au-Prince. He trained as a schoolteacher and taught for years before entering politics, and when he entered it he sat for the district he had come from, representing the Artibonite in the legislature over a long stretch before he held any national office. The biography is the point of the entry. Haitian politics through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was conducted largely by families of the capital and the provincial elite: French speaking, mostly light skinned, educated in the lycees or abroad. A schoolteacher from the Artibonite who reached the presidency in 1946 arrived by a route the system had not been built to supply. The men who came after him, Francois Duvalier among them, turned the existence of that route into an argument about who the country belongs to.

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.

Africa as a single thing was a European idea before it was an African one. Travel writing, painting and political argument produced the notion, and the partition of the 1880s and 1890s gave it lines on a map, administrations and borders that are still in force. Africans were forming their own view of Europe at the same time and answering on their own terms. From the early twentieth century they took over the invention, building new political realities and a sharper sense of who governed them and how Europe saw them. Contact with European political vocabulary produced African nations and African nationalism, and the words were turned against the powers that had supplied them. Liberalism, socialism, Christian doctrine and Islam were all customised until they worked as weapons. Pan Africanism began off the continent. Conquest had fired the imagination of black people in the Americas, and at the first Pan African congress in 1900 only a handful of the delegates were African at all.

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.