Africa is invented twice, once in Europe and once by Africans

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.

In May 1902, close to the end of his term, President Tiresias Simon Sam of Haiti set about choosing his own successor. The man he wanted was a soldier named Vilbrun Guillaume, related to him by marriage. The House of Deputies was packed with the president's nominees, so the election looked settled in advance. At the meeting called to choose the new president, shots were fired at the building, a brawl broke out, and the assembly ended without a vote. The attack carried on to the presidential palace. Simon Sam and his family left the country at once and settled at 6 Snegle Gade on the island of St Thomas. Haiti had held twelve years of unbroken peace before that afternoon. What followed was a long run of revolution that ended in the American occupation. Antenor Firmin and Nord Alexis both moved on the vacancy, and Alexis took power in December of the same year.

Antenor Firmin had the north and Nord Alexis had the army. In May 1902 Admiral Hammerton Killick took the whole Haitian navy up to Cap-Haitien along with several thousand Remington rifles and a million rounds drawn from the arsenal. Nord marched on Port-au-Prince, the provisional junta admitted him and refused Firmin, and by June the two sides were fighting. Nord won everything, chased Killick's landing party off the beach, and let his soldiers wreck Firmin's house at the Cap, burning the best private library in the country along with a manuscript history of Haiti that had taken twenty years to write. On 2 September Killick seized a German steamer running weapons north. Berlin sent the gunboat Panther, which found La Crete-a-Pierrot anchored at Gonaives on the sixth. Killick put on his uniform, ordered every man ashore except his surgeon, wrapped himself in the flag and touched a cigar to the powder train. Panther shelled the burning wreck anyway. The Church refused him rites because he had killed himself, and the Kaiser wired his compliments to the gunboat.

Pierre Nord Alexis was elected president of Haiti on 21 December 1902, at the age of eighty, after a violent contest over the succession that had run most of the year. He was a general with a long career behind him and a lineage that carried weight in the north. His father had been a dignitary in the kingdom of Henry Christophe, and Nord Alexis was born at Cap-Haitien while that kingdom still stood. Supporters read his election as the return of the northern tradition, austere, military and black, set against the commercial families of Port-au-Prince. He governed until 1908, when he was driven out at the age of eighty six, and he died in exile in Jamaica the following year. The most consequential act of his presidency was the consolidation of the foreign debt, which deepened Haiti's obligations to French and German creditors and helped produce the fiscal crisis the United States later used as its reason for landing marines in 1915.