Estime's road runs from the Christian Brothers to the palace

Dumarsais Estime was born at Verrettes in the Artibonite on 21 April 1900, a black provincial with no family standing, and he was schooled by the Christian Brothers at Saint Marc before moving on to the Lycee Petion in the capital. Mathematics was his subject in the classroom until he crossed President Borno and lost the post and the platform together. The elections of 1930 returned him as a deputy. He rose to preside over the Chamber and then to hold cabinet office under Vincent, remembered by colleagues as silent, surly and tireless. Senator Alphonse Henriquez called him a motor in a pair of trousers. Katherine Dunham, who knew him closely, wrote that his brusqueness covered a timidity underneath, and that his head looked too large for his body in the manner of Benin bronzes and Bambara masks, where the sculptor puts the spirit and intelligence of a man in the head. When he took the presidency in 1946 the Griot generation read it as their own arrival, and Rayford Logan called it the advent of the noir elite.

Japan defeated Russia in 1905. It was the first time in the modern era that a non European power had beaten a European empire in a full scale war, and the news travelled fast through every territory then under European rule. The practical consequences were in Asia. The consequences that mattered elsewhere were about what people believed was possible. Colonial administration rested on the claim that European supremacy was a fact of nature and not an outcome of gunnery, industry and organisation, and Tsushima made that claim harder to state with a straight face. Nicholls places the Japanese victory among the events that fed the growth of black consciousness in the years before the First World War, in Haiti and in the wider black world. Haiti had made the same argument in 1804 by destroying Napoleon's army, and had been punished for a century for making it. In 1905 the argument was made again by somebody else, and this time Europe had to concede the point in public.

On 1 January 1904 Haiti marked a hundred years since Dessalines proclaimed independence at Gonaives. Political violence and civil strife ran alongside the ceremonies and made them awkward. In the same year Washington announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, claiming a right to send troops into any state in the region that failed to keep order or pay its debts. The claim was aimed at the hemisphere in general, and Haiti, with a treasury in trouble and a government that changed hands by force, fitted the description as well as anywhere. The national football team was also founded in 1904, a small piece of institution building in a year when the older institutions were coming apart. So here is the balance at a hundred years. The country had survived the French indemnity, a long run of coups, foreign invasion attempts, earthquakes and a diplomatic quarantine imposed because it was governed by black men. It had not prospered. The next hundred years would open with American marines.

On 1 November 1919 United States Marines killed Charlemagne Péralte. His body was stripped, lashed to a door and photographed in a posture that read as a crucifixion, and the picture was circulated around Haiti so that anyone thinking of joining the rebellion would see it. The French had done the same thing in 1791 with Boukman's head on a pike outside Cap Francais. The result was the same both times. Péralte became a permanent figure in Haitian memory and his image the standard picture of resistance to foreign occupation, reproduced by Haitian painters for the rest of the century. More than two thousand Haitians died in the Caco rebellion. Fewer than a hundred Americans and gendarmes were killed. The disparity brought the campaign to the attention of the United States Senate, which held an inquiry in 1921 and concluded that the marines should stay. They stayed another fifteen years.