Ugandan cotton farmers learn politics from their landlords

Cotton growing spread across southern Uganda between the 1900s and the 1920s, and it produced a class of farmers whose grievances turned into politics. Land was held under a system that made chiefs into landlords, many of them absentee, and the tenants who actually raised the crop paid whatever rents those chiefs set. In 1928 the colonial administration capped what a chief could charge. The second complaint was about selling. Marketing arrangements favoured Indian merchants and the handful of large firms standing behind them, and Ugandan growers were kept out of the trade in their own cotton, which was the position African producers also held in Kenya and, with European buyers filling the role, in West Africa. Populist associations with the character of trade unions appeared in the 1930s, pressing for supervision of landlords and a share of the market. Economic complaint of this kind is where much of African nationalism began. The Asian community stayed commercially powerful in Uganda until Idi Amin expelled it in the early 1970s.

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.

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.