Creole in print is limited to folktales and children's fables

In 1901 Georges Sylvain published Cric? Crac!, a set of La Fontaine's fables retold in Creole verse in the voice of a Haitian mountain dweller. It is one of the few Creole texts surviving from the early twentieth century, and nearly all the others are of the same kind, written versions of Haitian folktales and adaptations of French material for children. Doret's Pour amuser nos tous petits, from 1924, turned more La Fontaine into Creole prose. The genres show what the language was permitted to do. Poems, folktales and short comic playlets, aimed at children or at an amused elite, and nothing that counted as serious. The assumption underneath that restriction outlasted the books, and many Haitians still hold it, that Creole cannot carry education, science or major literature and is best suited to jokes. These writers used French spelling conventions and French punctuation, so each text represented the sounds of the language differently from the last.

A set of ordinary statutes was turned against Vodou healers in New Orleans in the decades around 1900. From 1909 federal mail fraud law was invoked against practitioners who did business by post, and conviction carried a penitentiary sentence. The Louisiana Board of Health prosecuted people for practising medicine without a licence under the Medical Practice Act of 1894, and a revision in 1929 set a fine of fifty to a hundred dollars or ten to ninety days in the parish prison. The city passed its own statutes against fortune telling and obtaining money under false pretences in 1897, in 1916 and again in 1924. This ran in parallel with the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the persecution of Vodou leaders there. Stories circulated in the United States about bloodthirsty rites and human sacrifice, told to justify the occupation, supplied the reasoning for the prosecutions in Louisiana.

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.