A grandson of Christophe claims the presidency

On 17 December 1902 Pierre Nord Alexis declared himself president of Haiti while United States warships stood off the coast. He was born at Cap-Haitien on 2 August 1820 into the black aristocracy that Henry Christophe had built, and his mother Blezine Georges was one of Christophe's daughters. In 1845 he married Marie Louise, daughter of Jean-Louis Pierrot, who had himself been president. Two revolutionary lineages met in him, together with the sense of entitlement that came of belonging to the northern elite. In office he pressed for closer relations with the United States and put money into public works, railways above all. Rebellion was almost continuous, the public accounts were a mess, and he answered the commercial rise of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants with laws written to squeeze them out. In January 1908, deep in his eighties, he had himself proclaimed president for life. The revolt that removed him began within the year, and he was gone by December.

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.

In 1903 the United States took Guantanamo Bay in eastern Cuba as the anchorage for the Caribbean fleet it was then assembling. The acquisition was supposed to settle the question of where American warships would coal and shelter in these waters. It did not. Officers who used the place found fault with it, and their complaints kept alive an older American appetite for the Mole Saint-Nicolas, the deep harbour on the northwestern tip of Haiti that commands the Windward Passage. Washington had already gone after the Mole once, in 1891, when Frederick Douglass was minister in Port-au-Prince and the Hyppolite government declined to hand it over. Nicholls records how long the interest persisted because it explains what came afterwards. A base was wanted, a satisfactory one had not been obtained, and Haiti held the best site in the region. Twelve years after Guantanamo the marines landed at Port-au-Prince and stayed nineteen years.

African objections to colonial rule in the early twentieth century travelled through channels that were not political in form. Carving is one. By the 1930s African artists were producing work that mocked Europeans and the administration they ran, and taking supposedly European styles into African hands was itself a claim about who owned the form. Newspapers are another. The earliest African papers appeared in South Africa in the 1900s, an African press followed in West Africa, and by the years between the wars those papers were the main forum for anti colonial argument. Literacy limited who could read them directly, and villages worked around that by gathering while one person who could read went through the paper aloud. The educated men who wrote for these papers understood how the colonial economy was arranged and resented their exclusion from it. Before the early 1940s few of them asked for independence. They asked for a place inside the system. Colonial schooling had produced its own critics, and the war produced the rest.