A Haitian captain dies imitating a scene the archives cannot confirm

Girard uses the loss of the Haitian gunboat Crete-a-Pierrot to show how far the flag legend had travelled by the start of the twentieth century. Rather than surrender to a German battleship, her captain wrapped himself in the national colours and went down with the vessel, a death consciously modelled on the story of Laporte at Arcahaie. The point Girard draws is about the working power of invented tradition. Whatever the archival status of the original episode, by 1902 it had become canonical enough that a serving officer used it as a script for his own conduct under fire. This is the mechanism by which a contested nineteenth century anecdote becomes national behaviour. The legend by then had also acquired accretions that appear in no early source, including the seamstress Catherine Flon and, in some retellings, possession of Dessalines by the spirit Ogou at the moment he tore the cloth.

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.