A Port-au-Prince paper prints the song the streets were singing

On 15 November 1902 the paper Le Phare printed the words of a Creole chant then going around the streets. The detail is small and worth keeping. Political argument in Haiti has always run on two tracks. One is written, French, addressed to a literate minority and to the foreign consuls. The other is sung in Creole by the people who make up the country, and it travels faster, remembers longer and is harder to prosecute. Chants of this sort named officials, mocked candidates and reported on the fighting. Haiti that year was in the middle of an armed struggle over the presidency that ended with Nord Alexis taking the office in December. A newspaper that stopped to write down what people were singing was capturing the part of the political record that ordinarily leaves no trace at all. Most of what the Haitian majority has said about its rulers survives only where somebody in an office bothered to transcribe it.

The immigrant receiving station on Ellis Island opened in 1892. Through it over the next thirty years came close to four million Italian Catholics, half a million Greeks of the Orthodox church, half a million Hungarian Catholics, close to a million and a half Polish Catholics, over two million Jews out of Russian ruled Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, half a million Slovaks and millions of other Slavs from Byelorussia, Ruthenia, Russia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro. Of the 123 million people recorded in the census of 1930, one in ten had been born abroad and another twenty per cent had at least one foreign born parent. Almost a third of Chicago's 2.7 million residents in the 1920s were foreign born. New Yorkers spoke about thirty seven languages and only one in six attended a Protestant church. Many did not stay. Nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks and Croatians went home again, and more than half the Greeks.

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.

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.