Haiti writes an anthem in time for its hundredth birthday

Haiti had been independent for ninety nine years before it acquired a national anthem. La Dessalinienne was written in 1903, words by Justin Lherisson and music by Nicolas Geffrard, and it was sung for the centennial on 1 January 1904. The republic already had its other emblems. Catherine Flon had stitched the flag at Arcahaie in 1803 out of a French tricolour with the white taken out. The name Haiti had been recovered from the Taino people the Spanish destroyed. The anthem completed a set of symbols, every one of them pointing back to the revolution. That is the awkward part of the timing. A national song commissioned for a hundredth anniversary is also an instrument for measuring the distance between what was promised in 1804 and what existed in 1903, and every Haitian standing in the crowd at Gonaives had a rough idea of what that distance was.

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.

On 29 January 1904 Robert Stein, a translator at the United States Geological Survey in Washington and a former Arctic explorer, wrote privately to the novelist Thomas Nelson Page. He set out a plan to remove the nine million black citizens of the United States to Nigeria. Britain would rename the colony Hopeland, crown a Tuskegee graduate as emperor with a gold throne and a cabinet of ministers, and keep every actual power with an English resident, the arrangement already used in the feudatory states of India. Men of mixed descent would supervise the fields and white engineers would supervise them. County by county it would be made illegal for black residents to own property, trade or take work, their land bought at full value and an indemnity paid, so that nobody had to be forced aboard a ship. Stein wrote that the scheme could not be published and asked Page to show it to British diplomats in the city. He had held the idea for fifteen years. Page's papers record no reply.

The Maji Maji revolt spread across German East Africa with no planning and no central command. What held it together was religion. Priests scattered through the territory carried a common message, and the maji of the name was water sprinkled on the body that was said to turn German bullets aside. Belief of that kind united people across ethnic lines who had no other reason to act together, and the first attacks caught the Germans completely unprepared. Then colonial firepower told, the water was disproved in the most direct way available, and the movement started to come apart. Through 1906 German columns burned crops and villages, and the revolt was finished early in 1907. Twenty six thousand Africans were killed. Perhaps fifty thousand more died in the famine the burning produced. Afterwards the Germans spent money on development and mission schools, and farmers in the former rebel districts took up cotton willingly, which suggests the grievance had been the coercion rather than the crop. Tanganyikan nationalists half a century later took the revolt as their founding example.