Leger tells American readers the cannibal stories are made up

J.N. Leger published an article called The Truth about Hayti in the North American Review in 1903. Leger was Haiti's minister in Washington, which made him the official target of every story the American press ran about the country, and by 1903 those stories had settled into a fixed repertoire: human sacrifice, cannibalism, Vodou as organised savagery. He said the accounts were fabrications produced by people with an interest in Haiti's bad name. The choice of platform mattered. The North American Review was among the most widely read serious magazines in the United States, so the reply reached the same audience the accusations had reached. Four years later Leger brought out a full length history of Haiti in English, written for the same purpose. This was diplomacy conducted as literary defence, and it was the standard Haitian answer to foreign contempt for two generations. The marines landed anyway in 1915, and by then the repertoire Leger had answered was being used to justify the landing.

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.

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.

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.