A customs house falls while Haiti fetes its centenary

The United States took over the Puerto Plata customs house in July 1904 and installed a customs receivership across the whole Dominican Republic early in 1905. Roosevelt's message to Congress set out the principle: a country that behaved with reasonable efficiency and decency had nothing to fear, while chronic wrongdoing or helplessness might oblige some civilised nation to act, and in this hemisphere the Monroe Doctrine could require the United States to exercise an international police power. Ludwell Montague later summed up what Haiti should have concluded, that reform from inside is the only defence against reform imposed from outside. A few Haitians read Roosevelt closely and saw where the sentence pointed. Most were at Gonaives, where a quarter of a million people passed through four gateways named for Louverture, Dessalines, Petion and Nord Alexis to celebrate a hundred years of independence. Rosalvo Bobo, a mulatto physician from the Cap, said the country should instead cover itself in a funeral cloth and consider how it had spent the century.

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 Stein wrote that the scheme could not be published and asked Page to show it to British diplomats in the city.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 earthquake that hit Kingston in January 1907 was the worst seismic disaster in the northern Caribbean since Cap-Haitien in 1842. Two thirds of the city went down. Brick buildings put up to replace wooden ones after the fire of 1882 collapsed on the people inside them. Survivors walking the streets afterwards greeted each other by asking whether the other was alive. Fire followed and took what the shaking had left. Hundreds of the dead were buried in the May Pen cemetery under numbers pinned to rough crosses. The Myrtle Bank Hotel, full for the winter tourist season, was partly destroyed. The injured were carried to overcrowded hospitals on drays, there was looting, and the racecourse at the upper end of the city filled with tents where rich and poor camped for months. Many Jamaicans left the island. Haitian exiles in Kingston lost their businesses, among them Callisthenes Fouchard, whose Hotel Royale was wrecked.

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.