Maji Maji ends with 26,000 killed and 50,000 starved

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.

Dumarsais Estime was born at Verrettes in the Artibonite on 21 April 1900, a black provincial with no family standing, and he was schooled by the Christian Brothers at Saint Marc before moving on to the Lycee Petion in the capital. Mathematics was his subject in the classroom until he crossed President Borno and lost the post and the platform together. The elections of 1930 returned him as a deputy. He rose to preside over the Chamber and then to hold cabinet office under Vincent, remembered by colleagues as silent, surly and tireless. Senator Alphonse Henriquez called him a motor in a pair of trousers. Katherine Dunham, who knew him closely, wrote that his brusqueness covered a timidity underneath, and that his head looked too large for his body in the manner of Benin bronzes and Bambara masks, where the sculptor puts the spirit and intelligence of a man in the head. When he took the presidency in 1946 the Griot generation read it as their own arrival, and Rayford Logan called it the advent of the noir elite.

Japan defeated Russia in 1905. It was the first time in the modern era that a non European power had beaten a European empire in a full scale war, and the news travelled fast through every territory then under European rule. The practical consequences were in Asia. The consequences that mattered elsewhere were about what people believed was possible. Colonial administration rested on the claim that European supremacy was a fact of nature and not an outcome of gunnery, industry and organisation, and Tsushima made that claim harder to state with a straight face. Nicholls places the Japanese victory among the events that fed the growth of black consciousness in the years before the First World War, in Haiti and in the wider black world. Haiti had made the same argument in 1804 by destroying Napoleon's army, and had been punished for a century for making it. In 1905 the argument was made again by somebody else, and this time Europe had to concede the point in public.

The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 as a settlement between British settlers and Afrikaners, and the white population as a whole defended the position that settlement handed it. Between the wars every mainstream white party developed racial segregation further, along with influential lobbies including Anglican missionaries, some arguing that it secured labour and white supremacy, others that it shielded Africans from modern life. Wartime growth pulled thousands of Africans into the cities and the National Party campaigned on white fear. In 1948 it won under D. F. Malan on apartheid, a word meaning separateness. The Population Registration Act of 1950 sorted everyone into white and non-white, the second category subdivided into Coloured, Indian and Bantu, a linguistic term now put to work as a racial one, then subdivided again by tribe. The Group Areas Act fixed where each group could live and broke African unity by design. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 gave African children schools built to teach them their place.