Benito Sylvain founds a society under two black heads of state

In 1906 Benito Sylvain founded L'Oeuvre du Relevement Social des Noirs, placed under the joint protection of the rulers of Haiti and Ethiopia. Sylvain was Haitian, had served Menelik II as an aide, and had attended the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. The choice of patrons was the whole argument in miniature. In 1906 there were two independent black states with recognised sovereigns anywhere on earth: Haiti, which had taken its freedom from France in 1804, and Ethiopia, which had destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Everything else inhabited by black people belonged to somebody. Sylvain's programme was moderate by later standards, aimed at ending colour prejudice and at getting European colonists and African populations to cooperate. The organisation matters less for its programme than for the map it drew. Pan-Africanism in its first decade needed a sponsor with a flag, and the list of possible sponsors had two names on it.

Dumarsais Estime taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycee Petion. Duvalier married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and they had three daughters and a son, Jean-Claude. He worked with American public health missions in the 1940s, went to the University of Michigan in 1944 for public health training and failed it, then followed Estime into government as director general of public health and rose to minister. When Estime fell he went into opposition and then underground, from 1954 to 1956, which he afterwards called his years in the maquis. Clement Barbot said he carried a worn copy of The Prince in his pocket through that period. To Washington he looked ideal: a civilian, a doctor, modest in his habits, no richer for having held office. He wore a black suit, white shirt, dark tie and black homburg behind heavy round spectacles, which foreigners read as the uniform of a careful family physician. Haitians read it differently. That is the dress of Bawon Samdi, the lwa who keeps the gate of the cemetery.

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.

On a Sunday morning in 1910, in a Baptist chapel of people of colour in the northwest of Washington, a pastor was promising the worst of disasters to members of his flock whose conduct had drawn down the anger of God. He asked whether, if Christ appeared before them, they would not crucify him too, as the Pharisees of the present day, and hand him over to the hatred of the crowd like new Pontius Pilates. A voice begged for mercy. He went silent for a full minute, then pointed straight in front of him and cried out that Christ was there. The congregation turned as one towards the empty place. A woman rose, wailed, and began to dance and sing, then a second and a third, until two thirds of the room were leaping in a circle and shouting for mercy at the tops of their voices. It lasted half an hour. An American friend explained it afterwards: they were happy.