L'Etoile Africaine carries Pan-Africanism to Haitian readers

In January 1906 L'Etoile Africaine ran articles on the Pan-African movement then taking shape. The movement was six years old, dating from the London conference of 1900, and it had almost no institutional existence yet: a handful of meetings, a few journals, letters passing between men in the West Indies, the United States, west Africa and Europe. A paper in Port-au-Prince publishing its arguments was one of the connections that made it a movement at all. Haiti's place in this was peculiar. It was the reference point everyone in the network cited, the proof that black self government existed, and it was at the same time a poor country under mounting American pressure whose own newspapers were reading about the black world elsewhere. The journal's name states the position it took. The link ran both ways, and Haitian intellectuals were consumers of Pan-African thought as well as its favourite example.

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.

Haiti was much as it had been. The region around it was being rebuilt. The Spanish American War of 1898 confirmed the United States as the ruling power of the Caribbean, and American editors were already calling the sea Mare Nostrum after the Romans. Marines occupied and pacified Cuba twice between 1900 and 1910. Puerto Rico was an American possession, so was the Panama Canal Zone, and Washington was negotiating control of the customs houses of Honduras, Nicaragua and neighbouring Santo Domingo. Two ideas carried the policy. The Roosevelt Corollary held that no European power would be permitted to intervene in the Americas and that the United States would itself end the disorder and theft that invited such intervention. Dollar Diplomacy, stated plainly by Secretary of State Knox in May 1911, made American money the instrument of stability in the small republics near the canal. Haiti was poorer and less settled than any of its neighbours, sat astride the main approach to the canal, and was believed in Washington to be a German target. That combination decided the next twenty years.

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.