An American minister rides the country and reports what he sees

Henry Furniss, the American minister and the first black American to hold both a medical degree and a doctorate, rode over more than three quarters of Haiti and wrote a confidential report on it. He found the peasantry friendly, uninterested in politics, wanting to farm and to stay clear of the army, since serving meant going hungry because the money voted for rations never reached the ranks. They had no appetite for revolution of their own. Their officers marched them into one, and once the burning and the looting started the men caught the fever and kept going until somebody stopped them. Above them intrigue ran without pause, and a man in favour one day, sending rivals to prison or exile, could be the victim of the next man's plot. Meanwhile Nord Alexis, in his eighties and knowing only the methods of his own long life, was following the American election. His minister in Washington wrote that Taft would not tolerate more civil wars nearby, citing Cuba and Panama. The old man carried the letter about, showing it to his generals.

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.

Francois Duvalier was born in Port-au-Prince on 14 April 1907, the son of a justice of the peace, and went to school at the tin roofed Lycee Petion in Bel Air. He was a small man, five feet six and about a hundred and fifty pounds, a physician and ethnologist who spoke so quietly that people leaned in to hear him. On reaching the National Palace in 1957 he took a single sentence as his motto: I am the Haitian flag, one and indivisible. Louis XIV had claimed to be the state, and Stenio Vincent had claimed the same thing in Haiti. Duvalier was claiming something else. The flag is the object Dessalines made in 1803 by tearing the white strip out of the French tricolour, the thing carried at Vertieres and raised every first of January since. To attack the president was now to attack the flag, and to attack the flag was to step outside the nation. Within a few years the regime had a word for people in that condition. Apatrides, stateless.

The world depression of the 1930s cut the prices paid for African export crops, and the farmers who grew them for European buyers drew the obvious conclusion about the system they had been recruited into. Across the continent people formed self help associations with economic, religious and ideological purposes. Craftsmen who refused wage employment set up small workshops of their own. Any single one of these bodies was a nuisance to a district officer and nothing more. Taken together they amounted to a withdrawal of consent from colonial rule. What frightened the administrations was the prospect that peasants would stop selling into the market altogether, which would end the export earnings and the tax revenue in one stroke. So the colonial state went into the business it had claimed to leave to merchants. Marketing boards were created to fix the price paid to the grower and to handle exports. Agricultural departments began instructing farmers on technique. Rule by administration expanded, and the machinery it built was inherited later by nationalist governments.