An earthquake and the fire behind it take two thirds of Kingston

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.

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.

Cotton growing spread across southern Uganda between the 1900s and the 1920s, and it produced a class of farmers whose grievances turned into politics. Land was held under a system that made chiefs into landlords, many of them absentee, and the tenants who actually raised the crop paid whatever rents those chiefs set. In 1928 the colonial administration capped what a chief could charge. The second complaint was about selling. Marketing arrangements favoured Indian merchants and the handful of large firms standing behind them, and Ugandan growers were kept out of the trade in their own cotton, which was the position African producers also held in Kenya and, with European buyers filling the role, in West Africa. Populist associations with the character of trade unions appeared in the 1930s, pressing for supervision of landlords and a share of the market. Economic complaint of this kind is where much of African nationalism began. The Asian community stayed commercially powerful in Uganda until Idi Amin expelled it in the early 1970s.

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.