Duvalier tells Haiti that he and the flag are the same thing

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.

Shortly before four on the afternoon of Friday 4 December 1908, Callisthenes Fouchard stood on the deck of the SS Oteri in Kingston harbour and looked at the heaps of crushed brick still lying along Harbour Street two years after the earthquake. He had spent five years of exile in the city running the Hotel Royale, a guesthouse for foreign visitors and for other Haitian exiles. Eleven months of revolution had just brought down the military government of Nord Alexis, and Fouchard was going home to claim the presidency. He told the well wishers who saw him off that the revolution had been started in his favour and that his government would be a liberal one. Seventy five Firminists sailed from Jamaica that same month to press the claim of Antenor Firmin. Two days after the Oteri left, the fallen Nord Alexis landed at the same Kingston dock, where he spent his last days.

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 1904 Theodore Roosevelt announced that the United States held a duty, divinely conferred, to protect and regulate the small states of the Caribbean. The wording did the important work. A duty cannot be declined, and a duty that comes from God cannot be argued with on the merits, so any future landing of American troops in the region could be presented as an obligation discharged instead of a decision taken. Underneath sat the assumption that the countries concerned could not run themselves and that their disorder threatened the prosperity of everyone nearby, including the American investors and creditors whose claims were the usual occasion for sending a warship. Haiti had been independent for a century and was the oldest of these states. It carried the largest debts and had the least stable government, which put it near the top of any list drawn up on Roosevelt's principles. The doctrine was announced in 1904 and applied to Haiti in 1915.