Jacques Roumain is educated in four countries and comes home

Jacques Roumain was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907 to a prosperous family and educated in Switzerland, France, Germany and Spain. That itinerary was normal for his class and was meant to produce a certain sort of man: fluent, cosmopolitan, at ease in Paris, useful to a government. He came back in 1927, when Haiti was twelve years into the American occupation, and turned the training against the people who had arranged it. Within months he was among the young writers of La Revue Indigene, arguing that Haitian literature should stop imitating France and look at Haiti. Within seven years he had founded the Haitian Communist Party and been jailed for it. The occupation did this to a whole generation. It took the sons of the elite, raised to administer the country on French lines, and confronted them at twenty with foreign soldiers who did not care how well they spoke French. Roumain is the clearest case in the record.

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.

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.

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.