Janvier says the ancestors wanted a European state

On 5 January 1907 Louis Joseph Janvier published Notre Republique in Haiti Litteraire et Sociale, arguing that the founders of Haiti had intended to build a state on the European model. Janvier had spent his career defending Haiti abroad. He was a physician trained in Paris and the author of the standard reply to the foreign writers who described the republic as a relapse into barbarism, and his defence took a particular form: Haiti was a civilised state by the measures Europe itself used, with a constitution, a code, schools and a literature. That is the argument he restates here, projected backwards onto Dessalines and Petion. It is also the position the next generation would attack. If the standard of achievement is European civilisation, then the country's African inheritance becomes the problem to be managed and the peasant majority becomes an obstacle. Price-Mars, the Griots and eventually Duvalier all built on the refusal of that premise. Janvier stated it a year before Nord Alexis fell.

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.

On a Sunday morning in 1910, in a Baptist chapel of people of colour in the northwest of Washington, a pastor was promising the worst of disasters to members of his flock whose conduct had drawn down the anger of God. He asked whether, if Christ appeared before them, they would not crucify him too, as the Pharisees of the present day, and hand him over to the hatred of the crowd like new Pontius Pilates. A voice begged for mercy. He went silent for a full minute, then pointed straight in front of him and cried out that Christ was there. The congregation turned as one towards the empty place. A woman rose, wailed, and began to dance and sing, then a second and a third, until two thirds of the room were leaping in a circle and shouting for mercy at the tops of their voices. It lasted half an hour. An American friend explained it afterwards: they were happy.

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.