Le Matin weighs the Latin conception of work

On 4 June 1907 Le Matin, the Port-au-Prince daily, printed an article contrasting what it called the Latin conception of work with other models. The framing was borrowed wholesale from European race theory of the period, which sorted nations into Latin and Anglo-Saxon temperaments and assigned each a relation to labour, thrift and enterprise. Haitian writers picked the categories up because they seemed to explain something real. The country had a French legal code, a French school system, a Catholic church and a French literary culture, and it had almost no industry. If the Latin model produced elegance and the Anglo-Saxon model produced factories, then the choice of model amounted to an economic policy. What the argument left out was the plantation. Haitians of 1907 associated organised labour with coercion because of what had been done on that soil before 1804, within the memory of their grandparents. The debate ran in the papers for weeks and never reached it.

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.

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.

Early in 1908 Antenor Firmin landed secretly at Gonaives with fifty six followers brought from Kingston and St Thomas, among them Jean Jumeau, meaning to raise a revolution against President Nord Alexis. They had the example of Boyer Bazelais and the Liberal exiles, who had shaken Salomon's government from the same coast in 1883. The plan collapsed within days for want of weapons, ammunition and local support. Jumeau was captured and shot. Firmin went to ground with a Cuban who had made his home in Haiti during the 1890s and who backed the movement, and afterwards took refuge in the French consulate at Gonaives. Alcius Charmant, one of the party, went back to Kingston and published a letter accusing Firmin of sending men to die undefended on the strength of promised arms that were never there. Alexis answered the landing with summary executions of suspected sympathisers, and the New York papers ran headlines about a massacre feared in Haiti.