Louis Diaquoi is born at Gonaives and founds the Griots

Louis Diaquoi was born at Gonaives in 1907 and became a radical journalist. He was the driving force behind the Griots in their early years, the group that took the ethnological turn in Haitian thought and made it into a programme for a generation. The argument the Griots pressed was that Haiti's real culture was African and rural, that the elite's French self-presentation was a costume, and that political authority ought to follow from those two facts. Two of the men around him were Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier, who was born in the same year. Diaquoi died young and what he started did not. The ethnological movement supplied the vocabulary of noirisme, and noirisme supplied the justification for the regime that took power in 1957 and held it for twenty nine years. Nicholls traces the line from the little journals of the late 1920s to the National Palace because the men are the same men, writing in their twenties what they would apply in their fifties.

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.