A fake earthquake, a failed landing, and the poets shot at the cemetery

Pierre Nord Alexis was in his late eighties and wanted another term as president of Haiti. January 1908 opened with the arrest of Louis-Joseph Janvier, the country's leading constitutional scholar, who had announced a candidacy in Port-au-Prince and was dragged through the streets and jailed. On 15 January a cable reached the palace saying an earthquake had wrecked Gonaives. The telegram was a decoy. Jean-Jumeau had come in by sailboat from St Thomas and raised the flag of Antenor Firmin, holding Gonaives and Saint-Marc. Firmin's weapons never arrived, because American agents in New York had seized two thousand rifles, a hundred thousand cartridges and four hundred thousand dollars. Jean-Jumeau armed five hundred men with swords and machetes, lost, and was hacked to death when the firing squad failed to kill him. Merisier Jeannis was beheaded and his head shown on a pole in the Jacmel market. On the night of 14 March the president's police swept the capital, and the poet Massillon Coicou and his two brothers were shot at the cemetery beside graves already dug.

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.

Haiti was much as it had been. The region around it was being rebuilt. The Spanish American War of 1898 confirmed the United States as the ruling power of the Caribbean, and American editors were already calling the sea Mare Nostrum after the Romans. Marines occupied and pacified Cuba twice between 1900 and 1910. Puerto Rico was an American possession, so was the Panama Canal Zone, and Washington was negotiating control of the customs houses of Honduras, Nicaragua and neighbouring Santo Domingo. Two ideas carried the policy. The Roosevelt Corollary held that no European power would be permitted to intervene in the Americas and that the United States would itself end the disorder and theft that invited such intervention. Dollar Diplomacy, stated plainly by Secretary of State Knox in May 1911, made American money the instrument of stability in the small republics near the canal. Haiti was poorer and less settled than any of its neighbours, sat astride the main approach to the canal, and was believed in Washington to be a German target. That combination decided the next twenty years.

South Africa needed African labour in the mines and needed Africans confined to the reserves when the mines had no use for them. The pass system did both jobs, and it also produced the earliest sustained organised protest on the continent outside Islamic North Africa. In 1912 a group of educated men founded the South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress in 1923. Its reach was narrow at first, though it worked with Indian and Coloured organisations and laid ground for something larger. Mass action came from elsewhere. In 1919 huge demonstrations against the pass laws showed what popular participation could look like, and in 1920 some forty thousand mineworkers struck. That industrial strength made the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union possible, founded in 1919 and claiming a hundred thousand members by the middle of the decade. Internal splits broke it before the decade ended. The worker consciousness it exposed had been formed in the compound and down the shaft.