Antoine Simon walks into Port-au-Prince with a goat

On 5 December 1908 Antoine Simon entered Port-au-Prince, apparently as surprised as anyone that it had worked, and was proclaimed chef du pouvoir exécutif. On the twentieth the Senate, ringed by soldiers as a precaution, gave him 117 votes with none against. Simon had started as a peasant chef de section outside Les Cayes, which made him the first head of state in a long while who came from the rural majority rather than from the towns. The foreign press fixed on his goat, said to be a sacred animal that accompanied him, and used it to run the primitive-president story for three years. Meanwhile the actual business of those years was the National Bank concession, the railroad contracts, and the customs revenue, which is to say the machinery that put Haiti in default and brought the marines in 1915. The goat got the coverage. The concessions did the damage.

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.

Wages fell across Africa through the 1930s, in the mines, on white-owned plantations and in the towns that Africans were moving to in growing numbers. South Africa recorded serious African unemployment for the first time since the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. Prices fell too, which softened the blow on paper and made little difference in a household. Inflation in several territories hit town workers hardest, and real wages did not rise again until the second half of the 1940s, so the decade of hardship ran on for fifteen years. Poor whites suffered alongside them. Commercial farming had pushed tens of thousands of white families off the land and into the cities, where they competed with Africans for the same work, which is why the colour bar laws exist. Those who stayed on their farms scraped by growing maize for the towns. This population, urban and rural, became the constituency that Afrikaner nationalist politicians set out to win, and the winning of it reshaped South Africa.