Le Matin tells its readers the republic is splitting again

Le Matin was a morning paper in Port-au-Prince, read by the lawyers, merchants and officeholders who made up the Haitian governing class. On 4 March 1908 it ran a commentary on the state of the country under President Pierre Nord Alexis, an army general in his late eighties who had held the palace since 1902 and was arranging a second term. The paper's point was that the old divisions inside the political class were opening again and that the republic would pay for it. Two months earlier the constitutional lawyer Louis-Joseph Janvier had been beaten and jailed for announcing a candidacy in the capital. Ten days after this article the president's police began a week of night raids in which the poet Massillon Coicou and his brothers were shot at the cemetery. A newspaper column is a small thing to log on a timeline. It belongs here because the men who wrote it could see the year coming and said so in print while there was still time to say it.

The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 as a settlement between British settlers and Afrikaners, and the white population as a whole defended the position that settlement handed it. Between the wars every mainstream white party developed racial segregation further, along with influential lobbies including Anglican missionaries, some arguing that it secured labour and white supremacy, others that it shielded Africans from modern life. Wartime growth pulled thousands of Africans into the cities and the National Party campaigned on white fear. In 1948 it won under D. F. Malan on apartheid, a word meaning separateness. The Population Registration Act of 1950 sorted everyone into white and non-white, the second category subdivided into Coloured, Indian and Bantu, a linguistic term now put to work as a racial one, then subdivided again by tribe. The Group Areas Act fixed where each group could live and broke African unity by design. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 gave African children schools built to teach them their place.

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.

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.