The Caribbean becomes an American sea and Haiti lies across the canal route

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.

In January 1906 L'Etoile Africaine ran articles on the Pan-African movement then taking shape. The movement was six years old, dating from the London conference of 1900, and it had almost no institutional existence yet: a handful of meetings, a few journals, letters passing between men in the West Indies, the United States, west Africa and Europe. A paper in Port-au-Prince publishing its arguments was one of the connections that made it a movement at all. Haiti's place in this was peculiar. It was the reference point everyone in the network cited, the proof that black self government existed, and it was at the same time a poor country under mounting American pressure whose own newspapers were reading about the black world elsewhere. The journal's name states the position it took. The link ran both ways, and Haitian intellectuals were consumers of Pan-African thought as well as its favourite example.

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.

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.