A Washington congregation goes into trance on a Sunday morning

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.

By 1909 France and Germany carried more commercial weight in Haiti than in any other Caribbean country. The clergy were French, French importers at Le Havre took two-thirds of the coffee crop, and every Haitian loan from 1825 to 1896 had come from France. German firms moved two-thirds of Haiti's trade on the Hamburg America Line, controlled the railway, the Port-au-Prince wharf, the ice plant and the electric company, and married into Haitian families to get around the ban on foreigners owning land. German money financed the revolutions as well, buying rebel bonds at ten cents on the dollar and redeeming them in full when the rebellion won. In 1910 a Franco German group offered a new bank and a loan of 65 million francs secured on the customs. The National City Bank of New York and Speyer and Company offered 12.5 million dollars against American control of the same customs. Washington objected furiously to the European plan, and in January 1911 American interests took half of the new Banque Nationale de la Republique d'Haiti.

The European war arrived while most colonial administrations in Africa were still consolidating what they had seized. German Togo and Cameroon were invaded late in 1914, and the fighting in Cameroon ran into 1916. South African forces took German South West Africa and stayed there for more than seventy years. In eastern Africa the German commander von Lettow-Vorbeck kept a column moving through Mozambique, Nyasaland and northeastern Rhodesia and gave himself up only when he heard of the armistice in November 1918. Most of the soldiers on both sides were African, led by small numbers of European officers. Between 750,000 and one million Africans were pressed into service as porters, and roughly one in five of them died, mostly of disease. Armies burned crops and stores as they moved. France sent 150,000 West Africans to the Western Front and thirty thousand of them were killed. Conscription acquired a name among Africans, the blood tax. French operations against resistance to recruitment completed the conquest of West African districts that had held out since the 1880s.

Joseph argues that the occupation left a mark on the national psyche that Haitian thought has kept alive, and that the writing produced during it did lasting damage. Travel narratives, novels, memoirs and plays by American writers and artists between 1915 and 1934 repeated the ideas of Haiti's strangeness, tragedy and vast darkness, and presented the Black republic as a headless figure, an object of experimentation and of the foreign gaze. He cites J. Michael Dash's judgement that the American literary imagination of Haiti and its revolutionary history was both misguided and misrepresented, and amounted to a restatement of long-standing stereotypes. Joseph places this within a nineteenth-century American discourse about the Black republic that spread across the Atlantic world, and compares it explicitly to the way Europe invented exotic images of the Middle East, invoking Said's account of Orientalism.