Colour decides which party a Haitian joins, says L'Impartial

On 28 February 1910 L'Impartial carried an essay by J. Duclervil titled Le prejuge de couleur et nos partis politiques, holding that colour prejudice was the main thing deciding political allegiance in Haiti. Haitian parties of this period had no programmes and no membership rolls. They were followings built around a general or a lawyer, and they held together through family, region, patronage and colour. A president from the dark-skinned majority drew his support from the army and the north and was called a danger in the salons of the capital. A president from the light-skinned commercial families drew his support from the towns and was called a traitor to the black republic. Both accusations were usually made by men who wanted the customs revenue. Duclervil's article is one of dozens on this question in the Port-au-Prince press between 1900 and 1915. The frequency is the finding. A society that talks constantly about a division is organising itself around that division, whatever its constitution says about equality.

Between 1913 and 1931 hundreds of thousands of Haitians crossed to Cuba to cut sugar cane. The wars fought in Cuba from 1895 onward had held the island's own supply of labour low, so when the sugar industry began expanding the planters imported workers, most of them from Haiti. Haiti had people and was running short of ground. Arable land per head was falling by the end of the nineteenth century, and Haitians moved readily when offered higher wages. Living conditions in the Cuban cane districts were hard, and the movement continued anyway. The depression stopped it. Prices for primary products fell, and Cuban population growth had by then rebuilt the domestic labour force to a level at which the Haitians were judged unnecessary. Repatriation began soon after. Those who stayed grew old in Cuba, and by the early 1980s the survivors were elderly men who had arrived as young cutters.

Refusal took many shapes. In the French territories young men crossed borders and waited in hiding until the recruiting sergeants had moved on, the same evasion they used against tax collectors and labour levies. Revolts that looked like protests against conscription carried grievances that had been building since the 1890s. Armed resistance broke out against the British in Nigeria and against the French in Dahomey. In Mozambique the Barwe rose in 1917 against Portuguese rule. The Ottoman empire joined Germany late in 1914 and called for a jihad across the colonial world, which never came. The Sanusiyya, supplied with German and Ottoman money and weapons, beat the Italians in Libya early in 1915 and attacked the British in Egypt. Britain answered by declaring a protectorate over Egypt, crushing nationalist activity there, and taking the sultanate of Darfur in 1916. In Nyasaland in 1915 the preacher John Chilembwe led a short and fierce insurrection, driven in part by the scale of conscription and the number of local men killed fighting the Germans.

Long before he took office, Stenio Vincent served as a Haitian delegate to the international exposition at Brussels and published a survey of the republic with a Belgian publisher, covering its history, resources, climate, agriculture, customs, ethnography, religion and current politics. St. Hubert treats the book and the posting as the origin of a strategy. Born at Gonaives in 1874, with a law degree in 1892 and a post at the Haitian legation in Paris under Hyppolite by 1896, Vincent came to see international expositions as instruments of national argument, taking the example of Brazil as a model. Elected two decades later, he would send more delegations to world's fairs than any Haitian head of state since Salomon, participating in three during the nineteen thirties. St. Hubert reads that early posting as the seed of a lifelong strategy.