Haiti signs away a railway and the land along the track

In 1910 the Haitian government granted James P. McDonald, an American promoter, a concession to build a national railway and to develop the land on either side of the line. British diplomats reported that the contract had been pushed on Haiti and would ruin its finances, and Haitian nationalists read it as a sale of the country's economic independence. Both readings held up. The railway was to pay for itself out of export duties on bananas McDonald would grow on public land. Three disconnected stretches of track were laid where the ground was flat, the mountain sections were never attempted, and the line never joined the north to the west, which had been its entire purpose. The National City Bank of New York took the project over in 1911, and its representative later ran both the railway and the Haitian national bank. When the United States Marines landed in 1915, the claims arising from this concession were among the American interests the occupation was there to protect.

On 7 August 1911 Antenor Firmin came within sight of the Haitian coast aboard a French steamer. Cincinnatus Leconte was already in Port-au-Prince with the army behind him, and Firmin did not land. He died in exile on St Thomas five weeks afterward. In 1885 Firmin had published De l'Egalite des Races Humaines, a direct answer to Arthur de Gobineau's ranking of human races, written by a Haitian living in Paris and then ignored for a century by the discipline it had corrected. As foreign minister in 1891 he refused an American demand for a naval station at the Mole Saint-Nicolas while Admiral Gherardi's squadron sat in the harbour. He was the ablest man in Haitian public life and he never governed it. Three times his supporters rose and three times the army beat them. His weapons were seized in New York in 1908, his men were cut down outside Gonaives, and the last he saw of his country was a coastline from the deck of someone else's ship.

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.

The world depression of the 1930s cut the prices paid for African export crops, and the farmers who grew them for European buyers drew the obvious conclusion about the system they had been recruited into. Across the continent people formed self help associations with economic, religious and ideological purposes. Craftsmen who refused wage employment set up small workshops of their own. Any single one of these bodies was a nuisance to a district officer and nothing more. Taken together they amounted to a withdrawal of consent from colonial rule. What frightened the administrations was the prospect that peasants would stop selling into the market altogether, which would end the export earnings and the tax revenue in one stroke. So the colonial state went into the business it had claimed to leave to merchants. Marketing boards were created to fix the price paid to the grower and to handle exports. Agricultural departments began instructing farmers on technique. Rule by administration expanded, and the machinery it built was inherited later by nationalist governments.