A British writer finds Haitian lawyers trained for a country that is elsewhere

Harry Johnston, a British colonial administrator and writer, toured the Black republics for a book published in 1910. He found the Haitian elite highly educated, quick, witty and widely read, and then could find almost nothing in that education fitted to the country they lived in. France, he observed, trained young men for practical work in Africa and Asia, and gave the youth of Haiti a schooling suited to life in Paris or a French provincial town. Haitian lawyers knew the fine points of the Code Napoleon and showed no interest in building a plain civil and criminal law that would work for the population actually living on the island. In agriculture, forestry, botany, mineralogy and bacteriology he could find no Haitian at work at all. Johnston had his own reasons for saying it, since a colonial official who finds self-government wanting is arguing for his own trade. The observation still landed, and Haitian writers spent the next fifty years answering it.

Antoine Simon crammed soldiers onto a German merchant ship and onto the warship Nord Alexis, whose name nobody had thought to change, and steamed for Gonaives to put down Leconte's rising. He led the march north himself while Joseph Jeremie crossed the mountains to Hinche and pushed into Caco country through Cerca-la-Source, Mont Organise and Valliere. Leconte took shelter in the German consulate at Cap-Haitien. The government suddenly recovered its memory of the Consolidation fraud of 1904 and issued a warrant for him as a fugitive, and the Germans refused to give him up. Simon took Fort Liberte on 7 February and let his troops loot and kill across the north, in the same week that fire swept his own Les Cayes. Jeremie burned nothing, which earned him standing with the Zamors and with the Peralte family of Hinche. One of the young Peraltes, Charlemagne, marched in his column. Eight years later Charlemagne Peralte was leading the armed resistance to the American occupation, and the Marines shot him and photographed the body.

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.

On 28 July 1915 a crowd broke into the French embassy in Port-au-Prince, found President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam hiding in a bathroom, dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces. The day before, Sam had ordered the killing of 167 political prisoners taken from elite families, among them the former president Oreste Zamor. Those executions produced the rising that killed him. In Washington, Woodrow Wilson learned of it and feared that Rosalvo Bobo, whom his advisers took for a German sympathiser, would take power. On 29 July he ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The stated reason was humanitarian, the restoring of order in a country said to be incapable of governing itself. The working reasons were strategic: keeping Germany out of the Caribbean during the European war, holding the Windward Passage that guards the approach to the Panama Canal, and protecting American money already placed in Haiti. The occupation ran nineteen years. A century of Haitian self government, disorderly as it had been, ended inside a week.