A great-grandson of Dessalines is proclaimed president in the cathedral

Cincinnatus Leconte entered Port-au-Prince on 7 August 1911, went to the cathedral for mass, and was proclaimed head of the executive while the guns of Fort National fired a salute of twenty-one. On 14 August the National Assembly ratified what the army had already settled. Leconte was born on 29 September 1859 and was a great-grandson of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who declared Haitian independence in 1804 and was killed by his own officers two years later. Descent from Dessalines was an asset no president had carried since Faustin Soulouque. In a country where the revolution was the one source of legitimacy everybody agreed on, the name promised that the debt of 1804 might still be collected. Leconte governed for a year. On 8 August 1912 the palace blew up in the night with the president and several hundred soldiers inside, and Haiti returned to the run of short governments that ended with the American landing of 1915.

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.

Antoine Simon's army had gone through the North in February, burning villages and stripping gardens. It withdrew, and on 8 May 1911 revolt broke out again in every district the troops had crossed. The insurgents were Cacos, peasant fighters of the northern mountains who hired themselves to whichever general could pay. This time they chose their targets. They burned the sawmill and the construction camps of the National Railroad, fired into the houses of railway employees, and shouted against James P. McDonald, the American who held the concession. The company had handed its dynamite, powder and blasting caps to government troops, which placed it on one side of the fight. Foreign observers filed the Cacos under banditry. Bandits do not single out the physical plant of a foreign concession from everything else available to burn. The men who lit those camps knew who was laying track across their land and on whose account.

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.