The pass laws produce the organisations that will end them

South Africa needed African labour in the mines and needed Africans confined to the reserves when the mines had no use for them. The pass system did both jobs, and it also produced the earliest sustained organised protest on the continent outside Islamic North Africa. In 1912 a group of educated men founded the South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress in 1923. Its reach was narrow at first, though it worked with Indian and Coloured organisations and laid ground for something larger. Mass action came from elsewhere. In 1919 huge demonstrations against the pass laws showed what popular participation could look like, and in 1920 some forty thousand mineworkers struck. That industrial strength made the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union possible, founded in 1919 and claiming a hundred thousand members by the middle of the decade. Internal splits broke it before the decade ended. The worker consciousness it exposed had been formed in the compound and down the shaft.

At three in the morning on 7 August 1912 an explosion shook Port-au-Prince and a column of fire went up from the National Palace. The Italian powder Antoine Simon had left in the basement finally caught, and with it a million rounds of ammunition and other explosives stored there by a run of presidents who preferred their munitions underfoot to out of reach. The floor of President Cincinnatus Leconte's bedroom dropped into the fire. His daughter and son-in-law got out of a window before the building came down. The dead included his grandson and three hundred men of the presidential guard. Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, who had no affection for Haitian politicians, wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that Leconte's had probably been the best administration Haiti had seen in many years, and that the bank once reckoned ninety percent of customs duties were actually reaching the treasury. Leconte had told him officeholders were threatening his life over exactly that.

Under its charter the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti owed the government its revenues only at the close of the fiscal year, while the government needed cash every month. Cincinnatus Leconte asked for a supplementary convention to keep the old arrangement running. The bank refused, hinting that a monthly allowance might follow some form of control over the customs. Its New York group, run by Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, assured the State Department that no such thought had crossed anyone's mind. A convention was patched together anyway, and honest collection under Leconte and Tancrède Auguste left the government square with the bank and more than eight hundred thousand dollars in hand when the 1913 fiscal year closed. The bank opened a second front instead. It held ten million francs in gold meant to retire the debased paper gourdes, was lending that gold at twelve and a half percent, and would not give it up. When the assembly closed the loopholes, the bank called in loans and stopped making new ones.

The coffin was carried at speed across town to the Cimetière Extérieure through streets full of shooting soldiers, and the shape of the morning became clear. General Edmond Delly, military commandant of the capital and a candidate for the presidency, had surrounded the cathedral, and his men had broken up the funeral. Beaufossé Laroche, another candidate, had put his own troops into the streets to head Delly off. The two sides contended until midday, mostly by noise, when Seymour Pradel got the Réforme regiment and the presidential guard to clear the area so that the diplomats and clergy could withdraw and have a drink. At four the National Assembly met to choose a successor, and Delly's men charged the building. When the shooting stopped at dusk the electors picked Michel Oreste, a lawyer and deputy, over Luxembourg Cauvin. After a hundred and nine years Haiti had a civilian head of state. Each elector received a note from Oreste for six hundred dollars in gold, payable by the national treasury.