The First World War finishes the scramble for Africa

The European war arrived while most colonial administrations in Africa were still consolidating what they had seized. German Togo and Cameroon were invaded late in 1914, and the fighting in Cameroon ran into 1916. South African forces took German South West Africa and stayed there for more than seventy years. In eastern Africa the German commander von Lettow-Vorbeck kept a column moving through Mozambique, Nyasaland and northeastern Rhodesia and gave himself up only when he heard of the armistice in November 1918. Most of the soldiers on both sides were African, led by small numbers of European officers. Between 750,000 and one million Africans were pressed into service as porters, and roughly one in five of them died, mostly of disease. Armies burned crops and stores as they moved. France sent 150,000 West Africans to the Western Front and thirty thousand of them were killed. Conscription acquired a name among Africans, the blood tax. French operations against resistance to recruitment completed the conquest of West African districts that had held out since the 1880s.

Fifty United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 17 December 1914, walked to the National Bank of Haiti, took 500,000 dollars in gold from its reserves and carried it out to a warship. The gold was delivered to the National City Bank in New York. The Americans described this as safekeeping. Joseph Davilmar Theodore was president. His anti-American speeches had irritated Washington, and Washington was already uneasy about the speed with which Haitian governments were falling and about German commercial weight in the country in the first months of the European war. The removal did what a robbery would have done. It emptied the reserve standing behind the currency, it left Theodore visibly unable to protect the national bank of his own country, and it told every Haitian who read a newspaper that the United States treated Haitian sovereignty as conditional and Haitian assets as available. Seven months later the marines came back and stayed for nineteen years.

On 12 August 1915 American Marines stood inside the Haitian National Assembly with fixed bayonets until the members confirmed Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave as president. Dartiguenave, born on 6 April 1863 into a wealthy light skinned family, had been president of the Senate when Sam was killed. The Americans refused Rosalvo Bobo, the man most likely to win, and settled on Dartiguenave as someone who would cooperate. He was the first light skinned southerner to hold the office since 1879, and he governed as a proxy for American officials who ran the money, the armed forces and foreign policy. He signed a treaty giving the occupation legal form and placing Haitian finances under American control. The Haitian army was dissolved and replaced by a national guard armed, trained and commanded by the United States. That guard administered the corvée, which required peasants to work without pay on the national roads, a compulsory labour system imposed on the grandchildren of people who had fought a revolution to end compulsory labour.

Caperton had 400 men ashore in a city holding at least 1,500 of Rosalvo Bobo's Cacos, the remnants of the Reforme faction and what was left of the army. The Comite Revolutionnaire belonged to Bobo and was pressing the National Assembly to elect him. When the deputies asked whether they might proceed to an election, the admiral put them off. On 2 August he reported to Washington that the Cacos were professional soldiers under chiefs who sold their services to whoever offered most, that all Haitians feared them, that they effectively decided who governed, and that Congress had been about to elect Bobo out of fear until he stopped it. The Comite went on as though nothing had changed. It jailed a senator named Joseph Dessources for criticising it, and the Americans ordered him released. It took over the telegraph offices and filled the wires with messages for Bobo, and Caperton took charge of communications. It began drawing government money, and Caperton moved every gourde into a blocked account.