Two Caco armies take the North and Oreste finishes his dinner

Three days after Thomazeau, Trou du Nord was seized in the night and so was Monbin Crochu in the mountains near Vallière. Two separate forces were in the field, one loyal to the Zamor family and one to Davilmar Théodore of Ennery. The government rushed troops and arms by ship to Cap-Haïtien and Fort Liberté in time to clear each town, then lost the initiative. By 23 January 1914 the whole North and Northwest were gone. Fires broke out in Port-au-Prince, press gangs and firing squads worked through Jacmel and Jérémie, and the Môle, Port-de-Paix and Gonaïves declared for the revolution without specifying whose. On 27 January Charles Zamor landed at the Cap from exile and persuaded Théodore that the two Caco armies should combine. Michel Oreste had guests to dinner the night before. Word arrived mid meal that Saint-Marc had gone over. He finished the meal, announced he would resign in the morning, and tried to let the palace to the American, German or British legation. All three declined.

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.

On 28 November 1917 Trinidad and Tobago enacted the Shouters Prohibition Ordinance. It made it an offence to hold, join or attend a meeting of the Shouters anywhere in the colony, indoors or in the open, at any hour, and an offence to put up a building where they met. Owners and managers of land had to report any such house or gathering to the nearest constabulary station or be charged themselves. Police could enter premises without a warrant on suspicion and take the names of everyone present. The penalty ran to fifty pounds. A magistrate decided who counted as a Shouter and his ruling was final, wording chosen because a banned group might rename itself. Introducing the bill on 16 November, the Attorney General complained of noise and indecency and said the text came from a St Vincent law. The police manual listed white headcloths, candles, bells and chalk marks on the floor as evidence. Prosecutions were brought in the court at Toco.

At Versailles in 1919 the victorious Allies divided Germany's African colonies among themselves. Britain and France split Togo and Cameroon. Britain took Tanganyika. Belgium took Rwanda and Burundi. South Africa was given German South West Africa to administer. The rhetoric of the 1880s was no longer usable, so the treaty said these territories would be administered on behalf of the new League of Nations, held in trust, with the administering power preparing them for eventual self-government and protecting the interests of the people who lived there. The Mandate system had no means of enforcing anything, since the two most powerful members of the League were the two largest colonial empires, but the secretariat did send inspection teams and ask for reports. The principle it established was guardianship: that some peoples were less developed and required managing until they reached political maturity. That idea outlived the League by a century. Its vocabulary is still audible in the language of development and capacity building used about countries under foreign supervision, Haiti among them in the same decade.