Germany's African colonies are shared out and called a trust

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.

The corvée failed where it touched Haitian officials. Magistrats and gendarmes worked out that they could exempt anyone who paid and impress anyone who could not. A peasant who finished his annual stint was given a card by the Americans; the chef seksyon would tear the card up in front of him and send him back to work with a blow from the kokomakak. By late 1918, after Butler had gone, men were being roped together and marched to distant work sites like conscripts for the old army. Educated townsmen were caught in it too. Dantès Bellegarde was still angry twenty three years later about the gendarme who knocked on Jean Price-Mars's door in Pétionville and took him away for three days. Out of this came the teledjòl that ran through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite: the blan have come to bring slavery back, and the corvée is only the beginning. Major A. S. Williams wrote that the labour system had taught peasants to hate the occupation and taught gendarmes to treat civilians as material. He abolished it on 1 October 1918. It was already too late.

The assembly elected in 1923 opened on 11 August, ratified the Lausanne treaty, and in October made Ankara the capital. On 29 October it amended the constitutional act passed two years earlier, and the country became a republic. The presidency went to Mustafa Kemal. Ismet Pasha took office as the first prime minister under the new arrangement. The change followed from the principle of national sovereignty that the assembly had claimed since 1920, and it began a new ideological direction. The nationalism of the war of liberation had grown out of populist ideas and religious loyalty and had served to fix the territory. The nationalism that came after the republic aimed to rebuild the state on a secular western model. From this point the words Turk and Turkey appear in the leaders' speeches in a national sense where they had previously carried a religious one, and pan Islamism and pan Turanism were both discarded.

Colonel Littleton Waller took the north in hand. He paid off the Haitian garrison at Ouanaminthe, most of whom claimed the rank of brigadier general at the pay table, and put a Marine company on the Dominican border in their place. More companies went into Grande Rivière du Nord and Fort Liberté, giving him a triangle of garrisons to patrol from. Butler took forty men to locate the Caco strongholds, crossing country no foreigner had entered since the French, and afterwards said Haiti looked like a crumpled sheet of paper. On the afternoon of 24 October 1915 he came within sight of Fort Capois, a cone of rock a thousand feet above him ringed with stone walls and trenches, seven miles south of Saint Suzanne. He turned back toward Grande Rivière and spent the night surrounded and under fire from 400 Cacos. From 1 November the Marines swept west from the Dominican frontier, taking the strongholds one after another, nearly all of them old French forts. The last was Fort Rivière, on the peak of the Montagne Noire, 4,000 feet up.