A hundred dollars the first day and a file of testimony by February

The women knocked on doors and stopped people in the street. The first day brought in one hundred American dollars. Between October 1920 and February 1921 Haitian women financed the Union Patriotique's delegation to the United States, and the campaign reached all sixty-one committees the organisation had in the country, with women serving as the main fundraisers and the administrators in each of them. They were instructed to give two or three days a week to soliciting from families in their own neighbourhoods, and they spent weeks inside other people's houses. That is where the second thing happened. Sitting in those rooms, the collectors heard what the occupation had done to the women who lived in them, wrote it down, and carried the accounts back to the membership and outward across the region. The material became the centre of the delegation's report in 1921, reached American newspapers, and was printed years later in the book Occupied Haiti. A fundraising round had produced the first archive of the occupation's violence against women.

Eugene O'Neill's play opened at the Provincetown Playhouse and passed within a year to the young Paul Robeson, whose performance drew praise for its emotional strength, before going to Broadway in 1921. Jackson notes that Robeson had first encountered Toussaint and the revolution as a seventeen year old schoolboy in New Jersey in 1915, the year American troops landed in Haiti. The film version of 1933 opened simultaneously to segregated audiences and met immediate black criticism, with a New York paper reporting in September that Harlem objected to the constant use of a racial slur and a Philadelphia paper editorialising in November that it found not one redeeming feature in the picture. A later critic read the film as mapping its hero onto a Haitian primitivism drawn from nineteenth century colonial thinking.

The oldest movement in sub-Saharan Africa that can fairly be called nationalist was at the southern end of the continent. The South African Native National Congress was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress in 1923. Elsewhere, politics on the scale of a whole territory was rare before the Second World War. It worked in small colonies that resembled a precolonial state, and it worked in Tanganyika, where Swahili was spoken widely enough to carry a message from one end to the other. The Tanganyikan African Association was founded in 1929 with branches across the territory. The war pushed matters forward through hardship and sharpened political awareness. Colonial schooling, restricted as it was, produced elites who meant to build European style nation states in Africa and who then had to close the distance between themselves and everybody else. Women organised and campaigned, and were promised an equality that independence did not deliver. Nationalism had to supply an identity for peoples a European mapmaker had grouped together. It usually failed.

In January 1919 word reached Port-au-Prince that things were wrong at Hinche, out on the Plateau Central at the end of the new road. The corvée had officially stopped the previous October and was still running. Peasants ran into the bush at the sight of a gendarme. Prisoners taken by the marines were shot or simply vanished. Colonel Williams reported the charges baseless on the word of the district commander, Major Clarke Wells. Lieutenant Colonel Hooker went up and came back with the opposite finding. General Catlin, carrying a lung half destroyed at Belleau Wood, then went himself to Saint Michel, Maïssade and Hinche and talked to priests, magistrats and frightened peasants. The corvée was in full operation, prisoners had been shot with escape given as the reason every time, and Wells had made clear to his subordinates that he did not want prisoners reported. Catlin relieved Wells, moved every Gendarmerie officer out of the district, and brought courts martial against nobody. General Barnett read of indiscriminate killing in a court record that September and demanded an inquiry.