Batraville dies in combat and the guerrilla war ends

American marines had held Haiti since July 1915, and the armed answer to them came from the cacos, the peasant fighters of the northern and central hills. Benoit Batraville led them after Charlemagne Peralte was killed in 1919. In May 1920 he was shot dead in a fight with marine and gendarmerie patrols, and organised guerrilla resistance to the occupation ended with him. Nicholls draws attention to what was found among his personal papers. Batraville understood the peasant struggle in religious terms and sought spiritual protection for the men who followed him, which is to say the campaign was fought with the resources the countryside actually had. The occupation would last another fourteen years. It was ended by lawyers, newspapers, fundraising committees and a general strike, and no peasant army took the field against the marines again. Those papers record the last moment when the war was still being waged the old way, by men in the hills asking the spirits for cover.

By the 1920s more than three hundred thousand residents of the United States were of Caribbean derivation, the accumulated result of migration out of the islands after emancipation. They arrived just as the Great Migration was bringing millions of rural African Americans into northern cities, so the two movements met in the same neighbourhoods and pressed the same demand for inclusion in American society. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, built the Universal Negro Improvement Association into an organisation that linked struggles for Black equality across the Atlantic. Hubert Harrison, born in the Danish West Indies in 1883, supplied much of the writing that fuelled the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, alongside the Jamaican American poet Claude McKay. In Martinique at the same period Aime Cesaire was formulating negritude as a literary answer to white racism. The redefinition of Black art in the United States came in large part from people born in the islands.

A commercial and professional class in British West Africa founded the National Congress of British West Africa. It ran branches in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Through the 1920s it extracted the concession of elected African members in the territorial legislatures, most effectively in the coastal towns where this class had matured. The Congress produced offshoots, among them the West African Students' Union, which gave young West Africans in London a place to argue and introduced them to pan-African ideas. Its leaders thought regionally on a practical calculation, since no single colony could face Britain by itself. Many of them held that organising along colonial boundaries made no sense, those boundaries having been drawn by Europeans for European convenience. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria carried the argument. British officials meanwhile regarded their tropical African possessions as mere geographical units and saw no reason to worry about nationalism in them. Within one generation those units were sovereign states, governed by men who had been students in London.

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.