Indiscriminate killings reaches page one and changes nothing

Two days after the Lejeune and Butler report went in, the New York Times printed on its front page the private correspondence between General Barnett, commandant of the marine corps, and Colonel Russell in Haiti, with the phrase indiscriminate killings played large. The American election of 1920 was at its height. James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, advising the Republican candidate Warren Harding, told him to use the atrocity charges at once, and Harding was already telling crowds that American marines had killed thousands of Haitians. Johnson recalled that Harding treated the matter as a gift off the Christmas tree. Wilson answered with one more inquiry under Admiral Henry Mayo, which The Nation called a whitewash before it had reached Haiti and which concluded that the offences were remarkably few. Executions without trial did happen. The corvee ran on after orders to stop it and worked as debt peonage for the profit of Haitian officials. Major Wells and a few American subordinates covered for it. The Senate investigation of 1922 established ten illegal executions and nobody was convicted.

Churchstone-Lord told the Chicago Defender that if the United States meant to keep its protectorate over Haiti, Haitians would rather have Black American troops. White troops, he said, were arrogant and known for their contempt toward Haitians, women and girls in particular. The request measured what people expected to survive. Under a foreign army that was going to stay, the only choice on offer was which soldiers were least likely to read Haitian skin as permission. His report put a structure of rape, assault and murder in front of an American public with no other way of learning about it. Few of the incidents were ever investigated by the marines or by the gendarmerie. Haitians moved the information themselves, by word of mouth, in newspapers and journals, in open letters, and where it was possible through courts martial. Churchstone-Lord learned about the dead girls through those channels and sent the story north. The Black press in the United States did the work of a court of inquiry because there was no court of inquiry.

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.

Forty-five days after the ambush that killed Lieutenant Muth, a peasant told the marines where Batraville was sleeping. At daybreak on 19 May 1920 patrols closed on the rocks at the top of Morne Ti Bois Pin, five miles southeast of Lascahobas. The cacos fired first. An automatic rifle cut Batraville down, still carrying the binoculars taken from Muth, and a sergeant shot him with a pistol as he tried to rise and draw. Armed caco resistance ended there, and so did the presidential hopes of Dr Bobo, the mulatto physician for whose ambitions a great many peasants had paid. Marines and gendarmerie together lost 98 killed and wounded across the whole war. Caco dead are counted differently by everyone. A conservative figure for 1915 to 1920 is 2,250. Hans Schmidt put it at 3,250. Roger Gaillard asked whether the total, counting repression and the after effects of the fighting, might approach 15,000, and said the war often resembled a massacre. Not a shot was fired south of the Cul-de-Sac.