The game parks began as sleeping sickness evacuations

When sleeping sickness spread, administrations in Nyasaland and Tanganyika moved entire populations out of the infected districts. The land left behind became the game parks the tourist industry now sells, which is the whole colonial arrangement in one object. Colonial rule and the global market had deepened the environmental crisis and imported new diseases. The same rule then reversed part of the damage, clearing bush for commercial farming, controlling game and pushing the tsetse fly back. European medicine treated old diseases along with the ones Europeans had carried in. Colonial roads and railways could in principle move relief to a district where the harvest had failed faster than anything before them. Africans across the continent found their capacity to manage their own affairs cut down by the system, and the same system opened commercial and eventually political ground. From the 1920s onward fertility rose, the rains steadied and the population of Africa began the climb it has not stopped. The recovery is usually credited to the pax colonia. It was accomplished by the people who lived through it.

Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928. He had been born on 15 October 1876 at Grand-Riviere du Nord, had trained as a physician, and had spent his adult life watching the colour line inside Haitian society do damage that no foreign enemy had needed to inflict. The book's claim is short. The two things that most plainly mark Haitian life, the Vodou religion and the Kreyol language, come out of the African past by way of colonial slavery, they are a legitimate inheritance, and Haitians should hold them rather than hide them. That was written while marines occupied the country and while American racial contempt was busy confirming the light-skinned elite in its own contempt for black Haitian custom. Price-Mars also told his readers to take pride in the only slave revolt in the Americas that finished the job. A generation of black intellectuals took the book as a charter. One of them was Francois Duvalier, who turned it into a justification for dictatorship while its author was still alive to object.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races put much of its money into sending investigators abroad, and the most consequential of those journeys was Addie Hunton's visit to Haiti in 1926. Her guides in Port-au-Prince were Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain and Therese Hudicourt. Six years earlier those two had walked two hundred women through the same streets in protest; now they walked an American through the places where the occupation had done its damage. What came out of the trip was a report of 180 pages called Occupied Haiti. Its subtitle described the authors as six disinterested Americans, from organisations that were American through and through, who had looked at conditions on the ground themselves and wanted the independence of the republic given back. The conclusion was that the United States military should go, and go at once. The title alone did work that argument could not. Americans who had been told the occupation was a favour to Haiti were reading Americans who had gone to see and come home asking for withdrawal.

On 16 July 1926 the crowd at Ville Bonheur came for the Virgin of Saut d'Eau, for the great feast of the springs of Saint John, and above all for the waterfall. The street to the chapel was solid with people: pilgrims, onlookers, sellers of amusements, peasants in their Sunday clothes, superstitious townspeople, professional beggars in rags, sick people wasted by syphilis and tuberculosis, prostitutes past working age, countrywomen in votive dresses of blue, white or grey cotton with cords across the shoulder, young men down from the dance halls of Port au Prince, small children carried on their mothers' shoulders in thanks for having been born at all. The movement sorted itself into two streams, one climbing to the fall and the chapel, one coming back. In the afternoon the heat broke. Cloud ran in from the lake country over the mountains and the storm burst on the town. The women called the downpour a rain of blessings.