A French bishop tells a US senator who led the revolt

In December 1921 a United States Senate commission was in Haiti investigating reports of atrocities committed during the occupation. Senator Medill McCormick questioned Jean Marie Jan, the French Catholic bishop of Cap Haitien. Jan called the occupation an act of kindness, then explained the war against the Americans by saying the people had been driven to desperation by arbitrariness, injustice and mistreatment and had proclaimed their right to defend themselves. Asked whether Vodou had diminished since the landing, he answered that it had increased, and that the greatest cause was that the boko had been the soul of the insurrection. He also asked whether Washington intended to impose Protestantism by force. He had grounds. Edwin Denby, the American under secretary of the navy, was writing to E. O. Watson of the Council of Churches that Haiti lay within the sphere of the United States and that the Navy Department would be happy to facilitate the work of the missionary societies.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races ran study clubs in which members and outsiders read texts by people of African descent from anywhere in the world. The stated purpose was strengthening the darker races through familiarity with themselves and with one another. In practice this was an alternative curriculum, complete with research projects that placed Black women at the centre, at a time when no school in either country taught such a thing. Theodora Holly was the most requested speaker, lecturing girls and women in Haiti and in the United States on the history of Haitian women. Members also collected newspapers and photographs and mailed them across the water. Holly wrote to Margaret Washington describing a talk she gave to a girls' club in Port-au-Prince, where she held up Washington's photograph as an example of what a Black woman could be. A decade later in Paris, Jane and Paulette Nardal gathered a cercle d'amis on the same principle. An image travelling from Alabama to a schoolroom in Port-au-Prince was traffic the occupation had no method for reading.

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.

On 10 March 1922 the old battleship North Dakota carried General John Russell down the Gulf of La Gonave toward Port-au-Prince. He had smelled the city once before, as a midshipman in 1893, and had written in his journal that it was the filthiest place he had ever set eyes on and that he hoped never to return. He went ashore the next morning as American high commissioner, met by the magistrat communal, an honour guard of gendarmes, the palace band and a crowd well practised at cheering new rulers of Haiti. His first directive settled the shape of the next eight years. All correspondence between treaty officials and the Haitian government, Washington or each other would pass through his office, and no statement of policy, draft law or budget line could issue without his approval. The Haitian president, his ministers and the Conseil d'Etat kept the ceremony. Russell kept the valve. He compared the arrangement openly to Lord Cromer's Egypt, one foreign race governing a second in order to rule a third.