A Haitian delegation lays its case before Washington

Pauleus Sannon, Stenio Vincent and Perceval Thoby, sent by the Union Patriotique and arriving in the United States in February, presented a memoir describing political, economic and financial conditions under the occupation to the State Department and to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It charged that the occupation had effectively ignored Haitian constitutional law, that the American military had taken the customs houses, invaded the national territory and, by setting up martial courts, largely suppressed Haitian justice. It said no effective help had been given to develop agriculture or industry and no serious measure proposed to put the country's finances on a sound footing. The delegates asked for an end to martial law, withdrawal of the occupying forces and a national assembly to write a constitution expressing Haitian sentiment. The Nation printed the memoir in full. Pamphile notes the funding: a day of public subscription in which some two hundred women and girls walked the streets of the capital asking for money.

What the marines were doing to Haitian girls became a concern for Black women across the region, who recognised the methods from their own countries. By 1920 Margaret Washington and Mary Church Terrell, who presided over the National Association of Colored Women, had swung their organisation toward anti-Black violence in the Caribbean and at home. In August 1922 a small group of them set up the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. It took in Terrell, Washington, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mme. Charles Dube, a Haitian teacher and philanthropist, and Theodora Holly, an African American activist living in Haiti who edited the French pages of the Negro World for Garvey's association. The council spent its first year on Haitian women and children. Holly ran most of the investigation. She was the daughter of Bishop James Theodore Holly, whose family had emigrated from the United States to Haiti to get away from American racism, and she worked in English and French. Black women were assembling the machinery for holding an empire to account.

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.

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.