A Port-au-Prince evening paper works on the mind of the occupied

On 14 April 1921 Le Courrier du Soir, an evening paper in Port-au-Prince, published articles on the psychological side of Haitian resistance to the American occupation. The armed phase had ended the year before. What remained was a population living under a foreign army that had its own police force and its own settled opinion of what Haitians were capable of, and the newspapers were the instrument left for arguing with it. The paper set out to build a shared sense of national purpose among people whose ordinary lives had been reorganised without their consent. That is a specific claim about how occupations are beaten. They are beaten when the occupied stop treating the arrangement as permanent, and a daily paper reaches enough people often enough to make that happen. The occupation ran another thirteen years. The argument this paper opened in April 1921 was still being made in the streets when it finished.

The Turkish nationalists beat the Greek army in 1922 and the armistice of Mudanya of 11 October ended the foreign occupation on terms close to what they had demanded. Both Ankara and Istanbul were then invited to send delegations to the peace conference at Lausanne, which offered the sultan a chance to recover his standing at the expense of the modernists who held power in Ankara. On 1 November 1922 the National Assembly, pressed by Mustafa Kemal, abolished the sultanate outright and declared that the sultan's authority had in fact ended on 16 March 1920. Kemal defended the separation of sultan and caliph as closer to the practice of early Islam, and said that the house of Osman had seized a sovereignty that belonged to the Turkish nation and that the nation had now taken it back. The Lausanne treaty followed on 24 July 1923.

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.