A lecture at Primavera takes the peasant family seriously

In April 1922 Jean Price Mars lectured at Primavera in Port au Prince on the peasant family, taking the district of Kenscoff as his case. He had spent part of the previous November in the heights of the Sourcailles with a friend, collecting oral traditions from farming households, and he told the room plainly that his method claimed no scientific rigour. The subject was a provocation for that audience. Its members understood family as the sacrament the catechism describes, and their parish priest denounced from the pulpit the number of baptisms of children born outside marriage, four fifths of them recorded in the villages and coming from the countryside. The lecture answered by setting out what actually binds a rural household: the letter of request, the payment made to the bride's parents, the oath sworn before the family altar, and the long common life that might much later be carried to a church for a second blessing.

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.

A commercial and professional class in British West Africa founded the National Congress of British West Africa. It ran branches in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Through the 1920s it extracted the concession of elected African members in the territorial legislatures, most effectively in the coastal towns where this class had matured. The Congress produced offshoots, among them the West African Students' Union, which gave young West Africans in London a place to argue and introduced them to pan-African ideas. Its leaders thought regionally on a practical calculation, since no single colony could face Britain by itself. Many of them held that organising along colonial boundaries made no sense, those boundaries having been drawn by Europeans for European convenience. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria carried the argument. British officials meanwhile regarded their tropical African possessions as mere geographical units and saw no reason to worry about nationalism in them. Within one generation those units were sovereign states, governed by men who had been students in London.

Dartiguenave held the presidency through the most violent years of the occupation under American military supervision. By 1922 he was protesting the transfer of Haitian money into American banks, and Washington removed him, installing Louis Borno alongside Major General John Russell as high commissioner. The Borno and Russell government ran the country, ignored the violence around it, and denied what it could not ignore. Under Major Smedley Butler the Americans revived the corvée, a labour draft with precedents in French colonial rule and in Henry Christophe's building of the Citadelle. Conscription was indiscriminate. Butler wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it would not do to ask too many questions about how the work was done. People walked long routes through the mountains to keep off the roads. The brutality filled the ranks of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville, who took their tactics from Dessalines. Fighting between Cacos and Marines killed more than 2,250 Haitians in the first decade, some in combat and some at the hands of careless or predatory Marines.