Armed power in Haiti is gathered into one force under American command

The Gendarmerie d'Haiti was constituted under American command and every armed body in the country was folded into it. Before this, force in Haiti had been dispersed. Regional generals kept followings, provincial garrisons answered to whoever paid them, and any man who could arm several hundred peasants in the north could bargain with Port-au-Prince or march on it. The new force ended that arithmetic. Recruits were trained by American officers, paid from a treasury American officials audited, and posted where a single headquarters directed. Trouillot's point is that professionalisation and political control arrived in the same package. A disciplined national constabulary was a real administrative achievement, and it was also the most efficient instrument for internal repression the country had ever possessed. Whoever held the capital now held the guns. Every Haitian government after the marines left inherited that machine, and the century of army coups that followed began with a force built to make coups unnecessary.

The assembly elected in 1923 opened on 11 August, ratified the Lausanne treaty, and in October made Ankara the capital. On 29 October it amended the constitutional act passed two years earlier, and the country became a republic. The presidency went to Mustafa Kemal. Ismet Pasha took office as the first prime minister under the new arrangement. The change followed from the principle of national sovereignty that the assembly had claimed since 1920, and it began a new ideological direction. The nationalism of the war of liberation had grown out of populist ideas and religious loyalty and had served to fix the territory. The nationalism that came after the republic aimed to rebuild the state on a secular western model. From this point the words Turk and Turkey appear in the leaders' speeches in a national sense where they had previously carried a religious one, and pan Islamism and pan Turanism were both discarded.

African mine workers began striking in numbers once they stopped being migrants and started being residents. The 1927 walkout at the Shamva mine in Southern Rhodesia was run by Nyasa men who had lived on the property for years and had worked out how it functioned. On the Northern Rhodesian copper belt the pits sat close together, so news and plans moved between them, and the big stoppages came in 1935 and 1940. The second of those landed while the Royal Air Force was fighting over southern England. The miners knew nothing about that battle and everything about the fact that Britain could not do without copper, and the terms they extracted proved the point. No trade unions existed to call any of it. The organising ran instead through the Watchtower church and through Mbeni dance societies, formed for amusement, which split members into rival teams with uniforms and mock official titles borrowed from the men in the offices. Women danced and organised alongside men. Mbeni members served as go-betweens during the copper belt strikes.

These identifications were collected in the north of Haiti and hold for that region, since the pairings shift from one part of the country to another. Legba, the great master, the father, the familiar god of the Dahomeans, became Saint Anthony, probably Anthony the hermit, since the saint is shown with a black cock in place of a pig. Ougou Balindjo became Saint James the Greater. Agomme Tonnerre became John the Baptist. Daguy Bologuay became Saint Joseph, prayed to in words asking him to lead the petitioner as he led Mary into Egypt. The King of Aoueseau became Saint Louis, king of France. Grande Mambo Batala became Saint Anne. Maitresse Erzulie became the Virgin, and specifically the Virgin of the Nativity. La Sirene became the Assumption. Pierre d'Ambala became Saint Peter. Lesser deities found their own counterparts among the blessed, and a whole literature of written prayers followed the same road.