215 students walk out of Damien and the country follows them

The American Service Technique ran a Central School of Agriculture at Damien to train agricultural teachers, and it recruited from elite families who had no intention of touching a shovel. To make the course tolerable each student drew a monthly allowance of twenty-five dollars, and hired peasants did the farm labour while the scholarship holders did the reading. Coffee failed in 1928 and everything failed in 1929, so Dr Freeman cut two thousand dollars from the ten thousand set aside for those allowances, moved the money to peasant students at Hinche and elsewhere, and ordered the remaining boursiers to work the ground themselves. On 31 October at three in the afternoon all 215 students walked off the property with their Haitian instructors behind them. Within ten days the law, medical, engineering and normal schools had joined them, and Roumain and Pradel were making the strikers into heroes. At Jacmel the students marched under a green serpent on red, the banner of Danbala. On 3 December Russell told Washington the Garde could no longer be relied on.

Adolf Hitler had helped found the National Socialist party by 1920 and led it by 1921. It grew slowly through the decade, claiming over a hundred thousand members and 810,000 votes in the Reichstag elections of 1928. Then came the world economic crisis. German unemployment climbed to three million during 1930 and Nazi party membership doubled. At the polls in September 1930 the Nazi vote leapt to 6.4 million and Hitler commanded the second largest party in the Reichstag with 107 seats. The Weimar Republic had carried the defeat of 1918 and the terms of Versailles from its birth, had watched France occupy the Ruhr in 1923 after a reparations default, and had survived the hyperinflation that followed. It did not survive the depression. The economic collapse that put millions of Americans out of work put Hitler within reach of the German state.

Herskovits found a Dahomean who made charms for a living and who came back to him repeatedly through 1931 with new ones. For each he explained how it had been made, what had gone into it and why, the taboos attached to it, who could use it, under what conditions and to what end. Charms meant to harm were included alongside charms meant to protect. The collection reached just under forty gbo with the details recorded for every one. A gbo could be worn at the waist, neck, wrist or ankle, kept inside a house, set at the edge of a field, buried in ground a man owned, worked into cuts in his skin, or swallowed. Once a specialist had sold a client the method, the right to make that charm belonged to the buyer as much as to the seller. A Dahomean proverb says the charm holds nothing for long, while the powers of the Vodu are eternal.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.