Swahili gives Tanganyika a politics the size of the territory

The oldest movement in sub-Saharan Africa that can fairly be called nationalist was at the southern end of the continent. The South African Native National Congress was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress in 1923. Elsewhere, politics on the scale of a whole territory was rare before the Second World War. It worked in small colonies that resembled a precolonial state, and it worked in Tanganyika, where Swahili was spoken widely enough to carry a message from one end to the other. The Tanganyikan African Association was founded in 1929 with branches across the territory. The war pushed matters forward through hardship and sharpened political awareness. Colonial schooling, restricted as it was, produced elites who meant to build European style nation states in Africa and who then had to close the distance between themselves and everybody else. Women organised and campaigned, and were promised an equality that independence did not deliver. Nationalism had to supply an identity for peoples a European mapmaker had grouped together. It usually failed.

By the early 1920s the American military declared the caco wars won. The proof it offered was Charlemagne Peralte, the caco leader and intellectual, captured and killed in 1919, his naked body arranged to resemble a crucifixion and photographed, the photograph then circulated through a country that knew exactly what image was being used against it. Reports of continued killing kept reaching Washington and the Senate opened investigations. In 1920 Admiral H. S. Knapp, who had served in Haiti and said he had studied conditions there thoroughly, was asked whether some three thousand Haitian men, women and children had been shot since 1915 by troops under American command. He answered that it was very possible three thousand Haitian men in all had been killed, and that the operations were necessary to restore order and a respect for human life and property. The life and property in danger, on his account, were endangered by Haitians. The killing of people in their own country went into the record as the price of governing them.

In 1920 something near sixty percent of Haiti's territory carried forest. When Columbus arrived in 1492 the island was wooded throughout and held more than six thousand species of plant. Through the twentieth century the population grew and the trees were cut for charcoal, the only cooking fuel most families could afford. By 1980 under twenty-five percent of the country was forested. By the twenty-first century the figure was below two percent. What follows from that is soil running off the slopes into the sea, falling yields on the land that remains, hurricanes and heavy rain doing more damage than they would otherwise do, mudslides that have killed hundreds at a time, and silt cutting the output of the Peligre dam. After 1990 projects paid for by USAID planted more than sixty million trees, and most were cut for charcoal. The cycle runs until somebody supplies another fuel, and no Haitian government has had the money or the standing to do it. Fly from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo and look down. The Haitian side of the border is brown. The Dominican side is green.

On 15 May 1920 the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper in the United States, ran the headline US Troops Attack Haitian Girls. Its source was the Reverend S. E. Churchstone-Lord, an African American pastor serving in Port-au-Prince for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He described white soldiers of the American army spreading terror through the republic and trying to beat Haitians into submission. His heaviest charge was that nine Haitian girls between the ages of eight and twelve had died in a single night after being assaulted. He said further that white officers required members of the Haitian gendarmerie to procure Haitian women as concubines for them. Girls who survived were in some cases pushed into sexual servitude arranged by their own countrymen on American instruction. Elizabeth Saint-Bernard, Claircia Delva, Estrea, Marilia Lindor, Adirenng, Claircilia Telisma, Louise Ismael and Eleanor Charles appear in the military record distorted or not at all. Antioccupation families in Port-au-Prince, the Garoutes and the Sylvains among them, moved these accounts across the region and into the American press.