Nigerian nationalism splits along Yoruba and Igbo lines in 1941

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.

The Service Technique de l'Agriculture et de l'Enseignement Professionnel was organised in April 1923 and became the most far reaching American programme in Haiti. Its declared functions were agricultural training, research, farm schools, advice to adult farmers, animal clinics, field experiments and vocational instruction. Russell's larger aim was to raise from the peasantry a class of Black smallholders with schooling, capital and access to markets. The record is real. Experimental stations, a cattle breeding station at Hinche, the agricultural school at Damien that one historian called a miniature Tuskegee, demonstration farms, Plantation Dauphin at Fort Liberte with the largest sisal acreage in the world, tobacco brought back as a money crop, national soil surveys, and veterinary clinics that treated more than a hundred thousand animals. The hostility it drew ran far beyond agronomy. Since 1804 the oligarchy's position had rested on the peasantry having no schooling, no capital and no market. A programme that undid any one of those undid the oligarchy, and its members understood this faster than the Americans did.

Seabrook's travel narrative The Magic Island, built around the marine sergeant Faustin Wirkus and Seabrook's own fanciful account of Haitian religion, was chosen by the Literary Guild as its featured book for January 1929 and became a national bestseller. Renda uses its reception to show how empire was absorbed at home. Seabrook printed Wirkus's address, and schoolboys in Pennsylvania wrote to the man they understood to be a king, identifying with him as a Pennsylvanian, a working class boy and a Boy Scout, and asking about wild animals and chief exports. The Guild editor Carl Van Doren praised the book as a work in the literature of American empire and told readers they were citizens of an empire reaching far beyond their own continent. Renda notes that in 1929 empire was no longer debated in the United States, it was a point of pride.

When the Americans landed, Haiti carried hookworm, tuberculosis, filariasis, leprosy, malignant malaria, yaws, syphilis, smallpox, typhoid and a range of intestinal diseases. Captain Kent Melhorn, the naval officer put in charge of public health, described a country full of filth and sickness in which the few buildings called hospitals were shacks where the sick were brought to die. The Service de Santé Publique built and ran eleven modern hospitals employing 2,222 people, all but two percent of them Haitian, along with 147 rural and travelling clinics. Four further hospitals included the United States naval hospital in the capital, a building that later became the Hotel Oloffson and the setting of Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. In 1929 the service recorded 1,341,596 consultations and treatments, and nearly half of Haiti's 159 physicians worked for it. From 1926 a Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed the occupation to reorganise the national medical school, which with a new dispensers' school let Haiti train doctors and technicians to current standards. The British minister, who praised little else, called the medical work a credit to the profession.