Unemployed men in Southern Rhodesia found a church in 1934

By the 1930s African dissatisfaction with mission education was general. In South Africa the Zionist churches, which had white roots in the late nineteenth century, grew through the interwar years by folding African religious practice into Christian belief. Zionists accepted polygamy and gave women prominent roles. The mission school had no answer for people whose incomes had collapsed, and the doctrine it taught had begun to sound wrong: a white Christ, a salvation and an equality that appeared to be handed out selectively, and a demand for unconditional loyalty to the colonial state routed through the Church. Independent congregations multiplied in direct proportion to hardship. One was founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1934 by a group of unemployed men. Political argument travelled inside religious language. The Watchtower movement went into the mining compounds of southern Africa, recruited workers, offered a spiritual account of compound life and told them that at the second coming they would be among the elect. It built the first worker consciousness those compounds had, in the only vocabulary on offer.

American marines had held Haiti since July 1915, and the armed answer to them came from the cacos, the peasant fighters of the northern and central hills. Benoit Batraville led them after Charlemagne Peralte was killed in 1919. In May 1920 he was shot dead in a fight with marine and gendarmerie patrols, and organised guerrilla resistance to the occupation ended with him. Nicholls draws attention to what was found among his personal papers. Batraville understood the peasant struggle in religious terms and sought spiritual protection for the men who followed him, which is to say the campaign was fought with the resources the countryside actually had. The occupation would last another fourteen years. It was ended by lawyers, newspapers, fundraising committees and a general strike, and no peasant army took the field against the marines again. Those papers record the last moment when the war was still being waged the old way, by men in the hills asking the spirits for cover.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races put much of its money into sending investigators abroad, and the most consequential of those journeys was Addie Hunton's visit to Haiti in 1926. Her guides in Port-au-Prince were Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain and Therese Hudicourt. Six years earlier those two had walked two hundred women through the same streets in protest; now they walked an American through the places where the occupation had done its damage. What came out of the trip was a report of 180 pages called Occupied Haiti. Its subtitle described the authors as six disinterested Americans, from organisations that were American through and through, who had looked at conditions on the ground themselves and wanted the independence of the republic given back. The conclusion was that the United States military should go, and go at once. The title alone did work that argument could not. Americans who had been told the occupation was a favour to Haiti were reading Americans who had gone to see and come home asking for withdrawal.

On 16 July 1926 the crowd at Ville Bonheur came for the Virgin of Saut d'Eau, for the great feast of the springs of Saint John, and above all for the waterfall. The street to the chapel was solid with people: pilgrims, onlookers, sellers of amusements, peasants in their Sunday clothes, superstitious townspeople, professional beggars in rags, sick people wasted by syphilis and tuberculosis, prostitutes past working age, countrywomen in votive dresses of blue, white or grey cotton with cords across the shoulder, young men down from the dance halls of Port au Prince, small children carried on their mothers' shoulders in thanks for having been born at all. The movement sorted itself into two streams, one climbing to the fall and the chapel, one coming back. In the afternoon the heat broke. Cloud ran in from the lake country over the mountains and the storm burst on the town. The women called the downpour a rain of blessings.