1907–1908: (Furniss’s Prescient Summary and the American Shadow Over Haiti): After traveling through more than three-fourths of the country on horseback, Ame…

1907–1908: (Furniss’s Prescient Summary and the American Shadow Over Haiti): After traveling through more than three-fourths of the country on horseback, American Minister Furniss — the first American Black to hold both an M.D. and a Ph.D. — wrote a lengthy but prescient confidential summary. He found the peasants friendly and peaceable, with little interest in or knowledge of politics, wishing only to till their soil and avoid army service, which meant seeking outside work in order to eat, while funds appropriated for soldiers’ rations seldom found their way down to the ranks. Yet with all this the common people had no thought of revolution — they were forced into it by their commanding officers, and once revolution was on with the accompanying burning and pillage, they got the fever and went on until they were stopped. Intrigue was so rife that one might be in high favor today and have others condemned to exile, prison, or death, and tomorrow fall victim to the intrigue of another. Though he knew no other ways to rule save those learned in a very long life, Tonton Nord was not indifferent to fears of future U.S. designs — the day after the 1908 American election, Haitian minister J.-N. Léger wrote from Washington that President-elect Taft was not inclined to allow neighboring republics to continue the bloody game of civil war, and what he had already done in Cuba and Panama indicated clearly his future attitude. Nord Alexis, impressed and wary, carried Léger’s letter with him, showing it to politicians and generals alike, exploding one day that he would shoot even his own son if he caught him conspiring. The structural irony that Furniss’s report laid bare — a peasantry that desired nothing but to till its soil, conscripted into revolutions by officers whose only objective was to seize the state, within a system where the United States now loomed as both the external threat and the ultimate arbiter of internal order — captured precisely the neocolonial trap that Fanon would later describe: the postcolonial state suspended between the violence of its own officer class and the disciplinary power of the metropole, with no exit visible from either direction.