Padmore runs the Comintern's African section from 1927

Between the wars a class of educated Africans in the French territories began arguing about politics in print, and the administration worried that they would find a rural following. Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, an activist and for a time a communist, wrote about the emerging African proletariat and about nationalism. He belonged to a set of men across French western and equatorial Africa who ran newspapers, built the first trade unions and corresponded with Marcus Garvey and with George Padmore, the Trinidadian who took charge of the African section of the Comintern in 1927. Plenty of African politicians in these years worked with the colonial order. Blaise Diagne, elected to the French assembly from Senegal in 1914 on rural votes, made himself an ally of France and defended its policies in public, conscription included. Andre Matswa built a society in the French Congo in the late 1920s demanding French citizenship and the rights attached to it, and by the early 1930s the administration had broken both him and it. Dockers struck at Conakry in 1919 and railwaymen in 1925 and 1938.

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 composer Clarence Cameron White and the librettist John Frederick Matheus travelled to Haiti for six weeks in search of musical materials for an opera. White completed the score in 1932 after a fellowship took him to Paris to study, and although it was performed in concert form in Chicago that year it was not staged until 1949. Jackson gathers the same year's other Haitian works to show how concentrated the moment was. Vandercook's life of Christophe appeared with drawings of the revolt that later fed Jacob Lawrence's paintings, and it moved Countee Cullen so deeply that he wrote the poem Black Majesty, published that May in the magazine of the National Urban League. The Haitian past had become working material for the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson treats the trip as the start of a sustained American musical engagement with Haiti.

Zora Neale Hurston took a degree in anthropology from Barnard in 1928 and went to New Orleans that August for six months of fieldwork. She studied with nine Vodou doctors and went through six initiations. The longest, under a priest called Samuel Thompson in one of her books and Luke Turner in the other, required nine nights of preparation and then three days lying face down and naked on a couch spread with a moccasin hide, silent, a pitcher of water set at her head so that her spirit would not go wandering after any. She reported five psychic experiences inside those sixty nine hours. At eleven on the morning of 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, she was raised, led through running water, painted with a lightning mark from her right shoulder to her left hip, given eyes on her cheeks and a sun on her forehead, and crowned. At midnight a black sheep was killed and buried under her written petition.