Two Haitians in Paris start a magazine of black solidarity

Two Haitians living in Paris founded La Revue du Monde Noir in 1930 to argue for solidarity and self-respect among black people across the world. The setting matters. Paris in 1930 held students and writers from the French Caribbean, from West Africa, from Madagascar and from the United States, all of them educated in the same language and all of them discovering that the education had not made them French. A magazine in that city could reach the whole empire at once, which no journal published in Port-au-Prince or Dakar could do. The review is a direct ancestor of negritude, the movement that Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas would build over the following decade and that shaped black writing in French for fifty years. Haitians reached the argument early because they had been having a version of it at home since 1927. A country independent since 1804 had a longer run of experience with the gap between formal freedom and European contempt.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.

Legba is the youngest son of the Dahomean sky gods, the messenger who carries decisions from Mawu to the powers that execute them, and the one who can refuse to deliver a message or bend it in favour of a man who has fed him well. Every household, every village, every cult house and every individual keeps a Legba shrine, always near the entrance and always outside. A small mound of earth goes up as soon as a child is born and is enlarged when the child reaches adolescence. Missionary writing described Legba as the counterpart of the Christian Devil and explained his position outside the walls by the harm he does. Herskovits reported in 1931 that Dahomeans did not fear him and probably loved him more than any of the other great gods. Where he did hear the identification with the Devil from a Dahomean, the speaker had learned it in contact with missionaries.

In 1936 the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo was renamed Ciudad Trujillo after Rafael Trujillo, who had taken power in 1930 and would hold it until 1961. Trujillo and his supporters used the word dominicanizacion for their effort to mark the line between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, meaning to make a black Haiti and a white Dominican Republic visibly distinct. Along the frontier itself this took a practical form. His government granted peasants large tracts of land to farm and charged them with administrative duties on behalf of the state, in order to fix their loyalty and their Dominican identity in a region where daily life ran on community relationships and crossed the border constantly. The same programme had a second instrument called blanqueamiento, whitening, pursued by encouraging European immigration during the Second World War. In October 1937 Trujillo ordered the killing of dark skinned people living in the border zone, and estimates of the dead reach thirty thousand.