The first Haitian woman to hold a doctorate studies Creole and Congo children

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain was born in Port-au-Prince in 1898 and studied there, at Kingston and in Paris. In 1925 she became the first woman in Haiti to work in an office, at Damien. In 1931 she took the baccalaureate, the licence and the doctorate at the University of Paris, the first Haitian woman to do so. She worked as a research assistant at the University of London under Bronislaw Malinowski from 1935, where she met figures of the African decolonisation including Jomo Kenyatta, and sat in Evans-Pritchard's seminar at Oxford in 1959. She helped found the School of Letters in Port-au-Prince in 1937, taught at the Institute of Ethnology from 1941, and accompanied Alfred Metraux on the fieldwork at Marbial for Unesco. Her first book, on the morphology and syntax of Haitian Creole, appeared in 1936. She published on children's games and riddles in Leopoldville, on women's work in Lagos, and on marriage there.

Hoover's social scientists reported that infant mortality among black Americans in 1930 was nearly double the white rate, ten per cent against six, and that black life expectancy was fifteen years shorter, forty five years against sixty. Fewer than five per cent of eligible African Americans in the eleven states of the former Confederacy were registered to vote as late as 1940. Separate waiting rooms, separate drinking fountains, separate churches and deliberately inferior schools were the ordinary furniture of life, and the few industrial jobs in the South were closed to black workers. C. Vann Woodward called the arrangement an anthropological museum of southern folkways and dated its perfection to the 1930s. The historian Ulrich Phillips wrote in 1928 that white southerners shared one settled resolve, that the region should remain a white man's country. This is the United States that occupied Haiti until 1934.

Lieutenant Faustin Wirkus, a Marine serving in the occupation, published The White King of La Gonave in 1931. It sold ten million copies in the United States, then in Europe, and as far as Japan. In it he gave an account of the damage he had inflicted in order to save Haitians from cannibalism and black magic, and he set down the operating assumption that the cacos, the armed opponents of the occupation, were practitioners of the religion. Wirkus quoted his own orders, which required a report leading to criminal action against every priest and every diviner, described in the wording of the instruction as voodoo artists. Other books followed with titles like Cannibal Cousins, and between them they established Haiti in the English-speaking imagination as the country of the living dead. A military occupation had produced a literary genre, and the genre outlasted the occupation by decades.

In March 1932 the Paris journal La Revue du Monde Noir carried an article by Georges Hardy on what Black artists across the world had contributed. The journal was short lived and it mattered out of all proportion to its run. It appeared in French and English, which let Haitian writers, African American writers and Africans living in Paris read one another without a translator standing in between. That readership is what an article of this kind served. It presented a body of Black artistic achievement as a single subject rather than as a set of local curiosities, and it fed a sense of racial pride among an international group of intellectuals who had until then been working inside separate national conversations. For Haitians, whose country was under American military occupation, the journal supplied evidence that their own indigenist argument belonged to something larger. Ideas that later hardened into political movements were circulating first as literary criticism.