Carl Brouard keeps the indigenist revolt going in La Bataille

On 5 March 1932 Carl Brouard published in the newspaper La Bataille, continuing an argument he had been making since the middle years of the American occupation. Brouard belonged to the indigenist writers, who held that Haitian literature had spent a century addressing Paris while ignoring the country under its own feet. His position was that Haiti needed a cultural revolution, and that the revolution had to begin from the African inheritance of the peasant majority, its language, its religion and its music, rather than from the French models the educated minority had been copying. Saying so still carried a social cost among his own class. The occupation was ending and the question of what a self governing Haiti would say about itself was wide open. Brouard's answer was that the nine tenths of the population the elite treated as an embarrassment were the actual country, and that any literature worth the name would have to be built out of them.

Adolf Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated president of the United States thirty three days later, on 4 March. By 1932 some thirteen million Americans were out of work, one in four of those able and willing, and because most married women were kept out of paid work by custom, every fourth household had no earner at all. Roosevelt had been elected on a platform promising a new deal for the American people. He held office for twelve years and was elected four times, a record the Twenty Second Amendment made impossible for anyone after him. Kennedy's argument is that the two terms cannot be read apart. The Hundred Days, the reforms of 1934 and 1935, the fight over the Supreme Court in 1937 and the long argument about isolation all played out against the German dictatorship.

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.

Rafael Trujillo ordered a mass killing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937. After the Second World War he took an interest in sugar production and found that he needed workers. In 1952 his government signed a treaty with the Haitian government covering the seasonal movement of cane cutters across the border. Two renewals followed, one in 1959 and one in 1966. From 1971 the arrangement ran instead through contracts between the Dominican state sugar council and the government in Port-au-Prince, and these lasted until Jean-Claude Duvalier fell in 1986. They became a way for successive Haitian governments to make money. The Haitian side was paid a sum for setting up recruitment centres, and part of the migrants' wages was held back, officially to be handed over at the end of the season, in practice sent home and pocketed by the ruling circle. Conditions in the cane were documented from 1979 onward as slavery in all but name.