Lorimer Denis tells his generation to take power and hold it

On 23 June 1932 Lorimer Denis published Ma génération in L'Action Nationale and set out what he believed his contemporaries were for. The article addressed the new Black middle class of Haiti, men educated in the schools the country had built and shut out of the commercial and political positions held by the light skinned elite. Denis argued that they had to take power, and that taking it was the condition for restoring an authentic national identity. Two claims sit inside that. The first is that Haiti had lost its identity by imitating France. The second is that one particular class of Haitians was entitled to govern on account of who they were, ahead of anything they proposed to do. Denis spent the following decades developing the second claim in company with François Duvalier. When Duvalier reached the presidency in 1957 the programme in that article had a state behind it, and Denis had helped write the doctrine it ran on.

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

From the end of the 1930s colonial administrations in Africa began pushing plantation farming on the North American model, planned in offices and imposed on rural districts. The intervention was heavy handed and it produced resentment in the countryside that lasted for decades. It also broke something political. British rule across much of Africa worked through indirect rule, which governed villages by way of chiefs recognised, paid and sometimes invented by the colonial power. Agricultural planners dealt with land, labour and quotas themselves and went around those chiefs. The authority of men who already carried the stigma of collaboration drained away, since Africans in many walks of life had long treated the whole arrangement as irrelevant to them. Colonial power was dismantling its own local scaffolding while still leaning on it. What remained was a rural population with fresh grievances and a set of traditional authorities with no credit left to spend, which cleared the ground for a generation of nationalist leaders who owed those authorities nothing.

Sténio Vincent visited Washington in the spring of 1934 and was received at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt returned the call on 5 July, coming ashore from the USS Houston at Cap Haïtien in heat near a hundred degrees and walking the wharf on legs that polio had taken most of the use of. The two presidents drove through crowds to the Union Club and agreed a memorandum whose main effect was that the marines would be gone by the middle of August. On 1 August, in front of Vincent, the cabinet and ten thousand people on the Champ de Mars, Colonel Démosthènes Calixte took command of the Garde d'Haïti from Colonel Vogel. On 14 August the American flag came down at brigade headquarters, twenty one guns sounded from Fort National, then twenty one more while the Dessalinienne played and the Haitian flag went up. The Americans left their weapons and equipment behind. Next morning the marines marched to the transports.