Black professionals reach the London stage in a black writer's play

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

The United States formally ended its military occupation of Haiti and withdrew its forces on 14 August 1934, nineteen years after the marines landed. The soldiers left. The financial administration did not. Washington kept control of Haitian customs collection and debt service for years afterwards through a fiscal representative, which meant the instrument that had brought the marines in the first place remained in American hands once they were gone. Sténio Vincent, who had spent his career campaigning against the occupation and had been chosen president by the first working legislature since 1918, proclaimed himself the second liberator of Haiti. The title invited a comparison with Jean Jacques Dessalines and did not survive one. Vincent governed for another seven years, arranged the extension of his own term, and grew steadily more attached to rule by decree. Haiti got its army, its flag and its ceremonies back in 1934, and the ledger stayed in a foreign office.

A regional census in 1935 recorded more than fifty thousand Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The count was low. Many more had crossed the border without papers and were never entered in any register, which is the ordinary condition of migrant cane labour anywhere. They were there because Dominican sugar needed cutters and Haitian land could no longer feed the people standing on it. The estates paid badly, the work was seasonal, and the population settled into the sugar towns near the mills and along the frontier. Dominican nationalists had by this point identified those workers as the country's central problem. The rhetoric coming out of Santo Domingo through the middle of the decade described the presence of Haitians as an invasion of the national body. The country's own sugar industry had arranged for them to be there. Two years after this census, Trujillo's soldiers began killing Haitians along the border in numbers no census taker ever established.

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.