Two fingers struck on the mouth cross the Atlantic and hold

The four page spread opens with a short introduction and then goes straight at a single word. ABOBO is the cry of assent and invocation that runs through Vodou ceremonies and dances, the sound a congregation makes when a thing has been done properly. Comhaire-Sylvain noted that some people, while calling it, beat two fingers against the open mouth. She then set the word beside BOBOBO, a Dahomean term for exactly that noise made by exactly that gesture. The match is more than vocabulary. A word can be carried in the head and taught to a child in a room. A gesture has to be performed in front of somebody to survive, which requires an unbroken chain of people doing it: through the slave ships, through the plantations, through the revolution, through the nineteen years of American occupation that had ended five years before. Readers of a women's newspaper were shown that chain in four pages.

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez was born in May 1937 near the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Five months later Trujillo ordered the slaughter of dark skinned residents of that zone, an operation called Operacion Perejil and known more commonly as El Corte, the harvest. The dead were estimated in the tens of thousands, and Pena Gomez's parents were among them. He was raised by an adoptive Dominican family. The circumstances of his birth gave his political opponents their whole line of attack, and for decades he was accused of being Haitian; in the mid 1970s a journalist pressed him to answer the charge in an interview, and the recording and notes were lost. He ran for the presidency and never won it. After his final defeat he said racism was well entrenched in Dominican society, that a bloodbath would have followed had he been elected, and that Dominican society was not yet ready for a black president. He died on 10 May 1998.

The sharp increase in Jewish immigration into Palestine between 1933 and 1936 hardened Arab opposition to the Balfour Declaration and produced strikes, bloodshed and then open rebellion that lasted from 1936 to 1939. Serious disturbances broke out on 19 April 1936, and on 7 August a royal commission was appointed to establish the underlying causes and to determine whether either Arabs or Jews had legitimate grievances under the terms of the mandate. The commissioners reported on 22 June 1937 that partition was the only method they could propose for dealing with the root of the trouble, on the principle that half a loaf beats none. The Woodhead Commission sent out in 1938 found no workable partition scheme, and the White Paper of 1939 was a further British attempt at a settlement. The mandate ended on 15 May 1948 and the war followed at once.

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.