Les Griots writes the mulatto elite out of the Haitian nation

In October 1939 Les Griots ran a series under the title Considerations on our historical origins. The articles built out what its writers called the black legend, in which the light skinned elite of Haiti appears as a group whose loyalties lie abroad and whose presence in the country amounts to a kind of occupation. On that reading, the mulatto families who had held the presidency, the ministries and the trading houses were foreign in their tastes, foreign in their schooling and foreign in their interests, and the history of Haiti since independence was a history of their betrayals. The account had material behind it. Colour and property had lined up in Haiti for a century and a half, and those families had spent the American occupation doing business with the occupier. Turning that record into an inherited trait converted a political grievance into a permanent one.

For Africans and people of African descent across the Americas, the Second World War started in 1935. Ethiopia was the only genuinely independent state on the continent, and Mussolini wanted it, partly to build a new Roman empire out of Eritrea and partly to avenge the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. Through the early 1930s he argued in Europe that Ethiopia was an anachronism, a savage and unstable place that practised slavery and deserved no recognition. Britain and France quietly agreed. Italy invaded in October 1935 claiming an Ethiopian attack near the Somali border. The technological gap that had not existed in 1896 decided everything: armoured columns, aircraft and the occasional illegal use of poison gas. Addis Ababa fell in early 1936 and Haile Selassie went into exile, telling the League of Nations that Europe would be next. The Patriots kept up a guerrilla war throughout. Ethiopia became the focus of pan-African protest and an inspiration for the Rastafarian movement. Allied troops, including West and Central African units, restored Selassie in 1941.

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.