A Haitian woman puts a revolutionary woman on the Rex stage

Sanité Bélair was an officer in the Haitian revolutionary army, executed by the French in 1802 at twenty one. Every Haitian schoolchild knew her name, which is why people doubted that a play about her could hold an audience. The playwright Perez, a member of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, opened her drama at the Rex Theatre in Port-au-Prince on 10 August 1942. A reviewer wrote the following day that the piece kept close to the historical record and still escaped the false ideal, the flattering national portrait such subjects usually produce, and that a true ideal came out of it instead. After the first act he called the staging sober, clear and quick, and said the author deserved congratulation. The point of the notice is that familiarity had been beaten. Perez had taken the most rehearsed story in the country and made it move at the pace of something happening now.

Fighting on African soil was confined to a narrow strip of Mediterranean coast. Italian forces crossed from Libya into Egypt in the late summer of 1940 and were driven back into Libya by a small British force. The arrival of the German Afrika Korps changed the position completely, and for a time the drive toward the Suez Canal looked impossible to stop. Egyptian nationalists grew restless and feeling against the British hardened. Then the British held the Germans at El Alamein in October 1942, and the canal was safe for the empire for the time being. The threat that lasted was the Egyptian one, which outlived Rommel by more than a decade. British and Australian troops pushed the Germans west toward Tunisia. At the far end of the Mediterranean an American army came ashore in Morocco and Algeria, which put an end to the ambiguous standing of the Vichy administration there. The two forces closed on Tunisia from both sides and put the last Axis soldiers off the continent in May 1943.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died on 10 November 1938. The generation that had won the war of liberation and carried through the first reforms had by then reached the end of its creative period, working from goals set in the Young Turk era: a national Turkish state in a modern political form. Karpat's judgement is that they started with a society whose institutions were rooted in Islam, under bad conditions inside and out, and permanently undermined the belief that social arrangements, customs and authority were fixed. Ataturk is described as a soldier ruler rather than a dictator, a man who refused the title and kept insisting on national sovereignty, who ordered, punished and rewarded in the manner of someone used to being obeyed. He was an orphan raised in a village and then in Salonica. His coffin was placed in 1953 in a monumental tomb above Ankara.

The Société Haïtienne-Américaine de Développement Agricole was set up to grow rubber for a wartime market, and its method was to take farmland out of food. Crews cleared standing crops and cut down trees that bore fruit so that rubber could be planted in their place. Peasant families were moved off the plots they worked. The returns came in slowly and small. What the project delivered instead was displacement on a mass scale and the loss of the fruit-bearing stock that households had eaten from for generations. Fruit trees take years to bear. A family that loses one loses a decade of food, not a season of it. The rubber that replaced them failed to take hold, so the cleared ground gave nothing back to anybody. The ecological damage and the human damage were the same damage counted twice, and both were charged to people who had not asked for the scheme and could not refuse it.