An ethnologist named Duvalier turns the revolution into a religious claim

In February 1944 Francois Duvalier published an article on the stadial evolution of Vodou in the bulletin of Haiti's Bureau of Ethnology. In it he credited Jean Price Mars with proclaiming to the Society of History and Geography what he called an essential truth: that 1804 issued from Vodou. His own reasoning, he added, had been bound to arrive at the same conclusion. Duvalier was then a doctor and an ethnologist, thirteen years away from the presidency. The formula compressed the whole indigenist reading of Haitian independence into a slogan, and it gave the future dictatorship a claim on the religion of the majority and on the founding event of the country in one move. Once in power he presented himself as a spiritual father and encouraged the identification. The intellectual equipment was assembled well before there was a regime to use it.

African colonies were pulled into a European war for the second time in twenty five years, and supplied it with men and material. Britain leaned hardest on its territories, recruiting soldiers in west and east Africa and drawing on African farms and factories. Egypt mattered above all because of the Suez Canal, and Egyptian nationalism worried London without a break. In 1942, with German armour moving through the Western Desert, British armoured vehicles took up positions around the government buildings in Cairo, posted there to watch the ministers inside rather than to protect them. South Africa was under no obligation to join, since the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had removed it, and a large Afrikaner minority pressed for neutrality with some quiet sympathy for the Nazis. The government of Jan Smuts carried a declaration of war through parliament by the narrowest of margins. After the French armistice of June 1940 the governors of French Africa gave their loyalty to Vichy and later declared for de Gaulle. Italy, the one Axis power holding African ground, raised troops in Eritrea and looked at Sudan and Kenya, and its armies were beaten inside two years.

The Haitian arts movement of the 1940s ran alongside negritude, the wider current that took the study of African cultures across the world as its subject. Haiti drew people in. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Suzanne Cesaire, Langston Hughes and Lavinia Williams all studied, taught or made work in the country, overlapping there with Haitian artists including Jeanne Perez and de Pradines. The traffic ran the other way as well. Lina Mathion Blanchet, de Pradines and Perez left to perform in the United States. What made the country attractive to a Black American writer or a Martinican theorist was that the argument they were having elsewhere had been settled here in 1804 and had a hundred and forty years of practice behind it. Haitian dance, Haitian music and Haitian religion were available to be studied as a living culture. For the Haitian artists, the visitors were an audience that already agreed with them, which is a rare thing to have.

In 1945 Manuel Arturo Pena Batlle told his readers that under the Trujillo regime Dominicans had won unimaginable victories, above all in preserving the Spanish character of their nationality. He was a serious historian who had built a whole account of Dominican history around the idea of a Spanish community defending itself against outsiders, and he took a leading part in the border negotiations with Haiti. Among the victories he counted was the massacre of Haitians in the border zone eight years earlier. He argued that fixing a line on a map was the simple part of the border question and that the real problem was Haitians settling on Dominican soil, which had been dealt with by what people called la poda, the pruning. The regime he was defending ran on anti Haitian feeling and on an admiration for Spain, and he wrote at the moment when European fascism had just been defeated.