The group that came to represent this tendency most called themselves Les Griots, which by its name harkened to the West African image of poets and storytellers. The short-lived journal of the same name was the space for their expression of an Africanist vision of Haiti
[our] Latin culture is nothing but the legacy of a small group of Haitians represented by our intellectual elite [...] our African heritage is pervasive in the majority of the Haitian people to the extent that it construes an anatomo-psychophysiological substratum (Dash, 1981, p. 114).
The cultural position had become an ideological one. It further guided Haitian positions taken toward global African politics. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War, in 1935-1936, was a source of obvious bonding over the question of African liberation equated by 'Africanist' Haitian writers such as François Duvalier and Lorimer Denis, as being in common cause with Haiti. In 1936 they wrote:  
We Haitians, a Negro group lost in the basin of the West Indies, in this great current of pan-Africanism, which is taking shape, [...] we the Haitian youth have determined to press deep sympathy in the face of the serious problem facing this country [...]. For if we truly wish not be outstripped by the rapid progress of people of race and to live up to their racial consciousness, we must reject all the aberrant ideas on which we have lived from 1804 to nowadays (Duvalier, 1968, pp. 729-730).