Antoine Louis Léocardie Élie Lescot (9 December 1883 – 20 October 1974) was the President of Haiti from May 15, 1941 to January 11, 1946. He was a member of the country's light-skinned elite and used the political climate of World War II to sustain his power and ties to the United States, Haiti's powerful northern neighbor. His administration presided over a period of economic downturn and harsh political repression of dissidents.

Lescot was born a mulatto in Saint-Louis du Nord to a middle-class family. He traveled to Port-au-Prince to study pharmacy after completing his secondary education in Cap-Haïtien, before settling in Port-de-Paix to work in the export-import business. He entered politics after his first wife died in 1911, and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies two years later. After a four-year stay in France during the United States occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, he returned and held posts in the Louis Borno and Sténio Vincent administrations. Four years later he was named ambassador to the neighboring Dominican Republic, where he forged an alliance with President Rafael Trujillo, until moving to Washington, D.C., to work as ambassador to the United States.

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique in 1913. He traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, Césaire, who in 1935 passed an entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, created, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, the literary review L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). In 1936, Césaire began work on his long poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal", a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World and this upon returning home to Martinique.

Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. Together they moved back to Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. He would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon's short life.

Eustache Antoine Francois Joseph Louis Borno (20 September 1865 – 29 July 1942) was a lawyer (law degree earned in 1890 at the Faculty of Paris) and Haitian politician. He served as President of the Republic of Haiti from 1922 to 1930 during the period of the American occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Borno was of mulatto heritage, being the son of a white French father and a black Haitian mother.

In 1899, he was a diplomat in the Dominican Republic; then, in 1908, he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs for President Pierre Nord Alexis.

The country of Haiti, devastated by internecine conflicts and the mismanagement of its leaders, was looked upon as a strategically vital location by the United States at the onset of World War I. The U.S. had extended its influence throughout the Caribbean and Latin America following the construction of the Panama Canal by invoking the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

In 1914, the United States under President Woodrow Wilson presented a project for the control of customs and finances of Haiti. Borno, then Foreign Minister of President Joseph Davilmar Theodore, refused. The United States responded by confiscating the reserves of the National Bank of Haiti.

Alpha Condé (born 4 March 1938) is a Guinean politician who has been President of Guinea since December 2010. He spent decades in opposition to a succession of regimes in Guinea, unsuccessfully running against President Lansana Conté in the 1993 and 1998 presidential elections and leading the Rally of the Guinean People (RPG), an opposition party. Standing again in the 2010 presidential election, Condé was elected as President of Guinea in a second round of voting, according to official results.

Condé was born on 4 March 1938 in Boké in western Guinea to Mandinka parents from Baro village, Kouroussa Prefecture, upper Guinea. Alpha is married to Djene Kaba Condé. He has one son by the name of Alpha Mohammed Condé and one niece by the name of Aicha Diallo who is currently studying in the United States.

Alpha Condé, who is an ethnic Mandinka, left for France at the age of 15. He was active in parallel within the National Union of Higher Education (SNESUP) and combined the functions of charge within the Association of Guinean students in France (AEGF), and within the Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF), in which he was the Executive Coordinator of African National Groups (NG) from 1967 to 1975, overseeing the activities of the Directorate of FEANF.