Two hundred women take the streets of Port-au-Prince to collect money

On the first day of the collection in November 1920 a reported two hundred Haitian women went out into the streets of Port-au-Prince. The number survives. The names do not, which is the ordinary arithmetic of this archive. Regina Carrie Thoby, an outspoken opponent of the occupation, was very likely among them. So were Madeleine and Jeanne Sylvain, the teenage daughters of Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain. Madeleine would later found the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and write Haiti et ses femmes. Jeanne would coedit La Voix des Femmes. Both learned mass organising at an age when they were still walking beside their mother carrying a collection bucket, and no school in Haiti was offering that lesson. These were the same streets where Eleanor Charles had been killed and Adirenng Senatus's bones broken, and where four market women at Petit Goave had refused to stop trading. The street took Haitian women and the street was where Haitian women organised. Both things were true on the same afternoon.

The pan-African movement of the 1920s and 1930s grew in North America and the Caribbean out of a shared experience of colonial rule and racism. Marcus Garvey, who never set foot in Africa, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and preached Africa for the Africans and the removal of Europeans from it. Garveyism was eccentric in places, and it reached the young men who would lead African independence movements in the 1940s and 1950s. In French-speaking Africa the same current produced negritude, argued most publicly by the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor, later the first president of Senegal, which asserted Black self-respect and the antiquity of African civilisation. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Haiti sat in the middle of the traffic. The marines were in Port-au-Prince while Garvey was speaking in Harlem, and the Haitian writers who answered the occupation were reading the same material as the men who would govern Dakar and Accra.

The Summary Conviction Offenses Ordinance of 19 May 1921 defined obeah in Trinidad as any pretended assumption of supernatural power or knowledge for fraudulent or illicit ends, for gain, or to injure a person. Conviction before a magistrate carried up to six months in prison, with or without hard labour. A man could be sentenced to corporal punishment on top of it. A woman could be held in solitary confinement, three days at a stretch and a month in all. A justice could issue a warrant on the oath of one credible witness to search any premises by day or night and seize what was found. The police manual advised that convictions usually needed paid informers, and noted that no intent to defraud had to be proved. The same ordinance forbade drums, gongs, tambours, bangees and chac-chacs between ten at night and six in the morning, banned the bongo dance, and set a penalty of ten pounds with the instruments forfeited.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the export crops of tropical Africa came off small African farms. The change of those two decades was the lorry. Roads spread, motor transport followed them, and commercial agriculture reached villages the railways had left alone. Market towns filled up. African cultivators, mostly men using the labour of the women in their households, opened new ground for export crops. After a generation of conquest the 1920s were steady and comparatively prosperous, and the population grew. The communities forming out of this were part peasant and part capitalist, and European administrations disliked them. Officials preferred chiefs they had appointed and were wary of African businessmen who would eventually want politics as well as profit. The weakness in the arrangement was visible before the crash came. African producers had no way to move a world price, and what Africa sold remained crops, timber and minerals. In parts of West Africa the trade of the nineteenth century simply carried on under a new flag.