Hunton calls it quiet propaganda and then never stops talking

Back from Haiti, Addie Hunton reported that important people were paying attention and that her quiet propaganda on Haiti's behalf might come to something. Quiet is the wrong word for what she then did. Inside the same year she spoke about Haiti to the California state convention of the National Association of Colored Women, to the National Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, to the NAACP convention in Chicago, and to the National Association of Colored Women again at Oakland. The following year she carried the subject to the Pan-African Conference in New York. Malbranche-Sylvain and Hudicourt were working the same circuit from the other end, through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, so that what happened to a woman in Port-au-Prince could be described in a hall in California within months. The speed of the reporting did nothing to slow the occupation. While Hunton toured, Haitian girls went on being harmed by the men garrisoned in their towns, and the list of their names went on getting longer.

Haitian men avoided the main roads to escape the labour draft. Women could not, because they were the market sellers, the caregivers, the landowners, the shopkeepers and the domestic servants whose work required travel. American records and Marine photograph albums are full of pictures captioned as the typical country woman on a burro. Some men used that familiarity for cover. The Caco general Theophil toured the north recruiting while dressed as a market woman, travelling with a burro. General Petit Severe, wanted by the authorities in Cap-Haïtien, came and went from the town as he pleased in the same disguise, moving seven burro loads of rifles across the Dominican border. The performance made attacks on American officers possible. Visibility cut the other way as well, and girls and women travelled in groups for safety. Madame Benoît, wife of the Caco leader, went regularly to Mirebalais, Lascahobas and Port-au-Prince for supplies in the company of other market women, riding a bay mule and carrying a revolver under her dress.

By the 1930s African dissatisfaction with mission education was general. In South Africa the Zionist churches, which had white roots in the late nineteenth century, grew through the interwar years by folding African religious practice into Christian belief. Zionists accepted polygamy and gave women prominent roles. The mission school had no answer for people whose incomes had collapsed, and the doctrine it taught had begun to sound wrong: a white Christ, a salvation and an equality that appeared to be handed out selectively, and a demand for unconditional loyalty to the colonial state routed through the Church. Independent congregations multiplied in direct proportion to hardship. One was founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1934 by a group of unemployed men. Political argument travelled inside religious language. The Watchtower movement went into the mining compounds of southern Africa, recruited workers, offered a spiritual account of compound life and told them that at the second coming they would be among the elect. It built the first worker consciousness those compounds had, in the only vocabulary on offer.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races ran study clubs in which members and outsiders read texts by people of African descent from anywhere in the world. The stated purpose was strengthening the darker races through familiarity with themselves and with one another. In practice this was an alternative curriculum, complete with research projects that placed Black women at the centre, at a time when no school in either country taught such a thing. Theodora Holly was the most requested speaker, lecturing girls and women in Haiti and in the United States on the history of Haitian women. Members also collected newspapers and photographs and mailed them across the water. Holly wrote to Margaret Washington describing a talk she gave to a girls' club in Port-au-Prince, where she held up Washington's photograph as an example of what a Black woman could be. A decade later in Paris, Jane and Paulette Nardal gathered a cercle d'amis on the same principle. An image travelling from Alabama to a schoolroom in Port-au-Prince was traffic the occupation had no method for reading.