Two libraries, night classes in four towns, fifty students to a room

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale opened libraries at Port-au-Prince and Port-de-Paix and ran night courses through its chapters, including those at Miragoane and Jacmel. The subjects were history, home economics and Haitian culture, with grammar, foreign languages and writing on the list as well. Classes averaged fifty students. For an organisation founded a year after the American occupation ended, with no ministry behind it and no money from the state, four towns and a standing timetable is a serious institutional footprint. The centre of the curriculum is the part worth reading twice. Whatever else was offered, the core courses were childcare and household management. The league was teaching women to run homes better while arguing in its newspaper that women were socially enslaved. Both things were true at once, and the distance between them is the ordinary condition of a reform movement working with the students, the teachers and the expectations it can actually get.

Nation and nationalism sit awkwardly on postwar Africa. Territories had to turn themselves into nation-states out of administrative units in a very short time, and in some cases the work is still unfinished. Movements that called themselves nationalist were frequently defending a region or a group, as concerned with who would hold the territory after the Europeans left as with getting them out. Searching for a shared consciousness inside colonial boundaries usually misleads, because those boundaries were drawn for European convenience and carried no ethnic, linguistic or historical logic. In practice nationalism in Africa often meant sharper competition between ethnic, religious, regional and economic groups, some of those rivalries manufactured by colonial rule and some far older. Polities that had been dominant in the nineteenth century pursued their own aims inside the anti-colonial struggle and sometimes sought to leave it. The task facing postwar leaders was to gather political associations, trade unions, militant Christianity and Islam, negritude and pan-Africanism into something that could force a departure and then govern.

Negotiations over the boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had run on and off since the 1870s, interrupted for years at a stretch, with each side suspecting the other of stalling to gain ground. In 1935 President Rafael Trujillo and President Stenio Vincent signed a treaty that was supposed to settle the question. Jean Price Mars, who served as a Haitian diplomat in Santo Domingo and wrote the history of the two states, recorded that the hopes placed in it came to nothing. What the treaty did not touch was the movement of poor Haitians into Dominican territory to look for work, driven by population and by the sugar economy, and living once across the border in a disguised form of bonded service and under open racial prejudice. Price Mars called that the exposed nerve in all future relations between the two countries.

Valcin's essay telling servants they belonged back on the land appeared weeks before Rafael Trujillo cleared Haitians out of the Dominican Republic. His campaign of anti-Haitianism laid the country's financial crisis on the people working the western estates, who were poor, foreign in law, and in no position to answer. Across roughly two weeks in October 1937 he ordered deportations and executions, and Grace Sanders Johnson puts the estimate at 20,000 dead. Among them were women whose migration Valcin had described as a failure of judgement. They had not stayed on the plot with the promising vegetables. They had gone east, because east was where the wage was, and the border they crossed to earn it was where they were killed. The essay and the massacre sit a few weeks apart in the same year, in the run of the same paper.