Valcin says the road mattered as much as the meeting at its end

Stones came up off the road against the cars and the sea kept pace with them going north. For Cleante Valcin the trip was worth as much as the arrival. What she saw and heard, and where the party stopped, placed the league's members on a route of their own choosing, through a country they were learning to look at as organisers rather than as residents of the capital. By writing the drive as an encounter with beasts, with gods and with a sea that behaved like a person, she gave the ordinary labour of building chapters in the 1930s the shape of a voyage. Valcin was the first Haitian woman to publish a novel, and across her fiction she was trying to get the whole country onto the page. In La Voix des Femmes she and the other members did something narrower and stranger. They wrote down their changing relations with one another and the ideas they were forming together, issue by issue, so that the movement kept its own account of itself.

At a rally in Trafalgar Square James, as chairman of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, declared that the Ethiopian crisis had produced a union of sentiment among black people in Africa, America, the West Indies and everywhere else, and that its cause was theirs to defend by every means available. Hogsbjerg shows the Haitian material feeding directly into the campaign. James argued that Toussaint had beaten European armies through a ruthless guerrilla war fought from the mountains and that the Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 had been won in a comparable way, by scorched earth and retreat into high ground before falling on a cut-off Italian column. He urged an Ethiopian audience to destroy their country rather than hand it over. The committee even considered raising an international brigade in Britain.

Sténio Vincent named Tuesday 21 August 1934 the day of the second independence. Nobody waited for it. The balls started on the 18th at the Cercle Bellevue, carried on the next night at the Port-au-Princien, and the country went into days of bamboche. At midnight on the 20th a gun sounded from Fort National and the cheering ran from Bel Air to Morne l'Hôpital. In the morning monsignors Conan and Le Gouaze sang a Te Deum where the clergy stood white and the altar boys Black. Then the president drove through the city scattering freshly printed gourde notes into the crowd, laid wreaths at the statues of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines, and ran up the colours himself at the barracks. At the review that followed, a new Garde Présidentielle appeared under Major Durcé Armand, a relative of the president. Colonel Calixte led the officers in an oath of personal loyalty to Vincent. The oath the Americans wrote had bound them to the constitution.

The mountains that became the commune of Kenscoff were thin country under the French. The large sugar planters held the plains, and the estates up here belonged to men like Robin de Kenscoff and Lefebure de Fourcy, with few installations and few slaves. Most of those slaves came from the Lower Congo. Some had come from further up the river and been sold on the lower stretch, which is why a small settlement near Furcy was still called Nan Congo in 1937, and why a distinctive type of hut was found there. Many of them had arrived recently and were proud of having been born in Africa. In the lineage cemeteries of the region the inscriptions read like this: the person's name, the word African, a date of birth and a date of death. After the revolution some of their descendants obtained state grants of sixty to ninety acres and farmed them as owners.