Jeanne Perez puts Sanite Belair on a Port-au-Prince stage

Jeanne Perez wrote and produced her first play in 1940, when the niece she had been sending revolutionary letters to was eight years old. The subject was Sanite Belair, born Suzanne Belair, who fought under Toussaint Louverture alongside her husband Charles Belair. Sanite's ability as a soldier and the circumstances of her capture were already legend. So was her death. Facing a French colonial firing squad she refused the blindfold so that she could look the men in the eye, and she died shouting Viv libete, anba esklavaj. Haitian children had been told that story for generations. Perez took it off the oral circuit and put it in front of an audience with a script, actors and a set. This is the point at which a woman who organised for women's rights becomes a woman who makes art about them, and the choice of subject is itself the argument. The revolution had women in it, carrying guns, and one of them died better than the men who shot her.

After the war colonial governments went into crop production themselves. State marketing boards in British West Africa fixed prices to prevent a repeat of the 1930s collapse, and substantial public money was made available for colonial development for the first time. African growers saw the arrangement clearly enough. They were paid a small share of what their crops fetched, and the surpluses piled up in good years went into large capital projects instead of back to the farmers who had produced them. Capital-intensive schemes favoured machinery and settler experts over African smallholders. The groundnut scheme in Tanganyika laid out plantations on North American prairie lines. The ground was too dry, the soil too thin, the machinery no match for the climate, and it cost British taxpayers millions. French investment in Niger River dams for cotton failed similarly, as farmers there grew sugar and rice for local sale. Officials also compelled farmers to dig erosion trenches, rotate crops and cull cattle. These measures politicised the countryside and handed nationalist leaders a constituency.

Elie Lescot's inauguration ran ten thousand gourdes over budget because the war had put up the price of French champagne. He was born in 1883 at St.-Louis-du-Nord into a respected Capois family; his grandfather had been magistrat communal of the Cap for life. The American Armour had marked him as a future president as early as 1934, noting that from Trujillo's point of view he was the perfect choice, a son of the North where the Christophe tradition of discipline held. Lescot governed to that description. On 6 June 1941 he took the title of Commander-in-Chief, putting the Garde Presidentielle and the capital's police under his own hand and leaving the chief of staff paperwork. Through that summer his government raided ounfo and smashed the drums and sacred objects inside them. In October he abolished the prefectures for six regional delegues holding sole local authority. Haiti declared war on Japan on 8 December, then on the European Axis, and on Christmas Eve on Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. In January 1942 the legislature voted him extraordinary powers for the duration. On 23 February he suspended the constitution and told the Garde that saboteurs were to be tried, condemned and shot.

Elie Lescot was inaugurated president of Haiti on 15 May 1941, after Stenio Vincent resigned. He was born on 3 December 1883 into a light-skinned family at Saint-Louis du Nord, and he reached the office through the diplomatic service, having represented Haiti in the Dominican Republic and in Washington. He admired Roosevelt and the Good Neighbor Policy, and after Pearl Harbor he declared war on Germany at once. Haiti's part in the war was raw materials and a base for the American Coast Guard. His government also signed on to an American agricultural programme that expropriated peasant land for rubber and sisal and produced food shortages in the countryside. A devout Catholic, he pressed the suppression of Vodou, setting himself against the religion of most of the population and extending a persecution the Catholic Church had run since the concordat of 1860. His sons made money out of property seized from Germans during the war. Trujillo finished him by publishing the size of the bribes he had paid him.