The league admits in print that its ideas have not landed

Writing for the organisation, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau set down an assessment she had already made some years before and now had to repeat word for word. The ideas the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale pronounced were still poorly understood. The league did not yet have the authority to impose those ideas on anyone, nor the capacity to sustain them if it had. Her tone carried reflection and ambition for the movement, and it carried a loss as well. These women had expected to be much further along after ten years of work. Political organisations almost never say this in public. The habit is to claim momentum and let the record be argued over afterwards. The league printed its own shortfall in its own paper, which tells you how it understood what it was doing: a long argument with a country that had not yet agreed, rather than a campaign to be won and announced. The admission is one of the more useful documents the movement left behind.

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.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain divided Port-au-Prince into class zones for her research. Close to twenty thousand women lived at the seams between them. They were domestic workers, and their day was set by somebody else's breakfast. Coffee had to be on the table at seven, so they set out at five, and they came home after dark. Both ends of the journey happened when nobody was watching. Many of them had given up schooling for jobs paid at the legal minimum, and that trade runs one way only. The capital ran on these women. The households that employed them, the zones Comhaire-Sylvain mapped, and the professional and political life conducted inside them all rested on twenty thousand people walking through the dark twice a day. The map of the city did not show them. The census counted them in somebody else's house. The hours they spent in transit belonged to no one's accounts at all.

Comhaire-Sylvain set out in 1939 to find what girls in Port-au-Prince did with their free hours. The premise was that unaccounted time was a danger, that a girl whose day could not be reconstructed might be doing something that would cost her a reputation, and that such time therefore needed watching. The survey found something else. A large share of the girls she interviewed were servants in the houses of the well off, and they were working more than ninety eight hours a week. A small number were enrolled as full time pupils. Most were part time, and of those, many missed classes often. There was almost no free time left to investigate. The ninety eight hour week belonged to children who appeared on the rolls as students, and the houses that employed them were the houses of the women who would read the report.