Seven million dollars and ninety thousand workers grow no rubber

The Import-Export Bank of the United States put seven million dollars into SHADA. The money cleared land, paid farmers to work it, and hired administrators to run crop development, production and export. More than ninety thousand Haitians and Americans were employed on the programme. It went wrong from the beginning, and the reason was that the agricultural ambition had been drawn up without much attention to the ground it was to be carried out on. Cultivation takes years that a wartime shortage does not allow. A drought ran through 1943 and 1944. The cryptostegia vine failed to take root in areas the plan depended on. A fire went through one of the SHADA sites. What seven million dollars bought was a demonstration that Philippine agriculture does not transfer to Caribbean soil on demand, and a wide stretch of Haitian countryside stripped of what had been growing on it, which stayed stripped after the programme closed.

Postwar politics in Europe changed official thinking about what colonies were for. The Attlee Labour government in Britain broke with much of prewar social doctrine, and from about 1947 London began moving away from indirect rule through chiefs toward bringing in the educated African elite that had been pressing for entry since the 1930s. The French also started planning a gradual transfer, though they expected strong patron and client ties and a qualified autonomy rather than full independence. Where Europeans had settled, the plans were different. The Colonial Office envisaged special constitutional powers for white settlers in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia to guarantee their position and their economic dominance. One man, one vote was not under consideration. The planners of the late 1940s assumed former colonies would stay under metropolitan influence and that the handover would be very slow. Portugal and Belgium contemplated only cosmetic reform. Britain and France wanted moderate African leaders who would protect the interests being left behind, and no communists anywhere.

The Foyer was the house the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale kept for women in Port-au-Prince, and it worked as a fixed point for those who spent their days walking between the city's class zones. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain called them the femmes du peuple. One of them was Amise, who nursed Comhaire-Sylvain back to health through an illness and afterwards took her into zones four and three, the poorest districts in her own scheme. What Comhaire-Sylvain learned there, by her account, was how to celebrate death. The direction of instruction is worth pausing on, because for the period it runs backwards. A university-trained ethnographer from the elite was taken in hand by a working woman and shown parts of her own city she had no way into otherwise. The women who walked between the zones held together a city whose map showed those zones as separate. Their feet were the connection. The Foyer was where they could sit down.

The Foyer was the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale's attempt to work on the city directly. Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was crowded, expensive and hard on any woman who arrived alone, and the league's answer took the form of a room. The same people came back to it. A woman's absence would be remarked on. Care was expected there and could be asked for out loud. Recognition, care and accountability, built up slowly by repetition rather than declared. Grace Sanders Johnson describes what the room was for in one sentence. The Foyer was a place where somebody might see another woman looking out toward the sea for too long, and offer her other possibilities. Everything the league argued about wages, marriage, the law and citizenship sits behind that sentence. In front of it is a specific afternoon, a specific woman at a window, and the ordinary act of walking over and starting a conversation.