The Church breaks the temples with the president's blessing

In 1941 the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Haiti launched what it called an anti-superstition campaign, with the open support of the newly elected president Elie Lescot. The method was direct. Voodoo objects were sought out and destroyed in quantity: drums, altars, and the vessels in which the spirits are housed, everything that makes a temple a temple. Thousands of Haitians were made to stand up and formally renounce African religious practice. This was an attack on the religion of most of the population, carried out by a church established in the country by treaty with Rome and backed by the state. It was also an attack on a material record. The objects in a temple are not interchangeable. They carry the lineage of the people who served with them, and destroying the contents of a temple cuts a line that ran back through generations. Lescot's endorsement bought him the clergy and cost him the countryside.

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 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.

Some domestic workers in Port-au-Prince had no journey across the city. They lived in the house and went from downstairs to upstairs. That trip took a minute, appears in no record of anything, and left them available at any hour to whoever in the household wanted something. In the data these women were folded into the employer's household, counted as part of a family they may have felt nothing at all for. The consequence outlives them. A woman entered the record as a member of the household she served, while the household she actually belonged to left no trace, particularly where her own family fell outside what the Catholic parish registers would recognise: the wrong beliefs at home, a birth outside marriage, a partner the priest would not bless. So the archive reproduces the arrangement of the house. The people upstairs are documented as a family with dependants. The women downstairs are documented as one of the dependants. Their own kin are documented nowhere.