Hollywood answers the oath of rejection with a picture about escaped zombies

A year after the campaign that proclaimed Haiti a hotbed of magic, Jacques Tourneur's film I Walked with a Zombie reached the screen. Its premise was that zombies kept until then by priests had taken advantage of the disorder to escape, so that anyone walking in the countryside risked meeting one at the edge of a cane field. The figure of the living dead, brought back from the grave and stripped of will, carried the terror of the picture. The timing is the interesting part. A Haitian government campaign against the religion supplied the raw material for an American entertainment about that religion, and the film then circulated back as evidence of what Haiti was. For those who serve the spirits, being made into a zombie is the worst punishment there is, since it reduces a person to a slave, which is the exact condition the religion grew up against.

The war produced demands for independence, and it also produced stronger colonial states. For Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium the African territories mattered more after 1945 than they had before, and interventionist policy was pushed with new energy. Laissez-faire economics had governed until the early 1930s, the depression brought state management in its place, and the war settled the argument in favour of intervention. Africa's contribution to European recovery was judged essential, which meant European governments running colonial economies directly. In the British territories this is called the second colonial occupation, running from about 1945 into the early 1950s. The postwar lines were drawn accordingly. African nationalism became a serious force at the precise moment colonial administrations became most determined to invest in, develop and defend what they held. In many places colonial rule had lasted little more than two generations. The empires assembled in the 1890s were meant to last considerably longer than they did, and by the 1950s London and Paris had worked out that economic influence could outlive political administration.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale opened libraries at Port-au-Prince and Port-de-Paix and ran night courses through its chapters, including those at Miragoane and Jacmel. The subjects were history, home economics and Haitian culture, with grammar, foreign languages and writing on the list as well. Classes averaged fifty students. For an organisation founded a year after the American occupation ended, with no ministry behind it and no money from the state, four towns and a standing timetable is a serious institutional footprint. The centre of the curriculum is the part worth reading twice. Whatever else was offered, the core courses were childcare and household management. The league was teaching women to run homes better while arguing in its newspaper that women were socially enslaved. Both things were true at once, and the distance between them is the ordinary condition of a reform movement working with the students, the teachers and the expectations it can actually get.

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.