It is real, nobody calls the spirits, and so it is folklore

Years after the Rex performance Emerente de Pradines set out the line she worked by. When she performs Vodou songs and dance, she said, it is true and it is real; what is absent is the ceremony and the calling of the spirits, and that absence is what makes it folklore. The distinction protected the sacred while making a version of it available for a stage. Other people used the same distinction for other ends. Politicians, leftist organisers, intellectuals and women's rights campaigners in the Haiti of the 1940s put professionally choreographed spiritual performance to work as proof of national authenticity, useful in tourism, in inter-American diplomacy and in personal advancement, while still rejecting the truth of the practice itself. The dance was welcome in a hotel ballroom. The ounfò was still being pulled down. De Pradines held both halves at once and kept the part that mattered out of the transaction.

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.