Jeanne Sylvain brings a Chicago social work degree home

Jeanne Sylvain took her degree in social work at the University of Chicago in 1942 and came back to Haiti to work before returning to her studies. She belonged to a family that supplied the Haitian feminist movement with several of its organisers, and she had trained in the discipline American universities were then exporting across the hemisphere. She arrived in the middle of Élie Lescot's wartime programme, which aimed to build the Haitian economy on American demand and to bind the country into Pan-American networks of trade and diplomacy. That programme is what put her into a salaried job within a year. The forces she had studied in Chicago, foreign capital reorganising a rural economy for a distant market, were at that moment reorganising the country she had come home to. She spent the next two years working inside them and finding out what her training was worth against them.

Nigeria was a large territory with deeper internal divisions than any other British holding in West Africa. Its north and south had been governed separately until 1946. The north was mostly Muslim with old links across the Sahara to North Africa, the south heavily Christian after a long history of dealing with Europeans. Within the south, the Yoruba of the west and the Igbo of the east competed hard with each other. Within the north the argument was about the power of the aristocracy. From 1944 nationalist demands were carried by the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, which the newspaper editor Nnamdi Azikiwe helped found and meant to be genuinely national. It was read instead as an Igbo vehicle, and it never united the country behind it. By the early 1950s the fear of Igbo dominance in British run elections had produced two rivals, the Northern People's Congress, largely Hausa and Fulani, and the Yoruba Action Group. A colony assembled for administrative convenience was proving impossible to convert into one nation.

Kenscoff is a commune of about a hundred square miles in the mountains south west of Port-au-Prince, with roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants in the 1950s. Its main settlement is the bourg, called the buk in peasant speech, a word traced to mbuka, meaning village in the Kikongo of the Lower Congo, where a large part of the ancestors of the settlers came from. A motor road from Port-au-Prince opened in 1932, putting the bourg forty five minutes from the capital by car. In 1934 it was made the administrative centre of a commune. Because the summer temperature there sits between fifty two and seventy nine degrees, families from the capital began taking houses. Visitors saw crowded hotels, cars, villas and gardens and called it a small town. The peasant owners had sold only the strips along the road. From the first rains in the middle of September the holidaymakers left, and for the next nine months they were gone.

A man in the Kenscoff mountains who was already legally married could not easily register as his own the children he had by a plase wife. If he was well known in his own commune he might travel to another one to do it. Where he did nothing, the mother's father would commonly declare the child as his own by an invented woman. If the grandfather was dead, or the mother was over thirty and had been settled with a man for some years, she could register the birth herself, and the child was entered as born of an unknown father. In the bourg of Kenscoff between 1934 and 1956 there were forty eight such registrations, made by forty mothers. Twenty three of them concerned a woman who had been living with the child's father for between five and twenty four years. Ten of the children had no siblings. Three were made legitimate later when their parents married.