Twelve million dollars, a million felled trees, five tons of rubber

When Japan took Southeast Asia the United States lost its rubber and its hemp, and Haiti was told its moment had come. SHADA, a joint agricultural company, was created in late 1941 on a five million dollar Export-Import Bank loan guaranteed by the Haitian state, and in November 1942 Washington added seven million more. Twelve million dollars was many times what the Americans had spent on Haitian agriculture across nineteen years of military occupation. The American agronomist Thomas Fennell overruled Haitian specialists such as Georges Héraux and pushed ahead. Bulldozers took huts, coffee bushes, cashew, avocado and banana trees, and even the ounfò where Vodou is served. Roughly a million fruit-bearing trees and shrubs went down. By 1943 the work covered more than 100,000 acres, over five percent of the best land in the country, and employed 92,000 peasants at day wages on ground they had owned. Five tons of rubber came out of it. Work stopped in May 1944, leaving nearly 40,000 families displaced, the land ruined and Haiti five million dollars deeper in debt.

Portugal and Belgium ran smaller economies than Britain or France, had fewer options, and held on hardest. For Antonio Salazar's government in Lisbon the colonies absorbed surplus Portuguese population, in the way Fascist Italy had imagined using Eritrea and Ethiopia, and supplied markets and raw materials on the nineteenth century pattern. Portugal exported its own authoritarian system wholesale to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, where opposition was not permitted and reform was not discussed. The Belgian Congo boomed during and after the war on copper, rubber, gold and tin sold to the Allied war effort, and on uranium that went into the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of that money reached an emerging Congolese middle class. Most of its purpose was Belgium's own recovery. Lisbon feared that any reform in its African territories would open the door to British and French interests. The powers with the least room to manoeuvre eventually left their colonies with the most violence.

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.

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.