A fever with a terrible depression closes the schools by noon

Jeanne Sylvain wrote to her brothers and sisters about the illness going through Port-au-Prince in November 1943. Almost every family had a few days of fever with aches and the heavy depression that came with this particular sickness. The doctors could not agree. Some said dengue, some said an ordinary cold, some said a flu that was not the Spanish one and might well be Dominican. The schools had been running mornings only for a month and would stay that way until January, so the children wandered about in the afternoons and their parents were furious. The line about a Dominican flu carried a load. Six years earlier the soldiers of Rafael Trujillo had killed thousands of Haitians along that border in a matter of days. A disease that crossed it freely, at a moment when Haitians could not, was worth a bitter aside in a family letter.

African colonies were pulled into a European war for the second time in twenty five years, and supplied it with men and material. Britain leaned hardest on its territories, recruiting soldiers in west and east Africa and drawing on African farms and factories. Egypt mattered above all because of the Suez Canal, and Egyptian nationalism worried London without a break. In 1942, with German armour moving through the Western Desert, British armoured vehicles took up positions around the government buildings in Cairo, posted there to watch the ministers inside rather than to protect them. South Africa was under no obligation to join, since the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had removed it, and a large Afrikaner minority pressed for neutrality with some quiet sympathy for the Nazis. The government of Jan Smuts carried a declaration of war through parliament by the narrowest of margins. After the French armistice of June 1940 the governors of French Africa gave their loyalty to Vichy and later declared for de Gaulle. Italy, the one Axis power holding African ground, raised troops in Eritrea and looked at Sudan and Kenya, and its armies were beaten inside two years.

In May 1945 the Association Democratique Haitienne organised a memorial service in Harlem for Jacques Roumain, the Haitian writer and communist organiser. Earl Browder, then head of the Communist Party in the United States, spoke. The actor Canada Lee read a poem for Jacques Roumain that Langston Hughes had written for the occasion. The gathering made visible a community that had grown quietly. After the American marines left Haiti in 1934, Haitians who had relatives in Harlem, and women recruited to work as maids in wealthy white New York households, had joined people who emigrated earlier. Migration from Haiti to the United States is often told as three waves, the revolutionary period, the occupation and the Duvalier years, with nothing in between. The Harlem service belongs to one of those supposedly empty stretches and shows an organised political community inside it.

In April 1941 Suzanne Cesaire published a study of Frobenius in the journal Tropiques. Frobenius was a German ethnologist who had spent decades working in Africa and had argued that African societies possessed civilisations of their own, with their own coherence and their own history. Cesaire took that material and turned it against the assumption that Western civilisation stands above African cultures on some single scale. Nicholls counts the essay as a landmark. Two things about it are worth holding. It was written in the Caribbean in wartime, in a review appearing under an administration that read what was printed, so the argument had to be conducted in the vocabulary of ethnology rather than in the vocabulary of politics. And it was made by a woman, in a movement whose remembered names are almost entirely men. The argument that Africa had civilisations was being advanced from a small island by a writer who would spend the next fifty years being read as somebody's wife.