Four hundred women want in and the room holds thirty

The Foyer Ouvrier was aimed at a specific group: women who had come off the land into Port-au-Prince and become the urban working poor. The Haitian state watched them closely, because their movement between countryside and city could not be regulated, and provided them with almost nothing in the way of schooling or social service. The centre opened on 3 November 1943. Within a short time more than four hundred women had put their names down, and about a hundred were arriving every day. They asked for sewing and cutting, for cooking, for typing, and for lessons in French, Spanish and English, and the League's policy was to teach whatever was asked for. Note what the requests were. Women who worked all week came to learn a second and a third foreign language and a trade skill. They were shopping for exits.

The Haitian arts movement of the 1940s ran alongside negritude, the wider current that took the study of African cultures across the world as its subject. Haiti drew people in. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Suzanne Cesaire, Langston Hughes and Lavinia Williams all studied, taught or made work in the country, overlapping there with Haitian artists including Jeanne Perez and de Pradines. The traffic ran the other way as well. Lina Mathion Blanchet, de Pradines and Perez left to perform in the United States. What made the country attractive to a Black American writer or a Martinican theorist was that the argument they were having elsewhere had been settled here in 1804 and had a hundred and forty years of practice behind it. Haitian dance, Haitian music and Haitian religion were available to be studied as a living culture. For the Haitian artists, the visitors were an audience that already agreed with them, which is a rare thing to have.

Allied flags flew between Cairo and Casablanca in 1945, and none of the powers holding them had a secure future in North Africa. Moroccans expected full sovereignty once the war was won, on a promise reported to have come from Roosevelt himself. France answered by suppressing the new nationalist party Istiqlal, and the sultan Sidi Mohammad became the central figure of the struggle over the rest of the decade. In Algeria the American landings gave nationalism a push. Ferhat Abbas and other men schooled in French put their names to a Manifesto of the Algerian People that demanded reform. Abbas then set up the AML to argue for a republic federated with France. He was attacked by the settlers on one flank and by Ahmed Messali's PPA on the other for asking too little. Protest turned violent in 1945 and was put down with great brutality, and the years that followed brought French backing for the settlers and rigged elections. Tunisia lost its reforming monarch Moncef Bey to exile while Bourguiba held to the Free French. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood turned nationalist while London thought about the canal.

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.