The flu reaches the Sylvain house and takes a grandmother

The influenza that closed out 1943 did what outbreaks do. It produced rumour, fear, hints of national and international blame, shut businesses and schools, and wore out the people doing the nursing. The Sylvain sisters wrote to each other about the older members of their community, who were the ones at risk. Then the virus went through their own house. In the confusion and lethargy that followed, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau could not remember whether she had told her sister Suzanne, who was away doing research in the Belgian Congo, that the grandmother of Madeleine's husband Max Bouchereau had died during the epidemic. That lapse is the most exact record of the household's condition anybody left behind. A family of formidable letter writers who held themselves together by post lost track of a death, because every one of them was too ill to write it down.

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.

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.

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.