The girls being studied kept teaching the researchers instead

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain had spent years doing fieldwork among Haitian girls, and the girls had handled her. They declined the assumptions she brought about their lives, and they declined her right of access. They walked around her intentions, gave nothing to her questions, and in doing so taught her something about their own power and their own view of things. The same schooling went on at the Foyer Ouvrier. Women of the League arrived with university training and a plan for what working-class girls needed, and the girls corrected them by ordinary means: by choosing what to answer, by choosing what to attend, by declining to be material. Research of this kind assumes the knowledge runs in one direction. Here the subjects were running the seminar, and the credentialed women in the room were the ones under examination.

Colonial governments began organising local elections, and the elections built the movements that ended the colonies. In Cote d'Ivoire in 1944 cocoa and coffee growers set up the Syndicat Agricole Africain, whose first aim was the abolition of forced labour. The union put its weight behind its leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who won a seat in the Assembly in Paris and got the corvee abolished. In Paris he joined with other West African deputies to build the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, the main bloc pressing for reform across French Africa. In Senegal a wider franchise let Leopold Senghor found a party rooted in the countryside, breaking the towns' hold on politics. Between the mid 1940s and the mid 1950s voters in French West Africa went to the polls repeatedly, for the National Assembly in Paris, the Assembly of the French Union, the Grand Councils at Brazzaville and Dakar, territorial assemblies, referenda and constitutions. Belgium did the reverse in the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, sealing them off from every one of these developments, and their transitions were the worst on the continent.

C. L. R. James published the first edition of The Black Jacobins in 1938, writing in London for the Trotskyist press and organising for African independence. The book takes the revolt that began in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and treats it as a revolution of the first rank, with Toussaint Louverture as a political thinker and the enslaved of the northern plain as the people who decided the outcome. Before it, the standard European account handled Haiti as a colonial disaster with a body count attached. After it, the years from 1791 to 1804 could be set beside 1789 and 1917 and discussed in the same terms. The timing was deliberate. James was writing for readers who would soon be demanding an end to empire in Africa and the Caribbean, and he handed them a case in which enslaved people had beaten France, Spain and Britain in turn and founded a state. The argument outlived its first edition by decades.

Alice Garoute, Madeleine Sylvain, Jeanne Perez and Cleante Desgraves Valcin edited La Voix des Femmes and described it as a microphone for the oppressed. It would name injustice and abuse, they wrote, and bring Haitians together in a shared love of the country. Sylvain put the second aim plainly. The paper would link Haitians who knew too little about their own women, and would reach women anywhere in the world, free or not, on behalf of women's emancipation. It circulated in the main city of every region and in every town with a league chapter, among them Les Cayes, Cap-Haitien, Saint-Marc, Port-de-Paix and Jacmel. It went to North America by subscription, and Bryn Mawr College was taking it before Sylvain ever enrolled there. At the Paris Exposition of 1937 the writers won a prize for their reporting. Every number set aside a column in which invited respondents answered one question, for or against feminism, and reprinted essays and speeches by thinkers from Colombia, Cuba and Peru.