The League opens a house for working women in the capital

In 1943 the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, the Haitian women's organisation founded in 1934 by educated women of the capital, opened a community centre for women and called it the Foyer Ouvrier, the workers' hearth. It taught childcare, languages and cooking. It held a library, and it made space for folkloric singing, dance and sport. The list looks modest written down. Set against what existed for working women in Port-au-Prince at the time, which was close to nothing, it was a building with a door that opened. The League had spent nine years arguing that Haitian women of different classes shared an interest, and had been answered by the fact that its own membership came from one class. The Foyer was that argument in brick: a physical place where a domestic servant and a lawyer's wife could stand in the same room on a stated afternoon, doing something specific. Arguments do not create encounters. Addresses do.

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.

Women who quit domestic service in Haitian towns were routinely accused of theft on their way out. Guilt and innocence in these cases were seldom established either way. What the women were doing was leaving, and leaving without notice was the only shape the departure could take. Carolle Charles records the terms in which poor, working-class and peasant women described the thing they were guarding. Kom se kawo tem: my body is a piece of land. Se lajam'm: it is money. Read that literally and it rearranges the sociology. A migrant with no property who sells her labour in a town belongs, by the standard categories, to the urban proletariat. A woman who holds a plot and works it decides for herself how hard to work it and how much of the yield to keep. These women were placing themselves in the second category. The body was the holding. Walking out of the house was how she set the rate.

The Import-Export Bank of the United States put seven million dollars into SHADA. The money cleared land, paid farmers to work it, and hired administrators to run crop development, production and export. More than ninety thousand Haitians and Americans were employed on the programme. It went wrong from the beginning, and the reason was that the agricultural ambition had been drawn up without much attention to the ground it was to be carried out on. Cultivation takes years that a wartime shortage does not allow. A drought ran through 1943 and 1944. The cryptostegia vine failed to take root in areas the plan depended on. A fire went through one of the SHADA sites. What seven million dollars bought was a demonstration that Philippine agriculture does not transfer to Caribbean soil on demand, and a wide stretch of Haitian countryside stripped of what had been growing on it, which stayed stripped after the programme closed.