A club for black professionals becomes the hinge of noiriste politics

Haitian public life in the 1940s ran along a colour line that nobody wrote down. Light skinned families of the old elite held the commercial houses, most of the senior state posts, and the social clubs where those posts were arranged. Educated black professionals, many of them the product of schools built after the American occupation, could qualify for the work and stay outside the rooms where it was distributed. In 1944 L'Amicale was founded under the patronage of Emile Saint Lot as a professional club for black citizens, with the declared purpose of challenging that elite hegemony directly. Nicholls records what it became. The club turned into a significant organising centre for noirisme, the doctrine that the black majority of Haitians should hold the Haitian state rather than serve the families who had held it since independence. A social club with a membership list is a modest thing. This one supplied a political movement with its first address.

French territories south of the Sahara had been decisive for Charles de Gaulle during the war. They supplied soldiers, and they supplied the land and air routes across the continent that made a Free French war effort possible at all. African nationalists knew what that was worth. At Brazzaville in 1944 de Gaulle was obliged to promise political reform once the fighting ended, a package of concessions that African military and economic contributions had forced and that also acknowledged how much France would need its colonies to rebuild. The promise was aimed at keeping the empire steady and intact. Meanwhile inflation, broken trade routes and low export prices piled onto hardship left over from the 1930s. African workers had discovered their own leverage and were using strikes and new trade unions to real effect, above all in the mining zones. The British answered with film, radio, newspapers and pamphlets, which required presenting the colonial state as good and its enemies as evil. An empire that had demanded obedience now had to ask, and a request can be refused.

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.

In 1938 the anthropologist Jose Imbelloni proposed that the native people of the West Indies formed a distinct race, which he called Amazonid, and traced their biological descent from the Amazon basin, north through the Orinoco valley, and out along the island chain. The route is roughly right. Archaeology has since confirmed that direction of settlement, with pottery, languages and crops moving up the Antilles from the South American mainland. The racial classification is the part that has gone. Imbelloni belonged to a school that sorted humanity into fixed biological types with measurable skulls and firm edges, and running that machinery over the Caribbean produced a category nobody uses now. I keep it on a Haitian timeline for what it shows about the period. In 1938 a sound migration history and a false science of race arrived in the same sentence, and a reader had no easy way to take the one without the other.