DeWitt Peters finds that his chauffeur is one of Haiti's great painters

DeWitt Peters, an American teacher, opened the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince to give trained artists somewhere to meet, since they got almost no encouragement anywhere else. He had not understood that self taught masters were already standing around him. Rigaud Benoit drove his car. Castera Bazile worked in his yard, and Bazile's Baptism of Christ became one of the celebrated murals in Holy Trinity Cathedral. Hector Hyppolite, an oungan from Saint-Marc who said the lwa had told him fame was coming, first caught Peters's eye through the birds and flowers he had painted on the wall of a roadside cafe called Ici la Renaissance. Hyppolite took a one man show in Paris in 1947 and died the following year, which some in Haiti attributed to his neglect of the spirits that had made him. Philome Obin, a Baptist in Cap-Haitien who had been painting the history passing in front of him for decades, sent in his picture of Roosevelt's 1934 visit and went on salary at once. He had never been paid more than a dollar for a painting.

Nigeria was a large territory with deeper internal divisions than any other British holding in West Africa. Its north and south had been governed separately until 1946. The north was mostly Muslim with old links across the Sahara to North Africa, the south heavily Christian after a long history of dealing with Europeans. Within the south, the Yoruba of the west and the Igbo of the east competed hard with each other. Within the north the argument was about the power of the aristocracy. From 1944 nationalist demands were carried by the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, which the newspaper editor Nnamdi Azikiwe helped found and meant to be genuinely national. It was read instead as an Igbo vehicle, and it never united the country behind it. By the early 1950s the fear of Igbo dominance in British run elections had produced two rivals, the Northern People's Congress, largely Hausa and Fulani, and the Yoruba Action Group. A colony assembled for administrative convenience was proving impossible to convert into one nation.

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.

A farmer at Ulster Spring in Trelawney Parish made brown sugar and drove it to the Brown's Town market in Jamaica in his own mule drawn dray, along with yams, bananas and breadfruit. Local women bought his wet sugar by the tin and sold it on by the pound, clearing ten to sixteen shillings a tin. They took the sugar on credit, dug and weighed it out through the day, and paid him at the close in proportion to what they had sold. Whatever was left went into the market storeroom at twopence a tin and was sold the following market day, when he collected the rest of his money. The price he received was fixed at the moment of sale and did not move with the next week's supply, so the retailer alone carried the risk of a fall. Demand for the sugar dropped when mangoes were plentiful. The arrangement worked for sugar because sugar keeps, which yams and breadfruit do not.