Jeanne Sylvain answers the infanticide question with arithmetic

A newborn girl was found near the shore at Cite-Vincent in Port-au-Prince at the start of 1944. Jeanne Sylvain never claimed to know what had happened in that case or in the others being reported. She wrote to her sisters with a structural account instead. President Elie Lescot had brought down the prices of food staples. At the same time the taxes charged on goods imported from the United States, among them oil, soap and paper, had gone up. The minimum wage stayed where it was, at a gourde and a half. A household buying imported necessities out of that wage could not cover them, and the sums did not come out for the women running such households. She concluded that the basic needs of Haitian women were going unmet. The newspapers had asked whether Haitian mothers were mad or desperate. Sylvain added up the wages, the taxes and the prices, and produced a figure. The disagreement was about method before it was about conclusions.

Allied flags flew between Cairo and Casablanca in 1945, and none of the powers holding them had a secure future in North Africa. Moroccans expected full sovereignty once the war was won, on a promise reported to have come from Roosevelt himself. France answered by suppressing the new nationalist party Istiqlal, and the sultan Sidi Mohammad became the central figure of the struggle over the rest of the decade. In Algeria the American landings gave nationalism a push. Ferhat Abbas and other men schooled in French put their names to a Manifesto of the Algerian People that demanded reform. Abbas then set up the AML to argue for a republic federated with France. He was attacked by the settlers on one flank and by Ahmed Messali's PPA on the other for asking too little. Protest turned violent in 1945 and was put down with great brutality, and the years that followed brought French backing for the settlers and rigged elections. Tunisia lost its reforming monarch Moncef Bey to exile while Bourguiba held to the Free French. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood turned nationalist while London thought about the canal.

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 February 1944 Francois Duvalier published an article on the stadial evolution of Vodou in the bulletin of Haiti's Bureau of Ethnology. In it he credited Jean Price Mars with proclaiming to the Society of History and Geography what he called an essential truth: that 1804 issued from Vodou. His own reasoning, he added, had been bound to arrive at the same conclusion. Duvalier was then a doctor and an ethnologist, thirteen years away from the presidency. The formula compressed the whole indigenist reading of Haitian independence into a slogan, and it gave the future dictatorship a claim on the religion of the majority and on the founding event of the country in one move. Once in power he presented himself as a spiritual father and encouraged the identification. The intellectual equipment was assembled well before there was a regime to use it.