Losing the land turns peasants into workers and daughters into servants

The Haitian sociologist Alex Dupuy describes the economic model that followed the American occupation of 1915 to 1934 as one that set off a process of proletarianization. Large export monocrops and mining concessions broke up the small scale farming that had allowed Haitian families to hold their own against a growing state and a strong merchant class. SHADA was that model at full size. For the households it displaced the damage was financial, and it also changed what they were. A family with ground stood as landed people with a position in the district. A family without it had labour to sell and nothing else. For young women the consequence was specific. With no plot to work, a daughter was sent to Port-au-Prince or another town to bring in cash through small jobs and domestic service. Urban populations swelled with such arrivals. A girl serving in an elite household in the capital stood at the far end of a line that began when a company cleared her family's trees.

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.

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.