Marriage meant something different to every party that legislated it

The League's regard for state sanctioned marriage was widely shared among Haitian women. Women of every class and region attached some particular value to a legal wedding, and their reasons diverged. The legislation passed between 1944 and 1945 makes the divergence visible. For a professional woman in the capital, a legal marriage meant standing and a claim on institutions that answered to standing. For a peasant woman it bore on land, on what her children could inherit and on whether a partner's family could put her off a plot after his death. For the government of Elie Lescot it was a way of fixing households in one place and settling questions of inheritance in the countryside. For the Catholic church it was a sacrament and a matter of moral order. Four parties used one word and meant four things by it, and the laws of those two years were written in the narrow band where the four meanings overlapped. For a woman with no land, no husband and no wages, the word carried nothing at all.

In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter, proclaiming the right of all peoples to choose their own government and to be protected from aggression. Educated Africans read it and asked the obvious question. Churchill was obliged to reply that Britain already looked after its imperial subjects perfectly well. The reply did not hold.African newsletters multiplied through the 1940s and their contents travelled further by word of mouth than by print, and the comparison being drawn everywhere was between fascism in Europe and colonial rule in Africa. Organisers took the charter as evidence that the system was weak and the philosophy behind it bankrupt. Roosevelt, anti-imperial by instinct, pressed his ally for a postwar timetable. By the end of the war a generation of young Africans educated in Europe and the United States had gathered around pan-Africanism, and at the fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945 they stopped submitting petitions. The demand was the dismantling of the colonial empires and total independence.

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.

Constitutions in 1942 and 1946 allowed direct elections to a legislative council in the Gold Coast, which made organised parties worth forming. The United Gold Coast Convention was founded in 1947 under J. B. Danquah, a lawyer from a small professional elite. It was moderate, it stayed inside the law, and it worked by persuading colonial officials that reform was reasonable. The British were content with it. Younger activists with no property and no patience found nothing there for them. Kwame Nkrumah came back from the United States in 1947 to work for the Convention, having spent years in pan-Africanist politics abroad, and the rioting and shortages of those months made Danquah's method look useless to him. He left in 1949 and founded the Convention People's Party. Its method, taken in part from Gandhi in India, was called positive action: strikes and boycotts, non-violent, and willing to break colonial law. The British ran out of patience and arrested Nkrumah in 1950 along with several other leaders, on the theory that jailing a man puts away his argument with him.