The League attacked the marriage law and defended marriage itself

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale campaigned to change what a Haitian woman could earn and own inside a legal marriage. Its own papers record members disagreeing with each other about how a wife should conduct herself and about whether divorce should be available at all. On the institution itself the organisation held a steady line. Its programmes, its publications and its classes presented legal marriage and motherhood as the marks of a respectable Haitian woman. Members were fully aware that the civil code disadvantaged wives. They maintained that marriage remained worth having, partly because the title Madan carried a standing that offset what the code removed. A woman addressed as Madan in Port-au-Prince got answers that a woman in plasaj did not. Sanders Johnson reads this as strategy. The League was working on a state that recognised one kind of household, and it used that recognition to get women heard while attacking the terms on which it was granted.

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.

Women who quit domestic service in Haitian towns were routinely accused of theft on their way out. Guilt and innocence in these cases were seldom established either way. What the women were doing was leaving, and leaving without notice was the only shape the departure could take. Carolle Charles records the terms in which poor, working-class and peasant women described the thing they were guarding. Kom se kawo tem: my body is a piece of land. Se lajam'm: it is money. Read that literally and it rearranges the sociology. A migrant with no property who sells her labour in a town belongs, by the standard categories, to the urban proletariat. A woman who holds a plot and works it decides for herself how hard to work it and how much of the yield to keep. These women were placing themselves in the second category. The body was the holding. Walking out of the house was how she set the rate.

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.