Haitian women map their own routes from the mountains to the capital

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, Haiti's first women's rights organisation, built its own teaching materials in the 1940s rather than borrow them. Doing so meant paying attention to how women actually moved. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, an anthropologist, walked the mountains above Kenscoff and worked with the women there to produce a set of handwritten maps showing the rural paths that carry people down into Port-au-Prince. Those were women's routes: market women with produce, girls sent to relatives in town, workers going back and forth each week. In 1945 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau published a series of beginner reading books built on the same knowledge. The stories follow a girl through an ordinary day in which women cross between countryside and city and break the journey at the foyers kept by aunts. A child learning her letters from these books was also learning the geography of her own life, and being told that the women who travel it are the subject of the lesson.

French rule in North Africa ended in two places within a single year. In Morocco the nationalist protest was led by Sultan Sidi Muhammad, and fighting in the Spanish-held part of the territory added pressure the French could not absorb. They withdrew in 1956. Tunisia arrived at the same point in the same year. Its Neo-Destour party had spent the early 1950s pulling itself apart in a quarrel between Bourguiba, who wanted terms, and Ben Yusuf, who wanted more than terms. The French tried force against the protest and inducements to the politicians. Bourguiba's side won the internal fight and took the country to full independence. Richard Reid argues that these movements had advantages their neighbours to the south lacked. Islam supplied a long tradition of political argument. The territories had borders and identities centuries deep. A rising pan-Arabism connected them to the Middle East and to a world larger than the continent. Nationalists below the Sahara had to assemble all three of those things while they organised.

In October 1943 Élie Lescot toured Montreal, Ottawa, Washington, New York and Havana, and stayed at the White House, where Franklin Roosevelt called him a very old friend and talked about turning the Môle into a free port. Edward Stettinius put American spending on Haiti between 1938 and 1946 at forty million dollars. On 19 April 1944 the National Assembly rewrote the constitution: no elections until peace had been signed with every enemy power down to Bulgaria, the presidential term lengthened from five years to seven, and Lescot continued in office until 15 May 1951. His decrees began to open with the royal plural, Nous, Élie Lescot. In his address of 15 May 1945 he said his people were naive and poor, that they wanted the Four Freedoms Roosevelt had proclaimed, and that they would receive them once they had learned how to use them. A plot in the Garde was broken up in July, and seven enlisted men were shot at Fort Dimanche.

Diederich explains how he came to be in the middle of this story. Sailing for the South Pacific, he put into Port-au-Prince, left the sea to hunt for a stolen camera, fell for the country, worked briefly at an American owned casino and in 1950 founded an English language weekly, the Haiti Sun. Stringing work for American and British media followed. He describes the period from the late 1940s to the middle 1950s as a time when the country had more than charm, and later contrasts it flatly with what came after, calling the seven years from 1957 a nightmare in which friends and colleagues were killed or vanished while he filed reports abroad, often anonymously, and censored himself at home to avoid joining the disappeared. The paper is also the source for many of the dates in this book, since he covered the arrivals and departures himself.