London plans a slow handover with special powers for white settlers

Postwar politics in Europe changed official thinking about what colonies were for. The Attlee Labour government in Britain broke with much of prewar social doctrine, and from about 1947 London began moving away from indirect rule through chiefs toward bringing in the educated African elite that had been pressing for entry since the 1930s. The French also started planning a gradual transfer, though they expected strong patron and client ties and a qualified autonomy rather than full independence. Where Europeans had settled, the plans were different. The Colonial Office envisaged special constitutional powers for white settlers in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia to guarantee their position and their economic dominance. One man, one vote was not under consideration. The planners of the late 1940s assumed former colonies would stay under metropolitan influence and that the handover would be very slow. Portugal and Belgium contemplated only cosmetic reform. Britain and France wanted moderate African leaders who would protect the interests being left behind, and no communists anywhere.

On 11 January 1946 Elie Lescot was forced out of the presidency by a military coup in which Paul Magloire took the leading part. His removal closed the period, running from the start of the United States occupation in 1915, in which the light skinned elite governed Haiti without serious challenge. Several grievances arrived at once. Peasants had lost land to wartime agricultural schemes. Black intellectuals had not forgiven the campaign against Vodou carried out with the Catholic church. The dealings of the Lescot family were widely known. And a war fought against fascism made a president who ruled by decree hard to defend. Dumarsais Estime, a black politician associated with noirisme, was elected to a six year term and took office in August, the first black head of state since Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915. A new constitution was promulgated. The argument Jean Price-Mars had put in a book in 1928, that Haiti should recognise itself as an African country, now held the government.

Martha Jean-Claude was born in 1929 and sang in the cathedral choir in Port-au-Prince from the age of twelve. She began as a backing voice for her friend Emerante de Pradines and was pushed into the front when audiences demanded to hear her. On 20 December 1952, three months pregnant, she was arrested. The charges were vague and contradictory, covering criticism of the government, the communist activities of her husband, who was out of the country, and a plan to build housing for the poor that Paul Magloire found too revolutionary. Her health deteriorated to the point that she had to be moved to hospital, and on release she went into exile. She reached Cuba by way of a short stay in Venezuela, worked as a typesetter and a hairdresser, and in 1956 met Celia Cruz and recorded Canciones de Haiti. She did not sing in Haiti again until 1986.

A farmer at Ulster Spring in Trelawney Parish made brown sugar and drove it to the Brown's Town market in Jamaica in his own mule drawn dray, along with yams, bananas and breadfruit. Local women bought his wet sugar by the tin and sold it on by the pound, clearing ten to sixteen shillings a tin. They took the sugar on credit, dug and weighed it out through the day, and paid him at the close in proportion to what they had sold. Whatever was left went into the market storeroom at twopence a tin and was sold the following market day, when he collected the rest of his money. The price he received was fixed at the moment of sale and did not move with the next week's supply, so the retailer alone carried the risk of a fall. Demand for the sugar dropped when mangoes were plentiful. The arrangement worked for sugar because sugar keeps, which yams and breadfruit do not.