The president who cleared the land blamed the people who left it

Lescot's explanation of urban crowding rested on peasant fertility. Holding it required leaving out the movement of people that had been under way since the United States occupation, when Haitians began leaving the countryside for Port-au-Prince in steadily larger numbers. That migration had causes the government could name. One of them was SHADA, the agricultural venture his administration had backed, which took land out of peasant hands and cleared it for wartime crops, stripping the households that worked it of the ground they lived from. People walked to the capital because the districts they came from had been made unlivable, in part by decisions he had signed. Placing the cause in the reproductive habits of rural women moved the ledger away from the palace. The man who authorised the clearing described the crowds in the city as a matter of appetite among the people the clearing had displaced.

Colonial governments began organising local elections, and the elections built the movements that ended the colonies. In Cote d'Ivoire in 1944 cocoa and coffee growers set up the Syndicat Agricole Africain, whose first aim was the abolition of forced labour. The union put its weight behind its leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who won a seat in the Assembly in Paris and got the corvee abolished. In Paris he joined with other West African deputies to build the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, the main bloc pressing for reform across French Africa. In Senegal a wider franchise let Leopold Senghor found a party rooted in the countryside, breaking the towns' hold on politics. Between the mid 1940s and the mid 1950s voters in French West Africa went to the polls repeatedly, for the National Assembly in Paris, the Assembly of the French Union, the Grand Councils at Brazzaville and Dakar, territorial assemblies, referenda and constitutions. Belgium did the reverse in the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, sealing them off from every one of these developments, and their transitions were the worst on the continent.

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.

From the end of the 1930s colonial administrations in Africa began pushing plantation farming on the North American model, planned in offices and imposed on rural districts. The intervention was heavy handed and it produced resentment in the countryside that lasted for decades. It also broke something political. British rule across much of Africa worked through indirect rule, which governed villages by way of chiefs recognised, paid and sometimes invented by the colonial power. Agricultural planners dealt with land, labour and quotas themselves and went around those chiefs. The authority of men who already carried the stigma of collaboration drained away, since Africans in many walks of life had long treated the whole arrangement as irrelevant to them. Colonial power was dismantling its own local scaffolding while still leaning on it. What remained was a rural population with fresh grievances and a set of traditional authorities with no credit left to spend, which cleared the ground for a generation of nationalist leaders who owed those authorities nothing.