Haitian weekends become fashionable and the Oloffson fills with writers

Haiti received state visits in these years. Hector Trujillo, brother of the Dominican dictator, came for four days in April 1952. Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua followed. In November 1954 William Tubman of Liberia became the first African head of state to visit Haiti. Sir Hugh Foot arrived from Jamaica in February 1954, the first governor of that island to set foot in Haiti since Henry Morgan was shipwrecked and jailed there 279 years before, and he bent his waltz to the meringue. Foreign writers had begun coming under Estime and now the fashionable crowd followed, with the Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread house the marines had used as a hospital, becoming the place they stayed. Noel Coward, Truman Capote and Graham Greene all passed through it. The world economy paid for the party. By the end of 1954 tourism had tripled since 1950, coffee exports were rising twenty percent a year, the Korean War lifted sisal, and a cement works, a flour mill and a shoe factory opened.

France ran its African policy after 1954 in the shadow of Algeria, and the fear of a second Algerian war shaped everything decided in Paris. The plan had been a Greater France in which the colonies stayed inside the republic, an idea that assimilated West African elites supported until it became clear that full citizenship was never on offer. Reforms in 1956 gave internal self government while Paris kept the army, foreign policy and economic planning. As Algeria worsened, de Gaulle put a straight question to the colonies in 1958. Keep the link to France and keep the money, or take complete independence and lose all of it. Almost every African leader chose the link. Guinea under Ahmed Sekou Toure chose sovereignty. De Gaulle cancelled all assistance, withdrew French staff and had the equipment carried out. Guinea survived on Soviet and Ghanaian support. Within two years the rest of Francophone Africa had followed it, and in 1960 the French colonies of west and equatorial Africa became independent states.

Several film crews recorded the re-enactment, and in the autumn of 2012 Le Glaunec found an excerpt in the archives of a Haitian and Caribbean documentation centre in Montreal. It runs a little over three minutes, is narrated in English and appears to have been made for American audiences. The narrator calls the soldiers of the indigenous army a band of patriots fighting for freedom and frames the battle as a continuation of the American war of independence and its language of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The author reads this as an act of translation that makes the Haitian war intelligible to a foreign public by subordinating it to an earlier one. The footage shows a handful of French figures overwhelmed by hundreds of half naked fighters, a soldier of Rochambeau waving a white flag, and the horse of the actor playing Capois lying dead. It has apparently not been shown since 1954.

Mrs. N. farmed with her husband on about four acres near Brown's Town in Jamaica and had five children, four of them still at home. She decided the local market paid too little and began travelling to Kingston. Each journey took planning. She borrowed or saved capital, guessed at demand, bought eggs, avocados, soursop, pumpkins and fowls in her own district, loaded them on a donkey and met a truck on the road on Sunday afternoon. Her daughter walked the donkey home and took charge of the baby. The truck cost twelve shillings out and six back. The market opened at midnight and charged a gate fee and a handcart fee of one shilling sixpence each. More than a pound sterling went on transport and fees before she made a single sale, and about three pounds more had gone on the produce itself. She chose light goods with a high unit price because fares rose with bulk. Her capital was often borrowed from market butchers at a shilling per pound for three days. Losses on a few successive trips could end her business.