Bananas take forty five per cent of Dominica's exports

Bananas had been grown in Dominica for centuries in the gardens of ordinary cultivators, alongside the ground provisions people actually ate. They counted for little in the export ledger until the 1940s. Then the growth was fast. By 1953 bananas made up forty five per cent of the value of everything the island sold abroad, and they held that place for decades. Dominicans had watched crops rise and fall before. Coffee, sugar cane, cocoa, limes and vanilla had each in turn dominated the accounts, and every shift rearranged who worked for whom. What was new lay in the source. The crop that took over the export economy came out of the peasant garden, which meant that buyers had to reach into thousands of small holdings to collect it and to organise the collecting. Dominica's unity, in this reading, lies in the succession of single crops that tied it to markets elsewhere.

In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau formed the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale with nine other women: Georgette Justin, Maud Turian, Esther Dartigue, Alice Téligny Mathon, Marie Corvington, Olga Gordon, Fernande Bellegarde, Thérèse Hudicourt and Alice Garoute. They attacked gender inequality in Haitian politics directly and made suffrage the test of whether the country meant its own founding claims. Two decades of petitions, marches, essays and letters to legislators followed. In 1950 the Constitutional Congress amended Article 8 and granted women of twenty-one and over the right to vote in local and national elections. Haitian women cast ballots in a national election for the first time in 1957. The achievement belonged to a small professional class of women who kept insisting that the democratic promise of the first Black republic in the hemisphere was still outstanding. Their charge against the founders was specific. The men who won independence at the end of the eighteenth century wrote women out of full citizenship, and nobody corrected it for a hundred and forty-six years.

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.

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.