Twenty nine countries meet at Bandung and name a third road

Twenty nine Asian and African countries took part in the Bandung Conference of 1955. The word decolonisation acquired its modern meaning there, as a third option alongside capitalism and communism, at a moment when the Cold War was pressing every new state to choose one of the two. The first meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries followed in 1961. Non-alignment was itself a statement that the choice on offer was not the only one available. Bandung allowed Islamic and Indian arguments to be linked with the struggles in Africa and Asia, and it gave a vocabulary to people who wanted independence without simply changing patrons. In the early nineteenth century the words used for the same ends had been independence and revolution, as in the American and Haitian revolutions and the Mexican and Argentine independences. Haiti had made the case a hundred and fifty years before there was a conference at which to make it.

In 1955 agricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar and sisal made up 88 percent of the total volume of Haitian exports. By 1977 they made up 46.7 percent. Assembly plants in the towns grew over the same years, and yet three million four hundred thousand people still lived from farming, on holdings divided and divided again. The mechanism behind the fall was the marketing chain. Two separate networks carried goods from the most distant mountain garden to Port-au-Prince and abroad, one for export commodities and one for food eaten inside the country. On export crops the intermediaries, the importers, the speculators and the state took up to 50 percent of the value, which is why peasants lost interest in growing coffee, the principal crop. On food crops a very large number of intermediaries took 25 percent between them, and nobody attended to the food side at all.

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.

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.