Cite Simone starts with a handful of houses by the airport

The Duvalier government built a popular quarter on the northern edge of Port-au-Prince, next to the export producing factories and the country's only major airport, and named it after the president's wife Simone. In 1958 it amounted to a handful of houses. By the middle nineteen sixties it had been extended to over a thousand homes and demand had already outrun supply. The state sold off the initial stock of public housing. The zone lies on swampy ground near the shore and floods in the rainy seasons, when the drainage canals carrying animal waste, human waste and rubbish out to sea overflow into the streets and the houses. Its population was estimated at eighty thousand in the nineteen eighties and had reached four hundred thousand by the nineteen nineties. It was later renamed Cite Soleil. Its position beside the factories supplied the export economy with cheap labour, and unemployment there runs at about eighty per cent.

African independence came through a mixture of negotiation and violence, frequently both at the same time. Nationalist leaders presented the transfer of power as a victory over colonial masters and the fulfilment of a people's destiny. Governments in London, Paris and Brussels presented it as the last stage of a mandate they had always intended to complete. Neither version survives inspection. Armed movements did occasionally beat colonial forces in the field, and those victories rarely destroyed the political system already in place, and they rarely spoke for a whole population. What usually happened was a negotiated settlement, which was a considerable achievement in its own right. Departing administrations sometimes left behind friendly governments run by men they had educated. They also left social and political structures so unequal and so unstable that they could not hold. Underneath the failures of decolonisation sat something older: a contest over scarce political and material resources, fought with upheaval and the building of new communities, running through African politics since the nineteenth century.

The first Haitian refugee boat detected in Florida arrived in 1963. Its passengers asked for asylum, were refused and were sent home. Ten years passed before another sailboat reached the state. Richman takes the dates from Alex Stepick, and those isolated arrivals stand at the head of a movement that later became the defining image of Haitian migration. Through the first half of the twentieth century Haitian workers had gone instead to Cuba, to other parts of Haiti and to the Dominican Republic, following North American investment in capitalised agriculture. In the second half of the century they went to the United States and Canada, with New York the principal destination, and also to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Quebec, Boston and Chicago. One wooden boat turned away in 1963 sits at the beginning of a sequence that put more than two hundred thousand Haitians in South Florida within two decades of the first large crossings.

The League's leaders described women as a class defined by labour. Women did the work of producing labourers and citizens with their bodies, and every other kind of work they did was discounted, whether they were mothers, cultivators, domestic servants, intellectuals or professionals. Jeanne Perez, who edited La Voix des Femmes, wrote that women would no longer accept being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. The organisers wanted the material contribution counted. Haitian women had a share in producing the country's agricultural wealth equal to men's or larger, a claim resting on the peasant cultivators, the market women and the madan sara who moved and sold the nation's food. Women also did most of the teaching, formal and informal. Against all of it stood the Napoleonic Code inherited from the colony, which classed a married woman as a minor and denied her the right to hold her own wages. The League backed the argument with night schools and housing for working-class girls, both still running in the 1960s.