The class the Foyer taught is the one that carried Duvalier into power

Twenty years of research let Comhaire-Sylvain watch a part of Port-au-Prince change. She wrote about Zone III, which was made up of the students and the teachers of the Foyer, and she called them the most vigorous of all the social classes in the capital, the one most likely to advance quickly in the years ahead. Their appetite for connections across class lines, she noted, made them sympathetic to the peasantry. What she had been charting for two decades is what others have since called the Black middle class. Then in 1959 she wrote down where its energy had gone: the support of this group had put Francois Duvalier in the presidency. The women the Foyer educated became the constituency that carried him there. A feminist project measured its own success and found that its graduates had helped install the government that would spend the next thirty years closing every association in the country, including theirs.

Brussels intended to hold the Congo. Local elections in 1957 and 1958 were meant to satisfy the demand for reform, and instead they gave Congolese politics a structure it had lacked. Nationalist parties multiplied. The broadest of them formed around Patrice Lumumba, who in most respects was the only Congolese leader trying to build an organisation covering the entire territory rather than one region or one ethnic base. Political rallies in 1958 and 1959 turned into riots and the violence spread. The Belgians started losing control. They had delayed elections too long to manage the transition on their own terms or even in an orderly way. The colony had been run first as Leopold's personal estate and then as Belgium's, and it entered independence with almost no trained administrators and no political machinery of its own. The chaos that swallowed the Congo after 1960 was already implied in the way the last three years were handled.

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.

Manbo Esperancia Federic, a priestess in the coastal town of Jacmel, made her first spirit marriage in 1959, to Ezili Freda, the light-skinned Kreyol spirit of love who is fond of luxury. She later married Ezili Danto and Ezili Je Wouj in a single ceremony, since as she put it the two of them walk together. Each spirit comes with a specification. Freda takes pink and white, sweet pale food such as rice cooked in cinnamon milk, sweet drinks, mild cigarettes and a particular French perfume. Danto is a hard working and fiercely protective mother associated with the black pigs of the Haitian countryside, and takes fried pork, Florida water, strong rum and unfiltered cigarettes. Je Wouj takes her name from the red pepper her devotees rub into their eyes when she manifests. Esperancia keeps a shrine to all three in her bedroom and credits them with carrying her through personal disaster.