1940 to 1943 · Africanspan

The war on African soil is fought on one strip of coast

El Alamein saves the canal, and the threat that outlasts Rommel is Egyptian nationalism.

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1940s · Africandecade

Roosevelt promises Morocco sovereignty and France answers with arrests

Istiqlal suppressed, the AML attacked from both sides, and 1945 put down with great brutality.

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The 1940s to 1956 · Africanspan

Morocco and Tunisia are both free of France by 1956

Sultan Sidi Muhammad's protest and Bourguiba's Neo-Destour break the same empire in the same year.

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The 1940s to the 1960s · Africanspan

Land taken from Kikuyu farmers becomes the Mau Mau war

Kenyatta founded the KAU in 1947; by 1952 the landless were fighting a war he had not called.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Alice Garoute answers an assemblyman who called her manure

A politics made of tea parties, novels and refusal, with Carolle Charles warning against romance.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

War and hunger push the league toward a politics of labour

By the middle of the decade the argument was about wages, not about principles.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

The league calls Haitian women slaves and sets out to prove it

Sylvain-Bouchereau's phrase turns into a decade of research meant to substantiate it.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Haitian feminists refuse to choose between class and race

They talk of enslavement like the Marxists and still intend to earn, own and travel.

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The 1940s · Diasporadecade

Haiti becomes a workshop for Black artists from three continents

Dunham, Hurston, Suzanne Cesaire, Langston Hughes and Lavinia Williams all worked there.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Jeanne Sylvain's family letters double as political reporting

Epidemics, legislation and the movement all pass through one woman's correspondence.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

A decade of attrition runs up to the assembly attacks of 1946

Misogynist speech, disposable lives and absent care, documented by women about women.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

A newborn found at Cite-Vincent belongs to a long lineage

Suicide, infanticide and remade kinship were how enslaved women refused, and the refusal survived.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

The league's politics were practised through the body

Health, kinship and exhaustion enter the movement's thinking by way of Jeanne Sylvain's letters.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Twenty thousand women cross Port-au-Prince before dawn

Coffee had to be poured at seven, so they left home at five and came back after dark.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

The census files live-in maids into their employers' families

A commute of one staircase, unrecorded, and a statistical kinship that erases her own.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Amise nursed the scholar who mapped the city, then guided her

The women who walked between the class zones were the femmes du peuple, and the Foyer was theirs.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

The city grew past its walls and women had no room in it

The Foyer was one opening. Sanders Johnson records that the sea was the other.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

My body is a piece of land

Domestic workers who walked out were called thieves. Carolle Charles records what they held.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Someone at the Foyer might notice a woman watching the sea

Recognition, care and accountability, assembled slowly, as an intervention in the city itself.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Jeanne Sylvain looks at cleared land and wants to plant something

Letters, research and the Foyer all proceed from one claim: people produce space.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

Haiti's population figures come from the baptism registers

Comhaire-Sylvain warns that births outside hospitals and outside marriage never entered the count.

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The colonial era to the 1940s · Haitianspan

Sabine Lamour reads plasaj back to the plantation

Several women's labour on one garden plot kept a man's land out of a proprietor's hands.

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The 1940s · Haitiandecade

The coffee harvest decides when Haitians can afford to marry

Cash moves between the countryside and the towns on the schedule the crop sets.

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1940 · Haitianyear only

An Irish missionary gives Creole its first technical spelling

Ormonde McConnell built a thirty three symbol alphabet out of adult literacy work in the countryside.

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1940 · Haitianyear only

Haiti gives its written record a house

A national library in a country where the colony had made teaching a slave to read a crime.

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1940 · Haitianyear only

The league reorganises itself like a peasant work party

Sylvain-Bouchereau wants a small trained core, and what she describes is a kombit.

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1940 · Haitianyear only

The league admits in print that its ideas have not landed

After a decade Madeleine writes that the organisation still cannot make anyone accept them.

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1940 · Haitianyear only

Jeanne Perez puts Sanite Belair on a Port-au-Prince stage

Her first play is about a soldier who faced a French firing squad with her eyes open.

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October 1940 · Haitianmonth known

The women's league calls a halt and counts up five years

Madeleine announces in La Voix des Femmes that the league will pull back and rebuild its method.

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1941 to 1945 · Africanspan

Churchill signs a charter on self-determination and Africa reads it

Manchester in 1945 drops the polite petitions and demands the empires be taken apart.

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1941 to 1945 · Haitianspan

The war economy takes the last of Haitian women's wages

Wages that were already low fall further while the price of everything else rises.

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1941 to 1945 · Haitianspan

The state bans Vodou as religion and funds it as folklore

Price-Mars's ethnology is respectable while the ceremonies it describes are being broken up.

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1941 to 1943 · Haitianspan

SHADA needed a newspaper before it needed a rubber tree

Lescot and Dartigue spend on goodwill campaigns to keep the peasantry quiet about the land.

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1941 to 1944 · Haitianspan

Seven million dollars and ninety thousand workers grow no rubber

A drought, a fire, and a vine that would not root in the ground chosen for it.

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1941 to 1944 · Haitianspan

Rubber that would not grow replaced the trees that fed families

Clearing standing crops for a rubber vine that failed, SHADA cost families the trees they ate from.

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1941 to 1944 · Haitianspan

SHADA takes a hundred thousand hectares of Haitian ground

By 1943 the company had cleared 47,177 acres and would hold land on the scale of the old sugar estates.

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April 1941 · Caribbeanmonth known

Suzanne Cesaire turns a German ethnologist against Europe

Her essay in Tropiques denies that Western civilisation stands above the cultures of Africa.

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15 May 1941 to 23 February 1942 · Haitianspan

Lescot takes the army, the legislature and the constitution

Nine months from inauguration to suspended charter, with a war declaration for every month.

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15 May 1941 · Haitian

Lescot brings Haiti into the war and loses the countryside

Rubber takes the peasants' land, the Church takes their religion, and Trujillo publishes the bribes.

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1941 · Haitianyear only

Anti-Vodou inquisition flares up despite Price-Mars rehabilitation

Price-Mars had been arguing for Vodou since the 1930s; it did not stop the 1941 burning.

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1941 · Haitianyear only

Lescot fills the state with men of his own colour

The upper administration goes almost entirely to mulattoes, and the Church gets its campaign.

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1941 · Haitianyear only

The Church breaks the temples with the president's blessing

Thousands are made to renounce African religious practice and the objects are destroyed.

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1941 · Haitianyear only

Vincent leaves office having criminalised the practice of Vodou

In his final year the president gives state backing to the Church's antisuperstitious drive.

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1941 · Haitianyear only

Price-Mars and Roumain get a state institute for African Haiti

The Institut d'Ethnologie makes the study of African traditions in Haiti official business.

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1941 · Haitianyear only

Haiti is enlisted to solve an American rubber shortage

Lescot signs SHADA: hevea from the Philippines, planted on land the peasantry lived on.

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1942 to 1944 · Haitianspan

Twelve million dollars, a million felled trees, five tons of rubber

SHADA's programme took 100,000 acres, employed 92,000 peasants and produced almost nothing.

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1942 · Haitianyear only

A woman's play, a woman's history and Vodou on one stage

Sténio Vincent had just handed power to Élie Lescot, and both had treated Vodou as a problem.

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1942 · Haitianyear only

It is real, nobody calls the spirits, and so it is folklore

De Pradines kept the ceremony out of the performance, and other Haitians used the gap for their own ends.

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1942 · Haitianyear only

The play was the letter to Marie-Madeleine, finally staged

Six years earlier she had written to her niece about summoning a revolutionary woman.

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1942 · Haitianyear only

A child calls out marraine in every act and refuses the ending

Perez invented a filleule so that Sanité's death would be interrupted three times over.

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1942 to 1943 · Haitianspan

Jeanne Sylvain brings a Chicago social work degree home

She came back into Lescot's wartime economy and the Pan-American networks it depended on.

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1942 to 1943 · Haitianspan

Lescot bans the ceremonies and a band answers the next year

Jazz des Jeunes was founded to play the yanvalou, the ibo and the petro in public.

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1942 · Haitianyear only

Hollywood answers the oath of rejection with a picture about escaped zombies

The plot has the dead walking out of the temples while the country is in turmoil.

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22 February 1942 · Haitian

Gunfire in a Delmas church ends the campaign against Vodou

A mission service against superstition was broken up by shots, and the state pulled its support.

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6 April 1942 to 9 September 1943 · Haitianspan

Haiti sells its cotton to a war and gets an air force

Lescot and Welles sign at the Shoreham, and six worn out Douglas biplanes start the Corps d'Aviation.

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10 August 1942 · Haitian

A Haitian woman puts a revolutionary woman on the Rex stage

Doubters said Sanité Bélair was too familiar a subject; the reviewer said Perez had made it urgent.

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10 August 1942 · Haitian

The audience knew Sanité would die and held its breath anyway

A reviewer described going breathless toward an execution the country had known about for 140 years.

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10 August 1942 · Haitian

A voice from 1802 is used to galvanise a hall in 1942

The reviewer remembered the sound: a woman calling soldiers toward victory and freedom.

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10 August 1942 · Haitian

Vodou songs are written into the script of a patriotic play

Perez put the religion of the majority into a founding drama and gave Sanité a goddaughter to carry it.

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10 August 1942 · Haitian

The first Haitian folk songs sung on a stage came in a feminist play

Emerente de Pradines said she sang her first two folk songs playing Sanité Bélair's goddaughter.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

The League opens a house for working women in the capital

Classes in childcare, language and cooking, a library, and a room where they could actually meet.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

Four hundred and sixty workers pass through the Foyer in a year

Sylvain-Bouchereau's year end report counted more women through the door than the League had members.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

A women's league writes its year end report as a war dispatch

Her closing essays of 1943 named the enemies as ignorance, illness, misery and injustice.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

Sylvain-Bouchereau counts ten years and finds the lines drawn

A decade of experiments had hardened political divisions that ran through her own movement.

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1943 to 1945 · Haitianspan

The war makes the merchants rich and empties out the women

Guaranteed American contracts enriched the import houses while the markets went on extracting labour.

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1943 to 1945 · Haitianspan

Thirty seven and unmarried, and asked about it at every wedding

Her sister Yvonne, single at thirty six, said there had been no shortage of suitors.

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1943 to 1945 · Haitianspan

Marriage would have made her wages stop being hers

Her first paycheque was a step up, and Haitian law would have handed it to a husband.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

The Chicago trained social worker becomes SHADA's translator

A Propos de SHADA sent her into the countryside with engineers to write up the rubber programme.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

She liked the paycheque and believed the project would work

Peasants took the subsidies and townspeople expected work, on the strength of Lescot's Washington record.

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1943 to 1944 · Haitianspan

Her job was to make a failing project read as a success

Reading the papers and clipping every mention taught her what the newsletter was actually for.

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1943 to 1944 · Haitianspan

She would not send the SHADA paper to her own sisters

She withheld the newsletter from the readers she trusted most and kept trying to smuggle in jokes.

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1943 to 1944 · Haitianspan

The curriculum was set by the students who asked for it

Short of equipment and short of teachers, Madeleine and Jeanne built the timetable from requests.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

A women's centre built so women could go around the state

Schooling, training and a meeting room, supplied by women where the government supplied none.

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1943 to 1944 · Haitianspan

The girls being studied kept teaching the researchers instead

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's fieldwork subjects had walked around her questions for years.

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1943 to 1944 · Haitianspan

Offered dominoes after ninety hour weeks, they asked for English

Sylvain-Bouchereau bought cards and games; the students chose typing and language classes.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

Marguerite cooked for the League and got half a sentence

She appears in the archive because the flu went through the whole house on Rue Christophe.

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1943 to 1944 · Haitianspan

Women leave the Foyer in one group because the dark is safer that way

The class was meant to end at seven, and hundreds of students stayed past it anyway.

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1943 to 1945 · Haitianspan

One school staged Vodou on the Rex and taught Catholic marriage in class

Lorimer Denis walked the teachers through the ethnology collections and explained what everything meant.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

A literacy campaign teaches Creole out of Protestant tracts

Frank Laubach revised McConnell's spelling and the government of Elie Lescot printed it.

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1941 to 1945 · Haitianspan

A wartime rubber scheme takes 150,000 hectares and exports no rubber

Japan had taken the plantations of Southeast Asia, so the Americans tried a vine in Haiti.

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1943 · Haitianyear only

SHADA holds a fifth of all cultivated land in Haiti

Rubber and timber for the American war economy on 133,400 hectares of concession.

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September 1943 · Haitianmonth known

Cahiers d'Haïti reports the guest lists of the Lescot elite

The magazine printed the dinners and the clubs, and the black middle class read them.

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October 1943 to 15 May 1945 · Haitianspan

Lescot rewrites the constitution and postpones the Four Freedoms

Roosevelt called him an old friend; the assembly gave him seven year terms and no elections.

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November 1943 · Haitianmonth known

A fever with a terrible depression closes the schools by noon

Doctors argued over dengue, a cold, or a flu that might be Dominican, six years after the massacre.

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November 1943 · Haitianmonth known

The flu reaches the Sylvain house and takes a grandmother

Too ill to keep track, Madeleine could not recall whether she had written to Suzanne in the Congo.

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November 1943 · Haitianmonth known

Jeanne Sylvain sets the fever's depression beside women's deaths

The symptom the papers ignored sat next to her record of women's suicides and infanticides.

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November 1943 to May 1945 · Haitianspan

Weddings every week, and Jeanne Sylvain calls it an epidemic

Between two Novembers she was invited to a marriage almost weekly and treated it as an outbreak.

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3 November 1943 · Haitian

Mornings for the rubber paper, afternoons for the Foyer

The Foyer Ouvrier opened during the influenza outbreak and she taught in it without pay.

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3 November 1943 · Haitian

Four hundred women want in and the room holds thirty

Peasant migrants turned urban poor were the group the state watched hardest and served least.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

A club for black professionals becomes the hinge of noiriste politics

Emile Saint Lot's patronage gave excluded men a room, and the room turned into a movement.

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1944 to 1949 · Haitianspan

DeWitt Peters finds that his chauffeur is one of Haiti's great painters

Rigaud Benoit drove the car, Castera Bazile kept the yard, and both of them could paint.

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1944 to 1945 · Africanspan

De Gaulle offers reform at Brazzaville to hold the empire together

African troops and African supply routes had kept Free France alive, and the bill came due.

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1944 to the 1950s · Africanspan

A farmers' union in Cote d'Ivoire ends forced labour in French Africa

Felix Houphouet-Boigny went to Paris as a deputy and came home with the corvee abolished.

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1944 to the 1950s · Africanspan

Nigeria's nationalists cannot make one movement out of three regions

The NCNC set out to speak for a whole country and was heard as the party of one people.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

Aime Cesaire spends a month lecturing in Haiti and the room changes

Jeanne Sylvain wrote ahead to her sisters asking whether the visiting poet was Martinican or Guadeloupean.

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January 1944 · Haitianmonth known

A newspaper asks whether hunger or madness is killing Haitian infants

Le Nouvelliste printed the question as a choice between two answers, and the phrasing did the work.

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January 1944 · Haitianmonth known

Jeanne Sylvain answers the infanticide question with arithmetic

Lescot cut staple prices, raised import taxes, and left the wage at a gourde and a half.

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January 1944 to January 1945 · Haitianspan

Three laws in thirteen months rewrite what a Haitian woman may keep

Wages in January 1944, children's inheritance in December, the marriage tax gone by January 1945.

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January 1944 · Haitianmonth known

The family's reporter takes a job at the rubber company's newspaper

From mid 1943 Jeanne Sylvain wrote for A Propos de SHADA and watched the scheme from inside.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

SHADA cuts eighty six thousand jobs with a single decision

Two months after Jeanne Sylvain's warning the payroll fell from over ninety thousand to four thousand.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

The rubber scheme cut down the fruit trees that were the household savings

Clearing land for cryptostegia removed the provision grounds that carried families through bad months.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

Losing the land turns peasants into workers and daughters into servants

Alex Dupuy calls what followed the American occupation a process of proletarianization.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

Domestic service in the capital carried low wages, long hours and violence

Guerda Nicolas and Casta Guillaume weigh what the break from land did to the women it moved.

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January 1944 · Haitianmonth known

A baby girl is taken from the water at LaSaline in the first days of 1944

The road beside the sea was the same road the Foyer students walked home along.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

Yvonne Sylvain worked a few streets from where the baby was found

Her clinic covered LaSaline and Cite Vincent, so the story reached her before her hospital shift did.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

A Haitian wage law and a Pennsylvania bill answer the same problem

Sadie Alexander drafted for domestic workers a year before the League reached the Haitian senate.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

The wage law covered wives, and most Haitian women were not wives

Most Haitian couples lived in plasaj, an arrangement the civil code declined to recognise.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

The League attacked the marriage law and defended marriage itself

Members disagreed about divorce and agreed that being addressed as Madan was worth something.

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1944 to 1945 · Haitianspan

Marriage meant something different to every party that legislated it

Between 1944 and 1945 the church, the state and Haitian women wanted incompatible things from one word.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

The inheritance reform kept a married man's later children out

A married father could legally recognise the children of that marriage and no others.

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1944 to 1945 · Haitianspan

Lescot's marriage laws were an attempt to keep peasants on the land

More weddings meant more recognised heirs, and an heir stays where the plot is.

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1944 to 1945 · Haitianspan

What worried the state was how freely Haitian women moved

She bore the children, worked the plot and carried the produce to town, all in the same week.

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6 January 1944 · Haitian

Infanticide enters the weekly news and nobody treats it as an emergency

Deaths from hunger and births on the pavement had become routine items by the start of 1944.

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February 1944 · Haitianmonth known

An ethnologist named Duvalier turns the revolution into a religious claim

Thirteen years before the presidency, the slogan was already in print.

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March 1944 · Haitianmonth known

The rubber vine will not cooperate and Jeanne Sylvain explains why

A year into the job she wrote that the plant was being asked for more than it could give.

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19 April 1944 · Haitian

Haitian women win every office but president, and still cannot vote

Five days after a Pan-American fête, the assembly amended Article 4 for women over thirty.

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14 May 1944 · Haitian

Haitian painting gets an address on 14 May 1944

Peters rented rooms in the capital and a national school of painting came out of them.

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1944 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier leaves for Ann Arbor as the Griot movement disperses

The review has closed, one poet has recanted, and the future dictator studies public health in Michigan.

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December 1944 · Haitianmonth known

December 1944 lets children born outside marriage inherit land

Before the amendment, a birth recorded as illegitimate closed a father's estate permanently.

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1945 to the early 1950s · Africanspan

Europe invests harder in Africa exactly as Africans demand it leave

After 1945 the colonial powers valued their African territories more highly than ever before.

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1945 to the 1960s · Africanspan

Empire ends by negotiation in some places and by war in others

Kenya, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique fought; most of West Africa argued its way out in committee.

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1945 to the 1960s · Africanspan

Most African independence was negotiated and both sides claimed the win

Nationalists called it liberation and the metropole called it the plan working out on schedule.

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1945 to the 1960s · Africanspan

India, Japan, Washington and Moscow change what Africa can demand

Roosevelt wanted a timetable for decolonisation and his successors wanted the poor world kept from communism.

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1945 to the 1950s · Africanspan

Portugal held on longest because it was the poorest colonial power

Britain recovered fastest and let go fastest, having worked out how to keep the trade anyway.

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1945 to the 1950s · Africanspan

Marketing boards pay farmers a fraction and build the resentment

The Tanganyika groundnut scheme cost British taxpayers millions and grew almost nothing.

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1945 to the 1950s · Africanspan

Congolese uranium goes into the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Belgium and Portugal, the weakest of the colonial powers, governed with the least give.

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1945 to the 1950s · Africanspan

London plans a slow handover with special powers for white settlers

From 1947 Britain courted the educated elite it had ignored, and never imagined one man, one vote.

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After 1945 · Africanspan

The African nation had to be built inside borders drawn for filing

Anti-colonial protest and nationalism were different things and the gap between them mattered.

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1945 to 1963 · Africanspan

Mau Mau loses the war and ends the settler state in Kenya

Britain crushed the rebellion in the field and then conceded the case that had produced it.

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1945 to the 1960s · Africanspan

Africa's new states inherited illiteracy and a hurried governing class

Colonial schooling reached a minority, and the men who took over had been pushed through it at speed.

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1945 · Haitianyear only

A year out of SHADA, Jeanne Perez goes back to look at the cut forest

She had written the publicity that kept the clearing quiet, and then she walked the ground it covered.

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1945 · Haitianyear only

Haitian women map their own routes from the mountains to the capital

Kenscoff footpaths drawn by hand, and a first reader that taught a girl the shape of her country.

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1945 · Haitianyear only

Lescot cuts the marriage fee from twenty gourdes to half a gourde

Cheap weddings for the countryside, and a register in which peasant households finally appear.

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1945 · Haitianyear only

Lescot blames peasant unions for a population he never counted

He called rural family arrangements polygamy and made them the cause of crowding in the towns.

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1945 · Haitianyear only

The president who cleared the land blamed the people who left it

Migration to the towns had been rising since the occupation, and his account of the crowds left it out.

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1945 · Caribbeanyear only

A Dominican intellectual calls the massacre an unimaginable victory

Pena Batlle used the popular word for it, la poda, the pruning.

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1945 to 1953 · Haitianspan

Two books give Haitian Vodou an Egyptian pedigree

Maximilien and Rigaud traced the lwa to the Nile, and priests in the capital read them.

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the 1940s · Haitiandecade

A catechism teaches children that the priest is Satan's slave

Question and answer, learned by heart, in a country founded by people who had been enslaved.

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15 January 1945 · Haitian

The Haitian marriage tax is repealed under Lescot

A levy that fell on married women's earnings came off the books in 1945.

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22 March 1945 · Diaspora

The Arab League is founded before the war has ended

Independence had been won piece by piece and the pieces then agreed to hold together.

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May 1945 · Diasporamonth known

Harlem holds a memorial service for Jacques Roumain

Earl Browder spoke and Canada Lee read a poem Langston Hughes wrote for the day.

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December 1945 · Haitianmonth known

Andre Breton lectures in Port-au-Prince and the students catch fire

The founder of surrealism arrived as La Ruche was starting, and the two events met.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

Depestre publishes Gerbe de sang and calls the despair fertile

A twenty year old poet reads the fall of a president as the first move in a much longer change.

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1 to 11 January 1946 · Haitianspan

Four lines of verse in La Ruche bring down a president in ten days

Students, then teachers, then shopkeepers stopped work, and the guns at Fort National fired three times.

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1946 to 1949 · Haitianspan

Trujillo funds killer teams and an invasion column against Estime

The Dominican ambassador told Haiti's foreign minister the whole plan on the day after Christmas.

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1946 to 1949 · Haitianspan

Estime builds a labour federation to outflank Fignole and loses it

By 1949 he was ordering workers to buy bonds, and the peasants stopped working and ate mangoes.

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1946 to 1950 · Africanspan

The model colony turns on Britain over cocoa trees and shop prices

Two and a half million trees cut for disease control, and a boycott that forced European firms down.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

The suffrage debate becomes a hearing on whether women can be trusted

Emile St. Lot called them bad mothers and dictators, and the Ligue left the hall under military escort.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

The Ligue answers the assembly in print within a few days

Five essays, and one parenthesis that put an unnamed woman into the historical record for good.

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January 1946 · Haitianmonth known

Students bring down Lescot and the Ligue's members march with them

A week of protest, a military intervention, and a window that Haitian women tried to climb through.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

Noiristes and communists arrive at the assembly already fighting

Their shared front split in June over whether colour or class was the country's real division.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

The split between state and nation runs through the women's gallery

One woman stood entirely outside the government; the others were schooled and married into its edges.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

She came to the assembly on purpose, and other groups waited outside

Fignole's steamroller filled the street, and his movement ran a women's bureau of its own.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

Yvonne Sylvain's savings sit in an American bank for nine months

A friendship across the water covered one Haitian woman while her government did not exist.

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1946 to 1949 · Haitianspan

Estime comes to power on a postwar rise in coffee and sisal

The budget nearly doubled in three years and the noiriste argument looked proved.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

A masons' union forms in 1946 and is gone by the mid 1960s

After that, the quality of a house depended on which boss you hired.

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11 January 1946 · Haitian

Lescot falls and the era of uncontested mulatto rule ends

Land seizures, the war on Vodou, family corruption and a world war all arrived at the palace together.

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12 January to 16 August 1946 · Haitianspan

A colonels' committee runs Haiti for seven months and hands it back

Parties multiplied, strikes spread, and a labour leader's deputy was a doctor who had written as Abderrahman.

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1946 · Diasporayear only

Napoleon's second recommendation returns as emigration

Voluntary exile begins in 1946, accelerates under Duvalier, and becomes an outflow after 1980.

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1946 to 1957 · Haitianspan

American favouritism toward one faction produces the noiriste reaction

By installing mulatto elites as clients, the occupation set up the elections that brought Estime and Duvalier.

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1946 · Caribbeanyear only

France finally does in Martinique what Louverture proposed in 1801

Ninety-eight years after abolition, the islands become departments with citizenship and assemblies.

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1946 · Haitianyear only

A League member defines feminism as torment and collective help

Marie-Thérèse Poitevien made torment a prerequisite of feminist commitment.

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16 July 1946 · Haitian

A verdict of inferiority pronounced since 1804 disgusts and revolts us

The commission had dropped the women's demands, so the League's president wrote to it in public.

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August 1946 · Haitianmonth known

Estime takes office hated by the elite and by the street at once

The old families called him a usurper while Fignole's followers pulled down the capital's lamp posts.

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August to 22 November 1946 · Haitianspan

Foreign governments strike the socialist clauses out of Haiti's constitution

He wanted a ban on foreign landholding and legal unions, and five capitals objected in writing.

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9 August 1946 · Haitian

A woman of the people is turned away from the women's gallery

The assembly was deciding whether Haitian women could vote, and a soldier stopped one at the door.

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16 August 1946 · Haitian

Estime's election puts the black middle class in the Palais National

For thirty years the presidency had belonged to the light skinned families of the capital.

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16 August 1946 · Haitian

Estime is elected with submachine guns resting in the galleries

Two ballots in the Palais Legislatif, half tracks in the street, and an army that kept its promise.

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16 August 1946 · Haitian

Estime fills the ministries with black professionals and taxes income

Schools, farm settlements, a seat at the OAS, and the public health service handed to Francois Duvalier.

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October 1946 · Haitianmonth known

A Christian Democratic party opens for business in Port-au-Prince

Edouard Tardieu's party defended private property and attacked the unregulated market in the same breath.

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October 1946 to May 1947 · Haitianspan

Estime puts his rivals in the cabinet and then sacks them together

He promoted Lavaud to general, renamed the Garde, and offered its three commanders embassies abroad.

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December 1946 to 29 December 1948 · Haitianspan

Haiti asks Washington for relief and gets four million for the Artibonite

Two missions came home with nothing before a quieter negotiation produced a valley project.

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1947 to 1949 · Haitianspan

The United Nations adopts Haiti as a test case and finds no money

Experts surveyed the country from Cap to Cayes and produced 327 pages nobody would pay for.

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1947 to 1950 · Africanspan

Nkrumah splits from the lawyers and builds a party that breaks laws

The British liked Danquah's polite arguments, and the young men who had been rioting did not.

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1947 to 1957 · Africanspan

Ghana becomes the first independent state in sub-Saharan Africa

Britain called Nkrumah a wild man, lost an election to him, and let him out of prison to govern.

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1947 · Diasporayear only

Jeanne Perez goes to Harlem and carries the lesson home to Haiti

She had already written her niece a tour of Christophe's citadel; the route now ran up Manhattan.

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1947 · Haitianyear only

A street guide to Port-au-Prince becomes a survey of class

Comhaire-Sylvain read the wards and found servants living inside the districts of the rich.

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1947 · Haitianyear only

Foreign scholars are brought to an initiation at Leogane

Misdor's house was the first in its district to take the ason, and outsiders were invited.

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1947 · Haitianyear only

Haiti buys back the bonds and American control of its money ends

An internal loan retires six million dollars of debt and closes the last treaty obligation.

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September 1947 · Haitianmonth known

Estime nationalises the banana trade and hands it to seven friends

The chartered ships that replaced Standard Fruit's had no refrigeration, and the fruit arrived rotten.

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1948 to 1961 · Africanspan

Uganda's road to independence is a fight over who will inherit it

Britain deported the kabaka in 1953 and made Buganda's separateness the central question.

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1948 to 1963 · Africanspan

Mau Mau is beaten in the field and wins the argument in London

Britain jailed Kenyatta and filled detention camps, then began doubting the settlers were worth keeping.

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1949 · Haitianyear only

Haitian painters fill a cathedral with the country's own sacred imagery

Bishop Voegeli commissioned murals and received a biblical world set in the Haitian landscape.

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1949 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier convenes a national labour congress from inside the ministry

The under-secretary for labour called in the unions to discuss insurance for Haitian workers.

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1949 to 1950 · Haitianspan

The bicentennial fair opens with locked doors and a dance troupe

Six million dollars bought an aquarium with no water in it and buildings barely begun.

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1949 · Haitianyear only

A new city on the seashore, and a theatre for the drums

Port au Prince turned two hundred, tourists arrived, and temple rhythms went on a public stage.

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1949 · Haitianyear only

A shantytown is bulldozed to make room for a promenade

The seafront walk built for the bicentennial began with a forced relocation.

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26 May 1949 · Haitian

Michel-Rolph Trouillot is born into an argument about history

The man who would ask who gets silenced grew up in a house where the past was the family trade.

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1949 · Haitianyear only

A bishop gives Haitian painters the walls of his cathedral

Selden Rodman wanted murals on the fair buildings and got a Nativity in a Haitian village.

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July 1949 to 10 May 1950 · Haitianspan

A mob wrecks the Senate and the army removes Estime

Thirteen senators refused a constitutional revision, so a crowd came down from the market.

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1949 · Caribbeanyear only

A Cuban novel about Haiti gives world fiction the marvellous real

Carpentier came to Haiti in 1943 and left with a theory that reorganised Latin American writing.

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29 July 1949 · Haitian

Les Griots gets its summing up from one of its own

Henock Trouillot totted up twenty years of the movement in the journal's closing numbers.

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October 1949 · Haitianmonth known

Haiti builds a town on the border and Trujillo closes the road

Six hundred thousand dollars bought a bank, a theatre and a church for a place nobody could reach.

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