From Haiti to Congo: Colonial Fault Lines in the Life and Work of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain

This essay explores the early work of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain in Congo. Despite Comhaire-Sylvain being renowned as Haiti’s first woman anthropologist, her life and extensive scholar-ship in Africa have been largely overlooked. Given her unique positionality and formal training in Europe during a period when ethnology relied on empire to assert its utility to the state, Comhaire-Sylvain’s work unfolded along colonial fault lines, a dimension this essay seeks to tease out. The analysis focuses on a 1947 essay she published in La Voix des Femmes, the newspaper of Haiti’s first women’s rights organization. This piece, a literary sketch, provides insights into Comhaire-Sylvain’s perspectives on working-class women, racial segregation, and the gendered division of labor. It explores the “Zone neutre” of Léopoldville (later Kinshasa) and reveals a Caribbean scholar’s observations of life in a racially divided African colonial city, offering a precursor to Frantz Fanon’s portrayal of the settler town and the colonized town in The Wretched of the Earth.