African history had one address in America and it was Howard

Before the 1960s the study of early African history in the United States had a small number of addresses, and nearly all of them were Historically Black Colleges and Universities. William Leo Hansberry taught it at Howard, and his colleagues at comparable institutions carried the rest. Evidence was not the difficulty. Excavation reports, Arabic chronicles, linguistic work and classical accounts of African states had been accumulating for a century, available to any scholar who thought the subject worth an afternoon. The white academy did not, and the reason was racial rather than evidentiary. Politics broke it open. African independence movements from the late 1950s and the civil rights movement in the United States made the absence impossible to maintain, and departments began appointing Africanists. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Haiti has been handled by the same method. The record was always there. The willingness to treat it as history arrived only once the people it concerned had forced the question in the street.

The state of siege that Kebreau ran seemed to restrict every candidate except one. The press, which had said what it liked since Magloire fell, was curbed. Two days before the vote Jumelle withdrew from a contest he had lost, and Luc Fouche stood down from a senate race in Cap-Haitien, remarking that a careful look at the realities of the hour left him no illusions. About 950,000 Haitians voted on Sunday 22 September 1957, in a ballot the army had organised in full. Jean-Pierre Gingras called it the perfect peacefulness of fixed bayonets. Duvalier took 679,884 votes and Dejoie 266,992. Duvalier's candidates swept the senate and took two thirds of the lower house. Port-au-Prince, home to both the elite and Fignole's crowds, was the one place he lost badly. Duvalier told the New York Times that the great issue was honesty. Dejoie put the crooked share of the ballot at eighty five percent. The president-elect's favourite proverb held that since Guinea a black man has always betrayed a black man.

The campaign opened in 1956 after the resignation and exile of General Paul Magloire. Four candidates stood. Louis Dejoie, an industrialist and southern landowner, was the choice of the light-skinned bourgeoisie. Clement Jumelle spoke for the technocrats enriched under Magloire. Daniel Fignole, leader of the Worker and Peasant Movement founded in 1946, had the Port-au-Prince proletariat, the poor and middle peasantry and the lower ranks of the army. Francois Duvalier presented himself as the continuator of the 1946 revolution and the leader of the black middle classes, recruiting among northern landowners, part of the Syrian and Lebanese merchants and the black middle cadres of the army. Between December 1956 and May 1957 four provisional governments came and went. Fignole held the provisional presidency briefly and was overthrown and exiled by the army faction under General Antonio Kebreau. Kebreau then took four months to prepare a rigged election. On 22 September 1957 Duvalier was installed.

Francois Duvalier became president of Haiti on 22 October 1957. He was born in Port-au-Prince in April 1907, the son of a black justice of the peace, and he grew up under the American occupation, radicalised by the open racism of the Marines. He qualified in medicine in 1934, spent ten years as a hospital doctor, studied tropical disease control at the University of Michigan, and made his name in Haiti by helping to eradicate yaws. He was also a houngan, and he built his public image deliberately on Baron Samedi, the loa who governs the dead. A new constitution promulgated that December granted universal suffrage. Within twelve months he had survived an attempt by soldiers to remove him and had created the Tonton Macoutes. Noirisme had been assembled by Jean Price-Mars and his students as an argument for the cultural dignity of black Haiti. It became the official doctrine of a police state, which is what happens to an idea about pride once a government needs it to justify a militia.