Britain sells its African empire as a wall against Moscow

Lenin treated empire as the highest stage of capitalism and its weakest link, and through the Comintern in the 1920s the young Soviet Union encouraged revolutionary movements outside Europe, with more attention to Asia than to Africa. Under Stalin the policy turned inward and Africa was left alone until his death in 1953. From the middle of the 1950s Khrushchev and then Brezhnev supplied money and weapons to movements on the left. In its first phase the Cold War argued for keeping African empires rather than winding them up. Britain presented its colonies as a barrier to communism and its renewed colonial investment as a Marshall Plan against the poverty the Soviets were expected to exploit. African leaders read the situation quickly. Nkrumah kept Ghana in the Commonwealth while cultivating Moscow. Guinea survived French economic punishment because Moscow paid. Nasser and Ben Bella took Soviet patronage. Governments that chose Washington, Mobutu in Zaire and Kenyatta in Kenya, received military bases in exchange for silence about how they governed at home.

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.

By 1980 some two hundred thousand Haitians were living in the Dominican Republic, some for a season and some for good. Movement across that border is old and has taken three forms. The first people to go were maroons, escaping slavery on the French side during the colonial period for the Spanish side, where treatment was often better. After independence in 1804 the pattern changed. Haitian occupation of the Spanish part of the island and the invasion attempts that followed emptied the border districts on the eastern side, and Haitians filled the space. The third and largest movement came from sugar. American and other foreign firms built plantations and mills in the Dominican Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century and could not find enough local labour. In the 1950s the two governments signed an agreement that formalised the traffic. Observers compared the cane workers' conditions to slavery, and expected earnings there still beat those on a Haitian farm.

In the spring of 1981 American newspapers carried short reports of an illness killing gay men, which they called gay related immune deficiency. Within a year it had a new name, AIDS, many more victims and no explanation. Physicians in south Florida noticed that a number of their heterosexual patients with the disease were Haitian immigrants, and the observation hardened into a category. Haitians were listed alongside homosexuals, haemophiliacs and heroin users as a group at risk, a classification Haitians shortened bitterly to the four H's. Journalists supplied mechanisms: Vodou ceremonies involving blood, ritual scarring, whether the men had caught it from New Yorkers on holiday or given it to them. The epidemiology arrived later and pointed the other way, indicating that the virus had reached Haiti from North America and moved through the population the way it moved in African cities, by heterosexual contact. By then it made no difference. This did more damage to the Haitian economy than the scandals, the human rights reports and the boat people together.