Swahili gives Tanganyika a nationalism Nigeria could not build

Where no single ethnic group was large enough to dominate the others, a colony could build a politics that belonged to the whole territory. Tanganyika is the clearest case. The African Association had existed there since 1929 and came into its strength only in the early 1950s, when renewed economic interest in the territory pushed Africans off land wanted for white settlers and colonial officers began forcing changes on African farming. Terracing orders produced riots in 1955. Out of the Association came the Tanganyika African National Union in 1954, led by Julius Nyerere, who like Kwame Nkrumah had studied abroad and had watched what the Convention People's Party achieved in the Gold Coast. Nyerere widened TANU through the mid-1950s until it reached the villages, and he did it in Swahili, a language spread by nineteenth century caravan trade and then adopted by the colonial state for schools and offices. Nigeria and Uganda had no such common tongue and their nationalisms fractured along ethnic lines. Nyerere hinted at violence and never used it, which left the British nothing to answer.

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.