A racist textbook stays in print through three Oxford editions

Charles Gabriel Seligman published The Races of Africa in 1930. Its organising claim was the Hamitic hypothesis, which held that any large achievement in sub Saharan Africa had been the work of lighter skinned invaders arriving from the north. Ehret describes the book as a racist tract wearing the clothes of scholarship. Oxford University Press and the International African Institute reissued it in 1957 and again in 1967, by which point no one defending it could claim ignorance. It remains available for sale. The consequences reached well beyond libraries. Belgian administrators in Rwanda used the same racial ladder to sort Tutsi above Hutu, issued identity cards on that basis, and hardened categories that had been fluid into fixed racial facts. The propaganda of the 1994 genocide, which described Tutsi as foreign invaders to be driven out, drew on that scheme. A university press had supplied the authority. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the habit of crediting African achievement to somebody else is the habit that turned Saint Domingue into a French accomplishment.

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.

In 1968 Michel-Rolph Trouillot left Haiti for Brooklyn to get away from the Duvalier regime. He was one of a great many student activists who went that decade, into a New York that was becoming the second city of Haitian intellectual life. He came from a family of historians and had grown up inside the argument about what his country was. In exile he trained as an anthropologist, and the books he wrote afterwards changed the terms in which Haiti could be described. Haiti: State Against Nation set out the Duvalier state as a system rather than a personality. Silencing the Past asked why Western historians had treated the Haitian revolution as an event that could not have happened, and it is now read in universities that teach nothing else about Haiti at all. He held a chair at Chicago and died in 2012. The dictatorship that drove him out produced, at one remove, the historian who explained it.

In December 1968 the government ordered every school in Haiti closed for the unveiling of a monument to the unknown maroon in Port-au-Prince. The figure kneels on one knee with a broken chain at his ankle, a machete in one hand and a conch shell at his lips, the instrument used to call people together. It stands on the Champ de Mars facing the National Palace. The sculptor was Albert Mangones. Duvalier had spent years arguing that the runaways of the colonial mountains, rather than the free coloured class, were the origin of Haitian independence, and the monument put that argument in bronze at the centre of the capital. It outlived him entirely. Neg Mawon is now the image Haitians reach for when they want to say what the country is, reproduced on posters, currency and walls, and it was still standing after the earthquake of 2010 brought down the palace behind it.