Land taken from Kikuyu farmers becomes the Mau Mau war

White settlement in Kenya took the best farmland out of African hands and pushed the people who had worked it into crowded reserves. Colonial officials then blamed African methods for soil erosion and imposed farming rules that made the reserves harder still to live in. Those who left for Nairobi joined a growing urban poor the authorities treated as a criminal class. In 1947 the Kenya African Union was founded under Jomo Kenyatta and expanded quickly into a mass movement, run by moderates and filling up with people who owned nothing and were prepared to fight for land. Killings in the countryside began at the end of the 1940s and became sustained war through 1951 and 1952. The Kikuyu split along the same line. Kenyatta wanted peaceful change. The leaders of the landless wanted land and freedom. When the fighting spread across the White Highlands the British banned the KAU and imprisoned Kenyatta, who had had almost nothing to do with it.

The election of 22 September 1957 was held under the supervision of the military junta commanded by Antonio Kebreau. Francois Duvalier took more than 679,000 votes. Louis Dejoie took roughly 266,000. What began that day was the conversion of the Haitian state into a totalitarian machine built around one man, and a doctrine that shifted power toward the black middle class in the name of a new equilibrium. Trouillot refuses to treat the outcome as an accident or as something imposed from outside. He puts it inside a long structural quarrel between the people who staffed the state and the nation the state was supposed to serve, a quarrel older than any of the candidates. Duvalierism was one answer to that quarrel, and its answer was to make the state the only actor left standing. The vote count is the least interesting number here. The structure that produced the count had been assembling for a century and a half.

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.