Mau Mau loses the war and ends the settler state in Kenya

Most of British and French tropical Africa reached independence with little organised violence. Kenya was the exception, because land dispossession and urban poverty had made its political situation explosive by the early 1950s. Its decolonisation falls into three stages. From about 1945 to 1952 the crisis built until the colonial government declared a state of emergency. From 1952 to 1956 came the main period of Mau Mau fighting, which the British defeated militarily while learning that neither their own position nor the settlers' could be sustained. From the mid 1950s into the early 1960s, with the emergency lifted in 1959, the settler polity was taken apart and the colony moved toward the independence it received in 1963. The rebellion failed as a military campaign and achieved what decades of petitioning had failed to achieve. It demonstrated that dispossession would keep producing violence, and that holding white privilege in place would cost Britain more than the privilege returned.

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.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

Jeanne Perez wrote a public letter to her niece in 1936. In 1942 she wrote Sanite Belair with a goddaughter. Belair was an officer in the revolutionary army whom the French executed in 1802, and Perez gave her a child to instruct. Across those six years Perez assembled a record with a single argument running through it. The duty to care for women, which she treated as both sacred and political, is the test of whether Haitian citizenship means anything. She choreographed how women were to stand toward one another. She wrote women and girls into the national script as makers of the future rather than spectators of the past, and she did it for people who had been told the race was already under way without them. Belair's cry of long live liberty, down with slavery, came out of the 1942 script raised an octave. The change of pitch widened what freedom could be asked to cover.