Students bring down Lescot and the Ligue's members march with them

Eight months before the constitutional assembly, students in Port-au-Prince organised a week of protests against President Elie Lescot, who governed with United States support. They described themselves as continuing a fight for sovereignty begun in the nineteenth century, and they had been reading the Marxism, socialism and cultural nationalism circulating in Haiti after the occupation and the world war. The protests ended in a military overthrow of the president. Haitians called that week the Revolution of 1946. In August an assembly met to rewrite the terms of government and elected Dumarsais Estime. The women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale were part of January. Formed in 1935 by educated and financially comfortable women, the organisation brought its members and its students into the streets of the capital with everyone else, demanding representation in the state being rebuilt. Lescot had privately supported their claims. The nine months between his fall and the assembly produced a run of alliances for women activists, some genuine and some tactical.

In 1950 King's College London awarded a doctorate to Kenneth Onwuka Dike of Nigeria for a history researched through oral tradition, the first of its kind. Until then the African past had been treated as unrecoverable because it was unwritten. Dike showed that it could be worked on with evidence, and African history became a scholarly field. Literature moved at the same time. Camara Laye published L'Enfant noir and Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, both of them handling a pre colonial past that colonial schooling had trained its pupils to forget. The confidence was real and so was the wreckage around it. Ethnic, regional and religious blocs were already fighting over the space the colonial state would vacate, and many of those quarrels dated to the nineteenth century. The years of Dike's doctorate and Achebe's first novel were also the years of the South African race laws, of insurgency in the Portuguese colonies and the Belgian Congo, and of the wars in Algeria and Kenya.

Casimir argues that the two measures Bonaparte's government could not carry out have become operational again by other means. The first, destroying the working population's resource base, he traces through the twentieth century. The second, deporting the non-conforming French-oriented Haitians, has turned into an exodus. It began as voluntary exile with the 1946 Revolution, accelerated in the 1960s during Francois Duvalier's reign, and from the 1980s onward became an uncontrollable outflow of qualified and semi-qualified personnel. At the level of the masses, the departure of boat people looks to neighbouring territories, and even to the larger countries of North America, like a threat of significant proportions. His conclusion is that the state can no longer retain even its own oligarchy, and that the extinction Napoleon wanted by force is now burning on a low flame.

In 1945 Manuel Arturo Pena Batlle told his readers that under the Trujillo regime Dominicans had won unimaginable victories, above all in preserving the Spanish character of their nationality. He was a serious historian who had built a whole account of Dominican history around the idea of a Spanish community defending itself against outsiders, and he took a leading part in the border negotiations with Haiti. Among the victories he counted was the massacre of Haitians in the border zone eight years earlier. He argued that fixing a line on a map was the simple part of the border question and that the real problem was Haitians settling on Dominican soil, which had been dealt with by what people called la poda, the pruning. The regime he was defending ran on anti Haitian feeling and on an admiration for Spain, and he wrote at the moment when European fascism had just been defeated.