A mob wrecks the Senate and the army removes Estime

In July 1949 Dumarsais Estime put forward a revision of the constitution that would erase 1952 as the end of his term and lift the bar on a president succeeding himself. A general strike began at the university that November. Estime shut seven newspapers, banned the parties behind the strike, drove Daniel Fignole into the Argentine embassy and imposed censorship. When the chambers met on 18 April 1950 the Senate refused the revision by thirteen votes and held out for sixteen days. Then a crowd formed in the Marche Valliere, poured down on the Senate, beat the fleeing members, burned the archives and the portraits and carried pieces of the furniture through the streets. Estime went on the radio that night to praise their political maturity. Houses of the dissenting senators were sacked. On the morning of 10 May the general staff handed him a proclamation of his own resignation. An hour later Fort National fired the salute that told Port-au-Prince the junta was back.

The rate of illiteracy in Turkey stood at ninety per cent in 1927 and 1928. By 1935 and 1936 it had fallen to eighty per cent, and from 1950 onwards it settled around sixty per cent. Secondary schools expanded forty one times between 1927 and 1960 and university enrolment grew at about the same rate, so the effort went into the upper levels. In 1960 the villages still had 1,455,254 children in elementary school out of 2,372,778 of school age, while the towns had 823,947 out of 945,624. Villages were small and scattered, schools and teachers were expensive, and there was no settled idea of what mass education was for. Education at the higher levels became a marker of status, and some conservatives openly doubted whether spreading primary schooling was wise, proposing instead to train a technical elite abroad and hand the country to it.

After the disturbances in the Gold Coast, the British appointed the Coussey Commission to find out what had gone wrong in their model colony. It recommended more African representation and constitutional reform, and officials hoped this would strengthen the moderate elite of the United Gold Coast Convention. They presented Kwame Nkrumah as a dangerous radical and J. B. Danquah as the safe alternative. In the 1951 elections Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won heavily, and the British released him from prison and worked with him because there was nothing else to do. He became leader of government business and pushed decolonisation along steadily, arguing in private that a settlement was the only guard against disorder while speaking in public as a radical. Internal self-government came in 1954 and full independence in 1957, the first anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Two things produced it: mass protest that forced constitutional concessions, and a campaign of strikes and boycotts that made governing expensive while giving the troops nobody to shoot at. The habit of one commanding figure standing for a whole movement shaped what these new states became.

Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo in 1949. The novel follows Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte through the revolution and its aftermath, and it holds Vodou, revolutionary violence and European reason in one frame. In the prologue Carpentier set out what he called lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real, arguing that the ordinary substance of Caribbean life already contains what the European surrealists had to manufacture in a studio. He had visited Haiti in 1943 and seen Sans Souci and the Citadelle, and the trip gave him both the setting and the argument. That prologue became the founding statement of magical realism, the mode that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a generation after him carried to the rest of the world. The line runs from a ruined palace in the Haitian north to a Colombian village to the international bestseller list. Haiti sent out a revolution in 1804. In 1949 it sent out a way of seeing.