Haitian painters fill a cathedral with the country's own sacred imagery

In 1949 Alfred Voegeli, the Episcopal bishop in Haiti, commissioned a group of Haitian painters to decorate the walls of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Port-au-Prince. The murals they produced became the best known Haitian paintings of the century. They were executed in what dealers and critics called the primitive style, the manner of the self-taught painters then being sold abroad as a Haitian school. The subjects were biblical and the setting was Haitian. The figures, the landscape, the clothing and the ceremonial motifs came from the country the painters lived in, including elements drawn from its own spiritual practice. Churches in Haiti had spent much of the previous two decades cooperating in campaigns against Vodou. This commission put the visual language of Haitian religious life on the walls of a cathedral and paid for the work. Most of the murals were destroyed when the building came down in the earthquake of 12 January 2010.

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.

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.

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.