A Haitian scores the goal that beat England in the World Cup

On 29 June 1950 the United States played England at Belo Horizonte in the World Cup. England had some of the best players in the world and the American side were part timers. The only goal of the match was a diving header by Joe Gaetjens, born in Port-au-Prince, who had moved to New York in 1947 and who turned out for the Americans under a rule admitting men who had declared an intention to become citizens. It is still the most famous upset the tournament has produced. Gaetjens went home to Haiti afterwards and ran a dry cleaning business. In July 1964 the Tonton Macoutes took him away and he was never seen again. His brothers had joined an exile movement against Francois Duvalier. No charge was laid and no body was recovered. The man who scored the goal Americans still talk about was killed by the secret police of the country he was born in.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and its allies spent years pressing the case that Haitian women should hold the same political and civil rights as men, and obtained that recognition from the constituent assembly of 1950. In a speech to the assembly on 15 November 1950, Dantes Bellegarde told the chamber that what was wanted was to bring into the direction and management of public affairs an element that had stayed sound, and that by politics he meant education, health, work, hygiene, housing, and help for the poor and the disabled. He then made the argument that carried. Haitians had won their independence in conditions unique in the history of nations, abolished slavery by their own strength with nobody's help, and forced men of every race to recognise them as equals in rights and dignity. Haitians who now denied women their claims, he said, had placed themselves exactly where the colonists stood who kept black people in servitude on grounds of inferiority.

Britain, France and Belgium handed over power in their African colonies between the late 1940s and the 1960s, and even the transfers that went smoothly left the new states badly equipped. Schooling under colonial rule was open to a minority until the final years, so most citizens could not read, could not follow what their government was doing, and had no practical way to hold anyone to account. The men who took office had been pushed through training programmes assembled at speed once independence was agreed. Civil society, the associations and newspapers and courts that make a government answerable, had never been allowed to grow. Reid warns against reading the instability that followed as nothing more than colonial failure. The conflicts over who controlled land, revenue and office ran back into the nineteenth century, before any European flag went up, and they resumed once it came down. Colonial neglect made those older quarrels worse. I keep these decades on a Haitian timeline because Haiti reached the same position in 1804 and met the same problem: a sovereign state, a population kept illiterate on purpose, and a ruling class assembled overnight.

Bananas had been grown in Dominica for centuries in the gardens of ordinary cultivators, alongside the ground provisions people actually ate. They counted for little in the export ledger until the 1940s. Then the growth was fast. By 1953 bananas made up forty five per cent of the value of everything the island sold abroad, and they held that place for decades. Dominicans had watched crops rise and fall before. Coffee, sugar cane, cocoa, limes and vanilla had each in turn dominated the accounts, and every shift rearranged who worked for whom. What was new lay in the source. The crop that took over the export economy came out of the peasant garden, which meant that buyers had to reach into thousands of small holdings to collect it and to organise the collecting. Dominica's unity, in this reading, lies in the succession of single crops that tied it to markets elsewhere.