The junta writes an interim constitution and Magloire runs

The army had taken power in 1946 and given it back. In 1950 it took power again, and this time nobody pretended the officers were reluctant. Franck Lavaud's name headed the junta, and Paul Magloire took Interior and National Defence, which made him the man who counted. The junta dissolved the legislature and appointed a consultative council under Dantes Bellegarde, drawn mainly from the Senate, to design an electoral system and a constitution. Magloire told reporters that the constitution was in caretaker status. So were the Estime loyalists and the men who had wrecked the Senate in May, quietly arrested while the junta settled in. Antoine Levelt said the first job was to let people cool down. On 3 August the council issued a decree that served as an interim constitution. There would be elections for a new legislature and, for the first time in Haitian history, a direct presidential vote by every man over twenty one, on 8 October. Magloire resigned from the junta the same day and declared himself a candidate.

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.

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.