Kenneth Dike takes a doctorate built on what people remembered

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.

In October 1943 Élie Lescot toured Montreal, Ottawa, Washington, New York and Havana, and stayed at the White House, where Franklin Roosevelt called him a very old friend and talked about turning the Môle into a free port. Edward Stettinius put American spending on Haiti between 1938 and 1946 at forty million dollars. On 19 April 1944 the National Assembly rewrote the constitution: no elections until peace had been signed with every enemy power down to Bulgaria, the presidential term lengthened from five years to seven, and Lescot continued in office until 15 May 1951. His decrees began to open with the royal plural, Nous, Élie Lescot. In his address of 15 May 1945 he said his people were naive and poor, that they wanted the Four Freedoms Roosevelt had proclaimed, and that they would receive them once they had learned how to use them. A plot in the Garde was broken up in July, and seven enlisted men were shot at Fort Dimanche.

In 1968 Michel-Rolph Trouillot left Haiti for Brooklyn to get away from the Duvalier regime. He was one of a great many student activists who went that decade, into a New York that was becoming the second city of Haitian intellectual life. He came from a family of historians and had grown up inside the argument about what his country was. In exile he trained as an anthropologist, and the books he wrote afterwards changed the terms in which Haiti could be described. Haiti: State Against Nation set out the Duvalier state as a system rather than a personality. Silencing the Past asked why Western historians had treated the Haitian revolution as an event that could not have happened, and it is now read in universities that teach nothing else about Haiti at all. He held a chair at Chicago and died in 2012. The dictatorship that drove him out produced, at one remove, the historian who explained it.

In December 1968 the government ordered every school in Haiti closed for the unveiling of a monument to the unknown maroon in Port-au-Prince. The figure kneels on one knee with a broken chain at his ankle, a machete in one hand and a conch shell at his lips, the instrument used to call people together. It stands on the Champ de Mars facing the National Palace. The sculptor was Albert Mangones. Duvalier had spent years arguing that the runaways of the colonial mountains, rather than the free coloured class, were the origin of Haitian independence, and the monument put that argument in bronze at the centre of the capital. It outlived him entirely. Neg Mawon is now the image Haitians reach for when they want to say what the country is, reproduced on posters, currency and walls, and it was still standing after the earthquake of 2010 brought down the palace behind it.