Two federations enter independence carrying their own fault lines

Uganda reached independence in 1962 through a short lived alliance between Milton Obote's UPC and Kabaka Yekka, the party of the Ganda monarchy, brokered in part by the British. The kabaka became executive president the following year. As Obote's own support grew he stopped needing the Ganda, pushed through a constitution in 1966 that made himself executive president, and sent the army against the kabaka's palace. The monarch fled into exile and Buganda lost its special status. Nothing underneath had been settled. In Nigeria decolonisation was slowed because the Northern People's Congress, the Yoruba Action Group and the NCNC could not agree on a constitution. The Muslim north expected to be dominated by Europeanised southerners, and the Christian south was itself split between Yoruba and Igbo. A federal system was the compromise, and Nigeria became independent in 1960 under Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The north controlled the first federal parliament while each region ran its own affairs, which left large minorities under whichever group was locally biggest.

The election of 22 September 1957 was held under the supervision of the military junta commanded by Antonio Kebreau. Francois Duvalier took more than 679,000 votes. Louis Dejoie took roughly 266,000. What began that day was the conversion of the Haitian state into a totalitarian machine built around one man, and a doctrine that shifted power toward the black middle class in the name of a new equilibrium. Trouillot refuses to treat the outcome as an accident or as something imposed from outside. He puts it inside a long structural quarrel between the people who staffed the state and the nation the state was supposed to serve, a quarrel older than any of the candidates. Duvalierism was one answer to that quarrel, and its answer was to make the state the only actor left standing. The vote count is the least interesting number here. The structure that produced the count had been assembling for a century and a half.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

Julius Nyerere spent the late 1950s doing two things at once. He built the confidence of the British administration in Tanganyika while turning TANU into a territory wide party with grassroots organisation as strong as any on the continent. London opened the handover with a multiracial constitution that gave the small European and Asian communities a voice out of all proportion to their numbers, an arrangement borrowed from neighbouring Kenya. Nyerere talked the settlers' representatives into supporting TANU instead of fighting it, and the party took a majority in the 1958 assembly elections. Independence came in 1961. Britain held Zanzibar until 1963, and within weeks of the island's independence African rebels overthrew the Arab government in a revolution whose violence drew on racial resentments a century old. In early 1964 Nyerere brought Tanganyika and Zanzibar together as Tanzania. The island stayed politically restless for decades, and every quarrel came back to its terms with the mainland.