Algeria fights eight years to end French rule

The Algerian war of decolonisation ran from 1954 to 1962 and ended with the country's liberation, which is dated to 1961 in the sequence set out here. Malik Bennabi, who lived from 1905 to 1973, wrote through those years and through the earlier decades when Algeria was ruled first from Istanbul and then from Paris. His two short works on the question of ideas in the Muslim world were conceived in late 1960 and 1961 and published a decade later. He was asking why ideas go dead in the societies that hold them, and what bilingualism does to a people who think in one language and are governed in another. Anyone whose body came into the world before 1961 and lived through that war carried a different set of intellectual and political concerns from anyone who did not. Haitian writers under the American occupation had made the same observation about themselves thirty years earlier.

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.

Independence across Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States produced, from the late 1950s, a large expansion of scholarly work on the African past. Historians, linguists and archaeologists filled in centuries that university syllabuses had treated as empty, and African history became a subject many universities offer. Offering is a different thing from requiring. In world history courses the African material tends to sit in a sidebar or in a chapter that gets dropped when the term runs short, few history students take an African course at all, and the courses that exist give most of their attention to the last two or three centuries while the ancient periods stay thin. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the same arithmetic applies to us. Haiti is available to be studied and almost never required, so a person can finish a history degree in the country that bought Louisiana from Napoleon without being told why Napoleon was in a hurry to sell it.

The legislative record of the 1940s in Haiti shows women's rights argued over in the assembly, with grandstanding on every side of the question. The women who kept their own records were tracking something else across the same years. Misogynist speech did not thin out over the decade. It grew. Women's lives were handled as expendable. Care for women, in law, in medicine and in the ordinary running of a household, was largely absent, and it was women who documented all of this, about women, in letters and studies and the pages of their own paper. That documentation changes how the assembly attacks of 1946 read. Taken alone, the insults thrown at women in that chamber look like one bad session. Set against ten years of accumulated evidence, they are the loudest point in a campaign of attrition that had been running the whole time. The chamber only made the contempt audible.