Hurricane Hazel puts a blacksmith in a Belair household for twenty years

Hurricane Hazel came through Haiti in 1954 and left a blacksmith named Osias with nothing. A couple in Upper Belair, Sauveur and Rosita, invited him into their household until he could rent a room of his own. He was still living there in 1975. The arrangement worked because it was productive: Sauveur gave him sheets of zinc, Osias made chafing dishes and sold them on market days, kept a share and handed the rest over. He bought presents for the children and helped Rosita with household expenses. A young woman named Margareth, left with nowhere to go when the old couple she lived with left the neighbourhood, was taken into the same room, became pregnant by Osias and had a daughter. Neither of them paid rent. The household counted them as close friends and not as kin, which was the whole basis of their claim on the room.

Several film crews recorded the re-enactment, and in the autumn of 2012 Le Glaunec found an excerpt in the archives of a Haitian and Caribbean documentation centre in Montreal. It runs a little over three minutes, is narrated in English and appears to have been made for American audiences. The narrator calls the soldiers of the indigenous army a band of patriots fighting for freedom and frames the battle as a continuation of the American war of independence and its language of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The author reads this as an act of translation that makes the Haitian war intelligible to a foreign public by subordinating it to an earlier one. The footage shows a handful of French figures overwhelmed by hundreds of half naked fighters, a soldier of Rochambeau waving a white flag, and the horse of the actor playing Capois lying dead. It has apparently not been shown since 1954.

White settlement in Kenya took the best farmland out of African hands and pushed the people who had worked it into crowded reserves. Colonial officials then blamed African methods for soil erosion and imposed farming rules that made the reserves harder still to live in. Those who left for Nairobi joined a growing urban poor the authorities treated as a criminal class. In 1947 the Kenya African Union was founded under Jomo Kenyatta and expanded quickly into a mass movement, run by moderates and filling up with people who owned nothing and were prepared to fight for land. Killings in the countryside began at the end of the 1940s and became sustained war through 1951 and 1952. The Kikuyu split along the same line. Kenyatta wanted peaceful change. The leaders of the landless wanted land and freedom. When the fighting spread across the White Highlands the British banned the KAU and imprisoned Kenyatta, who had had almost nothing to do with it.

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.