Schoolboys fight the police in the corridors of the Lycee Petion

The 1955 coffee crop was the worst in years after Hazel. Complaints of graft rose as the government weakened, and the American magazine The Nation began printing the case against Magloire for his enemies on the left. Then came the old Haitian question of when exactly a president's term expires. Estime's supporters said Magloire had to go in May or at the latest December 1956. Magloire, reading the constitution written for him in 1950, said May 1957. From May 1956 there was no quiet. On 17 May schoolboys at Les Cayes and Jacmel came out into the streets, and so did the pupils of the Lycees Petion and Toussaint Louverture in Port-au-Prince, who barricaded the doors, threw furniture from the windows and fought the police from corridor to corridor. Tracts from a Comite Revolutionnaire appeared across the city. Magloire declared a state of siege. Later that month the drivers' union, which Francois Duvalier had helped build, went on strike.

Twenty nine Asian and African countries took part in the Bandung Conference of 1955. The word decolonisation acquired its modern meaning there, as a third option alongside capitalism and communism, at a moment when the Cold War was pressing every new state to choose one of the two. The first meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries followed in 1961. Non-alignment was itself a statement that the choice on offer was not the only one available. Bandung allowed Islamic and Indian arguments to be linked with the struggles in Africa and Asia, and it gave a vocabulary to people who wanted independence without simply changing patrons. In the early nineteenth century the words used for the same ends had been independence and revolution, as in the American and Haitian revolutions and the Mexican and Argentine independences. Haiti had made the case a hundred and fifty years before there was a conference at which to make it.

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.

Edmundo O'Gorman, a Mexican historian and philosopher of Irish descent, published La invencion de America in 1957. His argument was that America could not have been discovered, because no such thing existed before Europeans made one. The landmass was there. The entity called America was a European product, assembled out of expectation, cartography and law after 1492. O'Gorman was refusing the rules of evidence that European historical writing took for granted, and he said as much, proposing that historians work from other premises. Both accounts of 1492 can be internally consistent, which is the point of the exercise. What separates them is where the person speaking stands and what he assumes before he starts. For the Caribbean the argument bites directly, since the islands were the first ground on which the invention was carried out, and the first place where people already living somewhere were written into another continent's category.