Bombs go off in the market and an ambassador tells Magloire to go

Bombs began going off in public places in Port-au-Prince in November 1956, something Haiti had not seen before. Shots fired among the women in the Marche de Fer sent the waterfront running and the iron shutters down. In April 1957 a bomb factory was found at Martissant, and the man who built the devices named Francois Duvalier and Clement Barbot and described the November and December explosions in detail. Junior officers who had been lieutenants for twelve years were meanwhile plotting around Colonel Leon Cantave and Major Pierre Armand. Magloire arrested the presidential candidates, including his own chosen successor Clement Jumelle. On 4 December the main reservoir for downtown Port-au-Prince was dynamited. The president asked the American ambassador Roy Tasco Davis whether the elections should be put off. Davis came back the next day with the papal nuncio and told him he had lost the public and should leave on schedule. On 6 December Magloire announced his resignation by radio.

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.

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.

In 1958 race riots broke out in Notting Hill in London and in Nottingham. They marked the first open appearance of a racism made in Britain rather than carried home from the empire. Notting Hill was one of those transitional urban districts where Caribbean settlement had begun to take root in the middle of a British city, and three things met there. An organised fascist element became active for the first time since the 1940s, in the shape of the Unionist movement and the League of Empire Loyalists, and it carried the vocabulary of race into street corner politics. Local conditions were deteriorating as the room the postwar boom had allowed began to close. And the national press declined to read the events as being about race or about poverty at all. The Times ran an editorial headed Hooliganism is Hooliganism, filing the riots with teenage violence, football crowds and railway carriage vandalism as conduct an adult society could do without.