Five governments rise and fall inside six months

The day Paul Magloire flew out, construction stopped on the new slaughterhouse in Port-au-Prince. No order was given. The site simply went quiet, and the rusting frame stood there for years while government after government refused to touch a predecessor's project or even move the building materials stacked at the curb since 1956. Six years of spending, roads, hotels and public display evaporated at the same speed. What followed was nine months of provisional regimes that decided nothing. Within half a year Haiti went through five governments. Leslie Manigat listed the forms the country managed to exhaust: collegial government, provisional military government, provisional constitutional presidency, provisional revolutionary presidency, and a constituent assembly, the whole nineteenth century replayed at speed. The short-lived governments of 1911 to 1915 had at least been fighting over control of the country. These were surface weather. Underneath, four serious candidates competed for the succession, Louis Dejoie, Clement Jumelle, Daniel Fignole and Francois Duvalier, and the army that would normally have settled the matter was split into factions of its own.

Portugal did not negotiate. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau the administration hardened its racial policy through the 1950s and left nationalists no route except force. The MPLA was founded in Angola in 1956 and rode a peasant rising of the early 1960s against forced labour and compulsory cotton growing, practices the British and French colonies had given up years before. FRELIMO formed in Mozambique in 1962 and began a long war of its own. The worst of these wars was in Algeria, which French opinion counted as a province of the mother country. Reform schemes were half hearted and colonial officials sabotaged them. Younger nationalists set up the Organisation Secrete in 1948 to prepare armed struggle, and when it collapsed a handful of its members founded the Front de Liberation Nationale. The FLN went to war in November 1954 and fought on two fronts, guerrilla operations inside Algeria and diplomacy outside it at the United Nations and among the non aligned and pan Arab states.

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.

The West Indies Federation was launched in January 1958. Lloyd Best reached the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in the same month and remembered the season as one of great anticipation and almost unbridled hope. Mona had opened ten years before, in 1948. What followed there was years of mostly informal debate, fuelled first by the university programme of open lectures. C. L. R. James came in 1960. Best names the stretch from 1958 to 1961 as a threshold comparable to 1935 to 1938 and to 1944 to 1946, two earlier periods which between them had settled the question of self determination and responsible government in the British Caribbean and left only the question of form: federation, a single state, or separate independence island by island. Best would later propose a regional graduate university reaching for Haiti, Santo Domingo and Cuba, with French creole first among the languages it would require.