Magloire leaves and says he is handing over a lit cigar

Paul Magloire left the presidency in December 1956 and said that the country he handed over was a cigar burning at both ends. What followed proved him right. Between his departure and the election of Francois Duvalier in September 1957 Haiti ran through a series of provisional governments, most of them lasting weeks. Joseph Nemours Pierre-Louis, Franck Sylvain, a collegiate executive council, Daniel Fignole and finally a military council under Antonio Kebreau each held the palace in turn. Fignole lasted nineteen days before officers put him on a ship and shot down his supporters in the slums of Port-au-Prince. The army, which had removed Lescot in 1946 and Estime in 1950 and had now let Magloire fall, decided the outcome again in 1957. Ten months of improvised authority left Haitians willing to accept a government that promised to last, and the man who made that promise had spent the whole period building an organisation outside the state.

After the disturbances in the Gold Coast, the British appointed the Coussey Commission to find out what had gone wrong in their model colony. It recommended more African representation and constitutional reform, and officials hoped this would strengthen the moderate elite of the United Gold Coast Convention. They presented Kwame Nkrumah as a dangerous radical and J. B. Danquah as the safe alternative. In the 1951 elections Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won heavily, and the British released him from prison and worked with him because there was nothing else to do. He became leader of government business and pushed decolonisation along steadily, arguing in private that a settlement was the only guard against disorder while speaking in public as a radical. Internal self-government came in 1954 and full independence in 1957, the first anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Two things produced it: mass protest that forced constitutional concessions, and a campaign of strikes and boycotts that made governing expensive while giving the troops nobody to shoot at. The habit of one commanding figure standing for a whole movement shaped what these new states became.

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.