A bomb factory in Martissant ends a presidency in fifty two days

The National Assembly chose Franck Sylvain on 7 February 1957, a Catholic lawyer and journalist of forty six from Grand-Goave who was known to favour Francois Duvalier. He held office for fifty two days. The country was settling old scores under cover of an election. There were riots and shooting at Jacmel, where Duvalier was stoned, and at Les Cayes, Jeremie, Leogane, Gonaives and the capital. In early March a rumour that Fignole had been arrested sent the poor of Port-au-Prince against the police station and the palace itself, and the crowd smashed and looted its way through downtown when police pushed it back. Sylvain banned political broadcasts, set elections for 28 April, dissolved the legislature and ordered Jumelle's property seized. On 2 April the capital learned that police had found a bomb factory at Martissant, that two officers had died there, and that the president was under house arrest, accused of knowing about the bombs and about a plan to murder the candidates in their homes. The four men implicated were Duvalier supporters. Duvalier was not on the target list.

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.

Arriving at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica one day after his ouster, the Haitian military president Paul Magloire remarked that when he left Haiti it was on fire and that it was now going to explode. Smith builds his conclusion on that line, arguing that in Haiti the removal of a hated ruler has usually opened a long and halting march toward change rather than concluding one, and that Magloire's comment applies as well to 2004 and 1986 as to 1956. What distinguishes the most recent instance in his account is the continuing support for Lavalas, obscured by heavily armed gangs in the capital with unreliable political allegiances, a long list of contentious presidential candidates, the drug trade, and the ambiguous role of the bourgeoisie and the army.

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.