A provisional president is accused of arranging Duvalier's win

Franck Sylvain was appointed provisional head of state in February 1957 with one assignment, to hold the country steady until general elections could be run. He was accused of using the office to secure a victory for Francois Duvalier, and the army removed him. Nicholls places him in a line of caretakers who each lasted weeks. The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it explains what an election in Haiti meant that year. A provisional president controlled the machinery that would count the votes, so every faction had to either hold the post or destroy whoever did. Sylvain fell to the second half of that logic. The army, which had appointed him, discovered it could unmake him at no cost, and each removal made the next one cheaper. By the time a ballot was finally held in September, the question of who would win had been settled in advance by the men who decided who would supervise it.

France ran its African policy after 1954 in the shadow of Algeria, and the fear of a second Algerian war shaped everything decided in Paris. The plan had been a Greater France in which the colonies stayed inside the republic, an idea that assimilated West African elites supported until it became clear that full citizenship was never on offer. Reforms in 1956 gave internal self government while Paris kept the army, foreign policy and economic planning. As Algeria worsened, de Gaulle put a straight question to the colonies in 1958. Keep the link to France and keep the money, or take complete independence and lose all of it. Almost every African leader chose the link. Guinea under Ahmed Sekou Toure chose sovereignty. De Gaulle cancelled all assistance, withdrew French staff and had the equipment carried out. Guinea survived on Soviet and Ghanaian support. Within two years the rest of Francophone Africa had followed it, and in 1960 the French colonies of west and equatorial Africa became independent states.

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.