Duvalier calls the roll of every commune and La Gonave votes anyway

The refrain of Duvalier's most famous speech was that they had gone mad. They had decided to keep the most popular candidate in the country out in the dark, and to rule that the people of the Northwest, the North, the Artibonite, the Southwest and the Grand-Anse, along with the middle class, the professors, the teachers and the students of Port-au-Prince, had nothing to say. Then he began naming places. Derac, Phaeton, Maribaroux, Valliere, Monbin Crochu, Cap-Haitien, Fort-Liberte, Ouanaminthe, Limbe, Port-de-Paix, the Mole, Jean-Rabel, Belladere, Hinche, Mirebalais, Lascahobas, Marigot, Cayes-Jacmel, Cotes-de-Fer, Jeremie, Dame-Marie, Anse-d'Hainault, Cavaillon, Aquin, Coteaux. Every commune in the republic, each name carrying its own memory of revolt, and after each block of names the same accusation repeated like a summons at a Vodou service. It turned a candidacy into a cosmology. Voting against Duvalier became a betrayal of the map itself. He left out La Gonave, which had a few hundred inhabitants and produced eighteen thousand votes in September.

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.

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.

Athemas Bellerive had been director general of health in Haiti. He reached the Congo in July 1960, weeks after independence, as a malaria specialist directing the World Health Organisation emergency team. He described the situation as dramatic. There was not one Congolese doctor in the country. Almost every foreign doctor had left. Fighting between groups was under way, telephone links between the provincial capitals had been cut and the roads no longer carried traffic. Patients had walked out of the hospitals because the hospitals had turned dangerous, and those without the strength to leave died in them. His answer was to build a Congolese medical profession rather than staff the system permanently with foreigners. More than a hundred Congolese who had worked as assistants to expatriate doctors were selected, sent to Europe with their families, and given theoretical and practical training leading to a medical diploma. A French colleague on the Leopoldville team later called that his most important achievement.