Duvalier repaints the flag to install himself as Dessalines's heir

Dubois treats the capture of Dessalines by Francois Duvalier between 1957 and 1971 as the reason the empirical work in the forum is urgent. Duvalier did it through writings and speeches and through the symbolic gesture of changing the flag from blue and red to black and red, reinstalling what he presented as Dessalines's own colours over the nation. For Duvalier, Dessalines symbolised the long struggle of the black majority to take power from the light-skinned minority, and he cast himself as the heir who would complete an unfinished revolution. The mechanism Dubois identifies is that this appropriation still shapes how Dessalines is viewed inside and outside Haiti, which is why a genealogy of the uses of the figure has to accompany any fresh account of the life. Dubois notes that Americans are in no position to mock a country for turning its founders into quasi-religious figures.

Julius Nyerere spent the late 1950s doing two things at once. He built the confidence of the British administration in Tanganyika while turning TANU into a territory wide party with grassroots organisation as strong as any on the continent. London opened the handover with a multiracial constitution that gave the small European and Asian communities a voice out of all proportion to their numbers, an arrangement borrowed from neighbouring Kenya. Nyerere talked the settlers' representatives into supporting TANU instead of fighting it, and the party took a majority in the 1958 assembly elections. Independence came in 1961. Britain held Zanzibar until 1963, and within weeks of the island's independence African rebels overthrew the Arab government in a revolution whose violence drew on racial resentments a century old. In early 1964 Nyerere brought Tanganyika and Zanzibar together as Tanzania. The island stayed politically restless for decades, and every quarrel came back to its terms with the mainland.

In May 1973 an American shrimp trawler called the Sea Cat came across a Haitian sailing vessel, the Ella, off the coast of South Florida. The people aboard were worn down and low on food and asked for help, and the trawler towed them in. They were detained, their asylum claims were refused, and they became plaintiffs in the lawsuits that shook the immigration service for the rest of the decade. One of them was Nelson Thomas. Through the 1970s he picked oranges and apples along the seasonal route between Florida and Virginia and fathered four children who were United States citizens. In April 1980 word reached him that his mother's house in Port-au-Prince had been set on fire. He bought a Haitian passport at the consulate in Miami and flew home. On arrival he was stripped of everything he owned and jailed. About two years later he left by sea again. A cutter stopped him, an officer interviewed him briefly, and he was returned to Port-au-Prince.

Kebreau finished the job the same night. The cabinet went to jail along with twenty Fignolist organisers. At half past ten the next morning, with the guns of Fort National firing, the general told the press that the army had taken charge, that soldiers were the fathers of the family and not politicians, and that they wanted order and elections. On the night of the sixteenth the hammering on lamp posts started after the eight o'clock curfew and then turned into a sound people compared to the sea. Word had gone round that Fignole had been secretly executed. It was false. The slums came out anyway, breaking the street lights as they went, and the darkness was followed by fire. The fire brigade had its engines wrecked and its hoses cut. Fort Dimanche answered the attack from La Saline with machine guns. Then the army came in behind half-tracks and light tanks, firing into the alleys and into whole blocks of plank houses. This was the last time the poor of Port-au-Prince acted on their own account for thirty years.