Peligre finally makes power and the capital swells toward a million

By 1971 money had started to move again. The finance minister and the head of the bank knew that foreign donors would not reopen the taps while tax receipts kept vanishing into the unaudited tobacco monopoly, and their attempts at reform ran straight into Luckner Cambronne, Simone Duvalier and the whole militia structure that the monopoly had been feeding. There was more to work with than before. The new jet airport brought tourists back, including a new kind sold package deals by New York agents. Twelve hundred dollars bought two days in Haiti, a lawyer, a hotel and a divorce decree to hand to a spouse who had not been consulted. Haitians abroad sent home about 14 million dollars in 1971 alone, and the country ran its first balance of payments surplus in years. The generators at Peligre, begun under Magloire, came on line in July and the chronic blackouts ended. Foreign investors put up factories on the edge of the capital for the cheap labour, some 7,000 jobs by midyear. Port-au-Prince had held 200,000 people in 1957 and was approaching a million.

Speaking in Havana in 1968, the Haitian poet Rene Depestre described the negritude of the Duvalier government as a delirious mystification. His argument was that the regime's language about race concealed an ordinary struggle for power between rival groups inside the Haitian propertied class, and that dressing it as the triumph of the black majority was a service performed for reaction. Depestre had grown up inside the intellectual world he was attacking. He had been a young radical in Port-au-Prince in 1946, expelled and exiled repeatedly, and he had argued with Aime Cesaire, for whom negritude meant something other than a state doctrine. From Cuba he broadcast two hours a day into Haiti in Kreyol. The charge carried weight because it came from the left rather than from the elite the regime liked to name as its enemy. It said that a black government could reproduce the same order under a different flag.

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 1959 Duvalier gave his paramilitary force a formal existence as the Volunteers of National Security, the body Haitians called the Tontons Macoutes. Its declared purpose was to put down political opposition. Its real purpose was structural. Every Haitian government since 1806 had held office at the pleasure of the officer corps, and a president who wanted to finish his term had to keep the generals content or replace them faster than they could organise. Duvalier did something else. He built a second armed body, recruited outside the army, paid outside the army, and answerable to him alone, so that the regular soldiers were no longer the only people in Haiti with guns. From that year the VSN was the instrument through which the state reached into neighbourhoods and villages, and it did the work of surveillance, extortion and killing that a professional army might have refused or bargained over. The arrangement held until 1986, which makes it the most durable political invention of the twentieth century in Haiti.