The doctor who beat yaws takes the palace dressed as the loa of death

Francois Duvalier became president of Haiti on 22 October 1957. He was born in Port-au-Prince in April 1907, the son of a black justice of the peace, and he grew up under the American occupation, radicalised by the open racism of the Marines. He qualified in medicine in 1934, spent ten years as a hospital doctor, studied tropical disease control at the University of Michigan, and made his name in Haiti by helping to eradicate yaws. He was also a houngan, and he built his public image deliberately on Baron Samedi, the loa who governs the dead. A new constitution promulgated that December granted universal suffrage. Within twelve months he had survived an attempt by soldiers to remove him and had created the Tonton Macoutes. Noirisme had been assembled by Jean Price-Mars and his students as an argument for the cultural dignity of black Haiti. It became the official doctrine of a police state, which is what happens to an idea about pride once a government needs it to justify a militia.

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.

Where no single ethnic group was large enough to dominate the others, a colony could build a politics that belonged to the whole territory. Tanganyika is the clearest case. The African Association had existed there since 1929 and came into its strength only in the early 1950s, when renewed economic interest in the territory pushed Africans off land wanted for white settlers and colonial officers began forcing changes on African farming. Terracing orders produced riots in 1955. Out of the Association came the Tanganyika African National Union in 1954, led by Julius Nyerere, who like Kwame Nkrumah had studied abroad and had watched what the Convention People's Party achieved in the Gold Coast. Nyerere widened TANU through the mid-1950s until it reached the villages, and he did it in Swahili, a language spread by nineteenth century caravan trade and then adopted by the colonial state for schools and offices. Nigeria and Uganda had no such common tongue and their nationalisms fractured along ethnic lines. Nyerere hinted at violence and never used it, which left the British nothing to answer.