The numbers game returns from Cuba and the state takes a cut

The borlette was new in Upper Belair. Its name comes from la bolita, the Spanish name the New York numbers game acquired in Cuba and Puerto Rico when people travelled between the islands and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Migrants coming home through Cuba carried it to Haiti, and under Francois Duvalier it spread across the country and reached the slum. By the middle of the 1970s the state recognised it as a national institution. Sellers paid tax and used numbered state tickets, which gave a buyer some proof of what he had staked. The inspectors who checked on all this were tontons macoutes, and they took a weekly payment to leave sellers alone. When the seller was himself a macoute he decided by himself whether to pay a winner, and winners usually decided to forget the money rather than complain to his superior.

Every morning at six, as the light reached the Caribbean, a young Haitian journalist named Raymond Alcide Joseph went on the air from a New York station with news of Haiti in Kreyol and sharp jokes at the expense of the president. Haitians called the programme six o'clock mass, and few people with a transistor missed it. Joseph spoke for the Coalition Haitienne, an exile group backed by Paul Magloire that stayed away from invasions, having watched the farce in the Florida Keys in 1966 where a landing party was stopped by federal agents while a television crew paid for the story and helped write the script. The Voice of America had dropped its Kreyol service on instructions from the White House, so for three years Joseph's Radio Vonvon was the only competition for the two hours a day Rene Depestre broadcast from Havana. Duvalier obtained jamming equipment licensed for export by the United States and used it against Vonvon. He left Havana alone.

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.

Francois Duvalier died in office in April 1971, having already named his nineteen-year-old son Jean-Claude president for life. Observers abroad expected the country to come apart within weeks. It did not. The army accepted the transfer, the United States accepted it, and the government carried on with the same ministries and the same militia. What the succession settled was the character of the state. Haiti now had a presidency that passed by inheritance, and no mechanism remained by which anyone outside one household could compete for it. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reads the moment as the end point of a process rather than a rupture, the formalisation of a crisis already under way. Every step that made the handover possible had been taken earlier, when the constitution was rewritten to suit one man, the parliament reduced to an audience, and the militia built as a private force answering to the palace. A system arranged for permanence produced an heir because that is what it was for.