Unions are tolerated for six years and then reduced to one kind

Between 1957 and 1963 the Duvalier government allowed organised labour unions to operate. A series of strikes ended that, and by the close of the period the only unions still functioning were those that openly supported the regime, the chauffeur-guides among them. The chauffeur-guides were the taxi and truck drivers whose refusal to work had helped bring down Paul Magloire in December 1956, so the survival of that particular organisation is not a small detail. Duvalier had watched exactly what an independent transport union could do to a Haitian government, and he made sure the instrument stayed in his own hands. Nicholls dates the suppression to strikes, which is to say to the moment tolerance stopped paying. Independent labour was permitted while it could be steered and abolished as soon as it moved on its own. What remained carried the name of a union and functioned as an arm of the state.

The Suez Canal had offended Egyptian nationalists since it opened in 1869, and Gamal Abdel Nasser meant to remove every remaining Western hold on Egyptian sovereignty. Britain agreed in 1954 to pull its troops out. Two years later Britain, the United States and the World Bank withdrew the money promised for the Aswan Dam, and Nasser answered by nationalising the canal company. Britain and France invaded with Israeli help and the operation failed completely. Condemnation was worldwide and the loudest of it came from Washington. London and Paris backed down. Anthony Eden resigned as British prime minister soon afterwards. Nasser had won a victory for pan-Arabism, and Africans read it as something wider, the postcolonial state proving stronger than the empires that had ruled them. No European power had been humiliated on African soil on that scale since Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Within a few years Britain and France were retreating from the continent altogether. The remaining question was when Africa would be free.

Haitians reaching New York in the 1960s found no government or civic body set up to receive them. The Catholic Church filled the space, sponsoring centres that offered help with employment, immigration paperwork, housing, literacy and English classes. Lyderick Bonaventure, a trade union leader and political activist pushed out of Haiti, founded and directed one of the first of them in 1967. The Haitian Neighborhood Center, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, became a place immigrants went for counselling, for news from home, or simply to meet other Haitians. Similar centres followed in Brooklyn and Queens, among them Charlemagne Peralte and Haitian Americans United for Progress. The people running them were educated, comfortable in American institutions, and had generally held prominent positions in Haiti before the Duvalier government forced them out of the country.

Between 1956 and 1957 a household survey covered the bourg of Kenscoff, the settlements nearest to it, and the higher region of Furcy. Every plot of land occupied by peasants was canvassed systematically, and only a few families who happened to be away were missed. The count was made in the months when no holidaymaker from the capital was present, so errors could be corrected on the spot. It produced 917 households: 468 in the bourg, 198 in the neighbouring communities and 251 around Furcy. Household size rose with distance from the town. The bourg averaged 4.5 people, the nearby settlements 5.8, and Furcy 6.7. So did the shape of the household. Father, mother and children living alone made up 47 per cent of households in the bourg and 74 per cent at Furcy, while widows, widowers, separated people and young men starting out on their own were 26 per cent in the bourg and 8 per cent at Furcy.