A hedge of pegwe keeps animals out of a Haitian yard

On the Fond des Negres plateau in the southern peninsula of Haiti, houses sit on hill crests and ridges, each on a small plot ringed by hedges of living plants. Pegwe, the spiny Bromelia pinguin, grows in thick clumps about two feet high and turns back any animal or person, though it harbours snakes, mongooses and rats, so people dislike having it close to the door. Kadelab, the succulent Euphorbia lactea, reaches five feet, forms an impenetrable thicket, grows in orderly lines and tolerates low rainfall. Parese matures in under six months, runs to ten or twelve feet, holds soil well and looks better than either, though goats and horses eat its leaves. Croton and gad mezo line the path to the door and stand in decorative clumps. Bamboo marks where plots meet and is planted along watercourses. The plateau covers about five thousand five hundred hectares at three hundred metres, and the yard is called the lakou.

African independence came through a mixture of negotiation and violence, frequently both at the same time. Nationalist leaders presented the transfer of power as a victory over colonial masters and the fulfilment of a people's destiny. Governments in London, Paris and Brussels presented it as the last stage of a mandate they had always intended to complete. Neither version survives inspection. Armed movements did occasionally beat colonial forces in the field, and those victories rarely destroyed the political system already in place, and they rarely spoke for a whole population. What usually happened was a negotiated settlement, which was a considerable achievement in its own right. Departing administrations sometimes left behind friendly governments run by men they had educated. They also left social and political structures so unequal and so unstable that they could not hold. Underneath the failures of decolonisation sat something older: a contest over scarce political and material resources, fought with upheaval and the building of new communities, running through African politics since the nineteenth century.

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.

The new government inherited an empty treasury, dead tourism, coffee production down by more than two fifths and American aid programmes closed. Before October was out the supporters of Dejoie called a general strike, and it broke in their hands. Heavy men in dark glasses with pistols under their jackets persuaded shopkeepers to stay open. Where persuasion failed, cutting tools opened the steel shutters and police invited passers-by to help themselves under a law permitting the redistribution of goods to needy persons. Nobody tried the business strike on Duvalier again. Inside two months the penitentiary and Fort Dimanche held at least a hundred political prisoners, with as many people again in hiding or inside embassies. Clement Barbot ran this. In January 1958 his men kidnapped, beat and sexually assaulted the feminist editor Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel. Kebreau, who had installed the president, missed the signals. Twenty of his key officers were posted to remote garrisons, and on 12 March 1958 he heard Fort National fire thirteen guns for someone else and drove straight to the Dominican embassy.