A Rara band in Bizoton writes down its fines

In 1958 Gerson Alexis collected the written rules of a Rara band called Vapeur Vin Pou We, based at Bizoton outside Port-au-Prince. The first article required members to assemble before eight in the evening on ordinary procession nights. For Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday the meetings moved to the morning, with a separate hour fixed for each of those days. Anyone arriving after the appointed time paid two gourdes, unless illness or a prior arrangement excused him. The sixth article required a high hat, blue trousers and a yellow shirt, and set the penalty for appearing out of uniform at three gourdes. Wealthy Haitians and visiting Americans described Rara crowds as undisciplined mobs. This band ran on a constitution, a dress code and a published schedule of penalties, and it committed them to paper in a country where most of the people walking behind it could not read.

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.

The first Haitian refugee boat detected in Florida arrived in 1963. Its passengers asked for asylum, were refused and were sent home. Ten years passed before another sailboat reached the state. Richman takes the dates from Alex Stepick, and those isolated arrivals stand at the head of a movement that later became the defining image of Haitian migration. Through the first half of the twentieth century Haitian workers had gone instead to Cuba, to other parts of Haiti and to the Dominican Republic, following North American investment in capitalised agriculture. In the second half of the century they went to the United States and Canada, with New York the principal destination, and also to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Quebec, Boston and Chicago. One wooden boat turned away in 1963 sits at the beginning of a sequence that put more than two hundred thousand Haitians in South Florida within two decades of the first large crossings.

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.