Cagoulards take Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel from her house at half past eleven

Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, founded in 1934. She had taken part in the parliamentary debates and the women's demonstrations of 1946 and 1950 for political rights and the vote. She wrote for La Voix des Femmes from 1935 and started her own twice-weekly paper, L'Escale, in 1951. She had supported Louis Dejoie in the 1957 election and began criticising the new government at once. On 6 January 1958, at half past eleven in the morning, armed men came to her house. Officers of the military household and civilians including Clement Barbot, Elois Maitre and Luc Desir beat her two daughters in front of her and took her away. At Delmas the group raped her in turn and beat her with rifle butts. Her fingers were broken and she was left for dead in a ditch. Rape entered Haitian state practice as a political weapon at that moment.

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.