Every oungan in the Cul-de-Sac is trucked to the palace at midnight

One evening in 1959, as the light went off the Cul-de-Sac plain, trucks of soldiers surrounded Croix-des-Missions and Croix-des-Bouquets, the towns at the heart of Haitian Vodou. Through the night the detachments collected every oungan and every manbo in the district, the priests and priestesses who serve the spirits, and drove them at gunpoint toward the capital. The convoys came together in the inner courtyard of the National Palace. At midnight the prisoners were pushed up a dark back staircase into the Hall of Busts, where Duvalier stood by himself in the blood red robe of the Secte Rouge. He told them he was the supreme authority of the state and from that night their only master, and then sent them away without another word. He had announced the principle the year before, saying that to seek his destruction was to seek the destruction of Haiti herself. In October he emptied six Senate seats. The one senator who stayed in Port-au-Prince and kept speaking was taken by macoutes within the year and never seen again.

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.

Changes to United States immigration law after 1965 encouraged millions of Caribbean immigrants to come, and the decades that followed produced substantial educational and economic gains among them. Shared ideas about equality had already given way to the American civil rights movement and to Caribbean independence in the 1960s, so the new arrivals entered a country that had just rewritten its own rules. Some historians and sociologists point to Caribbean advances that run ahead of those of African Americans and read them as a breach in the diaspora unity of the earlier twentieth century. The comparison is contested. Winston James argued against it in 2002, examining Afro Caribbean social mobility in the United States and rejecting the standard explanation built on it. What is not in dispute is the scale. A region that had been sending tens of thousands began sending millions, and cities from New York to Miami were remade.

The League's leaders described women as a class defined by labour. Women did the work of producing labourers and citizens with their bodies, and every other kind of work they did was discounted, whether they were mothers, cultivators, domestic servants, intellectuals or professionals. Jeanne Perez, who edited La Voix des Femmes, wrote that women would no longer accept being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. The organisers wanted the material contribution counted. Haitian women had a share in producing the country's agricultural wealth equal to men's or larger, a claim resting on the peasant cultivators, the market women and the madan sara who moved and sold the nation's food. Women also did most of the teaching, formal and informal. Against all of it stood the Napoleonic Code inherited from the colony, which classed a married woman as a minor and denied her the right to hold her own wages. The League backed the argument with night schools and housing for working-class girls, both still running in the 1960s.