A student society at Mona gathers the next generation

The West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues was founded in the October term of the 1960 to 1961 academic year at Mona in Jamaica. Best names among its founders Walter Rodney, Orlando Patterson, Norman Girvan, David Beckles, David Dabydeen, Eric Abrahams and Adlith Brown. Around them he lists the people already teaching and researching on that campus: M. G. Smith, R. T. Smith, George Cumper and David Edwards at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, soon joined by Alister McIntyre and Archie Singham, and on the faculty Roy Augier, Esther Unger and Elsa Goveia. Most of those names became the intellectual apparatus of the English speaking Caribbean over the following twenty years, and several of them, Rodney above all, went on to change how the African diaspora in the Americas wrote its own history. Best treats the room as the moment at which a regional intelligentsia assembled itself out of a colonial university.

The general instructions prepared by the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs before the ministerial conference on the Alliance for Progress in June 1961 set the American objective in Haiti as keeping the country in our camp, and the line of action as living with Duvalier. Dean Rusk, who called Haiti the cesspool of the western hemisphere and its government enormously repugnant, argued for support anyway, on the ground that a Castro type regime might be no worse for Haitians and would be bad for the United States. Adolph Berle argued the opposite case and lost. What Duvalier delivered was concrete. Communists in Haiti were hunted actively. He offered Eisenhower and then Kennedy a military base in Haiti to replace Guantanamo. During the missile crisis he let American ships patrol Haitian waters to enforce the blockade of Cuba. His vote at Punta del Este gave Kennedy the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States.

Ugandan nationalism was weakened from the inside by the position of Buganda. The Ganda had received privileges from the British in return for helping to establish colonial rule, and other peoples resented them for it. When the kabaka objected in 1953 to a British plan to fold his kingdom fully into a single Uganda, the colonial authorities deported him, which turned Ganda grievance into a mass movement. The British then conceded, and the 1961 constitution gave Buganda internal self-government separate from the central state. Other divisions ran alongside that one. Northerners distrusted the educated nationalists, who were mostly southern and Christian, and in the south Protestants and Catholics had been competing for office since the late nineteenth century. The Uganda National Congress, founded in 1952 and renamed the Uganda People's Congress in 1960 under Milton Obote, drew on northern and Protestant support. The Democratic Party drew on southern Catholics. The Ganda formed Kabaka Yekka. Independence was as much a contest over who would hold power afterwards as a campaign against Britain.

In a footnote added to the 1963 edition of his history, and stressed again in his later lectures, C. L. R. James distinguished the Jacobins from the sansculottes and mapped that distinction onto the Haitian conflict. The Jacobins he treats as authoritarian enlightened despots, while the sansculottes wanted a dictatorship over the aristocracy and a free democratic state among themselves. On this reading the labourers who rose against Toussaint were not simply avengers, they wanted to hold the former masters down while governing themselves democratically. Ciccariello-Maher uses the point to argue that repressing an avowed enemy is compatible with popular democracy and does not forfeit any future claim to universal equality. He notes that this distinction is missing from Buck-Morss, who treats every identity based opposition as brutality feeding an endless cycle of victim and aggressor.