African history enters the curriculum and stays an optional extra

Independence across Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States produced, from the late 1950s, a large expansion of scholarly work on the African past. Historians, linguists and archaeologists filled in centuries that university syllabuses had treated as empty, and African history became a subject many universities offer. Offering is a different thing from requiring. In world history courses the African material tends to sit in a sidebar or in a chapter that gets dropped when the term runs short, few history students take an African course at all, and the courses that exist give most of their attention to the last two or three centuries while the ancient periods stay thin. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the same arithmetic applies to us. Haiti is available to be studied and almost never required, so a person can finish a history degree in the country that bought Louisiana from Napoleon without being told why Napoleon was in a hurry to sell it.

Under Francois Duvalier, president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, the men who worked for him carried the bodies of their victims out to Titayen, a stretch of desert ground at the foot of the coastal mountains a few miles from Port-au-Prince, and left them there for crows, goats and vultures. Everyone understood the choice of ground. Haitians who serve the spirits hold that a permanent link runs between a person's spirit and the physical remains, which is why tombs are built above ground with flat roofs that work as tables for offerings of food and rum on birthdays, on All Saints' Day and on the first of January, which is Ancestors Day and Independence Day at once. To withhold the body was to cancel all of that for the whole family. The name of Titayen stayed in the national memory, and in 2010 whoever picked the site of the mass graves for earthquake victims picked the same ground.

Greene spent August 1963 in Haiti and found the Oloffson almost empty, with an Italian casino manager and an elderly American couple as the only other guests, a scene he transposed almost unchanged into his novel. The gossip columnist Aubelin Jolicoeur announced his arrival on 13 August and became the model for Petit Pierre. A New York paper ran a piece on 18 August noting that Greene was thinking of writing an entertainment beginning with a hotel keeper who returns to find only two guests. His own article appeared in a London Sunday paper on 29 September 1963 under the title Nightmare Republic, a bleak account of a people living under a strange curse in which he cast Papa Doc as the Vodou spirit Baron Samedi, a figure in top hat and tails haunting the cemeteries in dark glasses with a cigar. Diederich later learned Greene had been watched day and night throughout the visit.

From 1955 the British in Kenya accepted that the colony had to change and began consolidating African holdings and issuing title under a new Kikuyu settlement scheme. They left untouched the grievance that had produced Mau Mau. Land went to men classified as loyal and the landless got nothing. Then the Hola Camp killings came out, detainees beaten to death in a system that treated Mau Mau as a disease to be washed out of the mind. The revelations disgusted British opinion. Harold Macmillan had already begun doubting that colonies paid for themselves, and now they were costing him votes. Multiracial power sharing was dropped in favour of African majority rule, the nationalist parties were legalised, and Jomo Kenyatta came out of prison to lead KANU and take Kenya to independence in 1963. In the last months Britain bought more than a million acres from departing European farmers for redistribution. Seller and buyer both had to be willing, so the buyers were men who already owned land.