Belgium quits the Congo in months and the state falls apart

Belgium gave up the Congo in 1960 after years of unrest, and moved so fast that the nationalists themselves were caught unready. Parties multiplied, most of them regional and built on one language group. Patrice Lumumba tried to hold a national coalition together while the army mutinied under him and Katanga, which held the copper, declared itself separate. Americans, Russians, Chinese and Belgians all involved themselves. The United Nations sent its first large African force, and the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, died when his plane came down in Zambia in September 1961. Peacekeepers brought Katanga back under central control by 1962. Lumumba was gone by then, kidnapped and killed, with American knowledge and to American satisfaction, since Washington feared both his politics and his ability to hold a crowd. The army commander Joseph Mobutu, backed by the Americans, took power outright in 1965 and kept it for thirty two years. He renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and the West paid the bills until the Cold War ended.

The militia that had been operating around Francois Duvalier since 1958 was formalised by a presidential order dated 7 November 1962 and published in the official gazette Le Moniteur on Thursday 15 November. The body was named the Volunteers of National Security. Its members wore blue and were drawn from the poor classes, and Haitians called them the tontons macoutes. The corps included women, some of them in senior rank. Its declared purpose was the security of the nation. Its working purpose was to reach into every quarter and every rural section on behalf of one man. Every source of power in the country was brought under the same arrangement. The cabinet was submissive, the administration was macoutised, rank conferred no authority of its own, and whatever power an individual held came from his personal and direct relation to the chief of state. The legislature and the courts were placed in the same position.

Greene told Diederich in a letter of 20 December 1965 that a novel about Haiti was coming out at the end of January, and a copy reached the Diederich house in the middle of the Dominican civil war. In the prefatory letter Greene wrote that poor Haiti and the character of Duvalier's rule were not invented, and that the latter had not even been blackened for dramatic effect, since it was impossible to deepen that night. Diederich read it in one night and concluded that Greene had protected everyone concerned and had breached no confidence, and that the book gave the poor of Haiti something the dictatorship had taken from them, a voice. He identifies the models as he knew them, Jolicoeur as Petit Pierre, Fred Baptiste and Hector Riobe behind the young Philipot, Bajeux as the refugee priest, and Doctor Camille Lherisson, a revelation Greene made only in 1980, as Doctor Magiot.

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.