Sharia divides politics in the north while the south stays local

Islam is old in Africa and its place in government has been argued over since independence. South of the Sahara the argument has mostly concerned the standing of Muslims inside states with large Christian populations. Nigeria applies sharia in the northern states while national politics turns on how Muslims and Christians divide the presidency and the ministries. Islam there is local and adapted, with sufi orders predominating, which is precisely what campaigners for a pure orthodoxy attack. Where Muslims are a minority, as in Kenya and Tanzania, they have organised as a lobby around economic neglect. North of the Sahara it went differently. Sadat was killed in 1981 by Islamists who regarded his agreement with Israel as a betrayal, and Mubarak inherited the fight with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front took on the FLN and the country fell into civil war in the early 1990s. War between the north and south of Sudan ran from 1955 with one interval and had left about 1.5 million people dead by 2002.

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.

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.

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.