Duvalier re elects himself by 1,320,748 votes to nothing

On 8 April 1961 Francois Duvalier dissolved both chambers and called elections for a single fifty seven seat assembly to be held on 30 April. The ballots were printed with a heading across the top: Republic of Haiti, Doctor Francois Duvalier, President of the Republic. The names of the legislative candidates ran underneath. At Cap Haitien the prefect made government employees and the men in the jail vote, then collected Canadian and American residents, French priests, missionaries and their wives and walked them to the polls under guard. About a million Haitians were eligible. The government announced that 1,320,748 had voted. On 9 May the country was told that the same ballots had also returned the president, unopposed, by 1,320,748 to nil, for a six year term starting on 22 May, although his own constitution ran the term he was already serving to 1963. Duvalier said his enemies could accuse him of one crime only, which was loving his people too much.

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.

UNESCO, the United Nations Children's Fund and the civilian branch of the Congo operation set up a Centre de Production at Limite, about fifteen miles outside Leopoldville, the city now called Kinshasa. It was a printing plant. In its first two years it turned out over half a million educational and instructional items for a country whose school system had lost the Belgians who ran it. Roger Ade, a Haitian, supervised the plant and worked directly with the Congolese trainees learning the machines, and was photographed there in October 1963. Raoul Peck, whose father Hebert went to the Congo with the first Haitian contingent, has described the ordinary conditions of that work. For a whole year his father had no car, lived on the outskirts rather than in the good part of town, and rode the crowded local buses to work every morning with everyone else. Maurice Dartigue was meanwhile demanding equal rank and equal pay for Haitian teachers from United Nations headquarters.

The 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey produced the first direct national measurement of infant mortality in the country, worked out from the birth histories women gave. In Port-au-Prince, of the children born between 1956 and 1960, 144 in every thousand died before their first birthday. The figure fell to 137 and then to 122 over the next two five year cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1975 it rose to 197. Rural areas and small towns ran at 132, then 142, then 143, and dropped to 103 in the last cohort, ending far below the capital. The national rate was 124, and the author judged that rural deaths were undercounted and the true national figure closer to 150. The suggested cause was food. Rural mothers nursed for about eighteen months, city mothers for about twelve, and a 1978 nutrition survey found younger and better educated women in the capital weaning early and moving to bottled milk. Some did not nurse at all.