The last independent newspaper in Haiti is closed in January 1961

La Phalange was the Catholic daily of Port-au-Prince and the last newspaper in Haiti with an owner the government did not control. On 9 January 1961 it was closed, after it printed objections to new decrees on education. The decrees mattered because the church ran a large share of the country's schools, so a government that set the curriculum was taking those schools away from the priests who staffed them. The closure settled the press question at the same time. Every other paper of any size was already friendly or already gone, so the end of one Catholic daily ended the possibility of reading a dissenting account of anything in the country. What followed was recorded by the government, by exiles in New York and Montreal, and by foreign correspondents who were put on planes as soon as they became inconvenient. The Duvalier years are hard to document for a reason, and the reason has a date on it.

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.

A revised edition of James's history appeared with footnotes, a new appendix and six fresh paragraphs opening the chapter on the war of independence, containing what one critic calls his most concentrated meditation on Toussaint's tragedy. Hogsbjerg links the revision to James's sense that decolonisation had changed what the story meant, since writing about independence around 1960 was a different matter from writing about it in 1936. The reading James settled on is that Toussaint's error came from the very qualities that made him, and that his failure was a failure of enlightenment rather than of darkness. Dessalines could see the situation clearly and simply because the ties binding him to French civilisation were the slenderest. James then helped a fellow Trinidadian adapt the history into a new play with the same title.

In 1955 agricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar and sisal made up 88 percent of the total volume of Haitian exports. By 1977 they made up 46.7 percent. Assembly plants in the towns grew over the same years, and yet three million four hundred thousand people still lived from farming, on holdings divided and divided again. The mechanism behind the fall was the marketing chain. Two separate networks carried goods from the most distant mountain garden to Port-au-Prince and abroad, one for export commodities and one for food eaten inside the country. On export crops the intermediaries, the importers, the speculators and the state took up to 50 percent of the value, which is why peasants lost interest in growing coffee, the principal crop. On food crops a very large number of intermediaries took 25 percent between them, and nobody attended to the food side at all.