A Haitian exile runs UNESCO's Africa division and hires Haitians

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.

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.

The approach to independence in Rwanda was dominated by the split between Tutsi and Hutu, which German and then Belgian administrators had hardened out of older and looser social categories into a fixed racial hierarchy with identity cards to match. In 1959 a Hutu rising against the Tutsi monarchy killed a great many people, and the Belgians restored order only to begin managing a transfer of power to the majority they had spent decades governing through its rivals. Parmehutu, the main Hutu party, swept the local elections of 1960. The monarchy was abolished the following year, and Parmehutu took the country to independence in 1962. Ethnic violence did not stop. The fear that the Tutsi were about to take power back was the trigger for the massacre in 1994 of Tutsi and of the Hutu thought to be friendly to them. In Burundi next door the Tutsi held power from independence until 1993. The categories were an administrative convenience. They became the lines along which two countries tore.

Changes to United States immigration law after 1965 encouraged millions of Caribbean immigrants to come, and the decades that followed produced substantial educational and economic gains among them. Shared ideas about equality had already given way to the American civil rights movement and to Caribbean independence in the 1960s, so the new arrivals entered a country that had just rewritten its own rules. Some historians and sociologists point to Caribbean advances that run ahead of those of African Americans and read them as a breach in the diaspora unity of the earlier twentieth century. The comparison is contested. Winston James argued against it in 2002, examining Afro Caribbean social mobility in the United States and rejecting the standard explanation built on it. What is not in dispute is the scale. A region that had been sending tens of thousands began sending millions, and cities from New York to Miami were remade.