A watchman is wound in barbed wire and hung up to bleed

In August 1962, on the anniversary of the ceremony at Bois Caiman, the president presided over a repetition of it at which his cabinet and his senior militiamen drank warm blood from a chalice. The two years that followed were among the bloodiest the country has had. The killing looked shapeless at first. A watchman at the public works department was found wound in rusty barbed wire and left hanging outside his shack to bleed to death. Another was crucified against the cemetery wall at Petionville. Jean Chenet, an intellectual who liked chess, was shot on his own doorstep, and an army major stopped his American wife from moving the body until the following day. The human rights commission of the Organisation of American States asked twice to visit. The first request was ignored and the second was refused as an intrusion on Haitian sovereignty. Food shipments meant for starving peasants rotted on the docks because consuls abroad would not issue papers for them.

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.

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.

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.