Bishop Paul Robert of Gonaives is expelled from Haiti

Paul Robert had been bishop of Gonaives for years and had made his name leading the drive against Vodou, the campaign Haitians remember as the anti superstition campaign, in which priests and their helpers broke drums, cleared shrines and made converts renounce the religion in writing. In November 1962 the government expelled him from Haiti and said he had plundered the folkloric riches of the nation during that same campaign. Robert was the third senior churchman removed inside two years, after the archbishop of Port-au-Prince and the apostolic administrator who replaced him, and the pattern held. Francois Duvalier had been an ethnologist before he was a politician and had written about Vodou as the authentic culture of the Haitian majority. Expelling the bishop who had tried to destroy it cost him nothing at home. He had already been excommunicated in Rome, so there was nothing further to lose abroad. The vacancies left behind could be filled only with the government's consent.

Dunduzu Chisiza was building the first economic plan for the territory about to become Malawi. He had drawn in experts from across the world to prepare an ambitious five year programme of economic recovery. One night in September 1962, racing home from a meeting in Blantyre, he drove into the abutments of a high level concrete bridge and was killed. Mourners came from the whole country to the funeral. He had been part of the group that did the practical work of government through 1962, when Kamuzu Banda formally held only the ministry of lands, natural resources and local government yet decided policy, approved legislation and directed the other ministers. In those months they widened secondary schooling, remade the native courts, improved conditions for agricultural labour, reformed the marketing of produce and replaced chiefs with elected district councils. The one man who could argue with Banda about the economy was gone two years before the country became independent.

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.

The West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues was founded in the October term of the 1960 to 1961 academic year at Mona in Jamaica. Best names among its founders Walter Rodney, Orlando Patterson, Norman Girvan, David Beckles, David Dabydeen, Eric Abrahams and Adlith Brown. Around them he lists the people already teaching and researching on that campus: M. G. Smith, R. T. Smith, George Cumper and David Edwards at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, soon joined by Alister McIntyre and Archie Singham, and on the faculty Roy Augier, Esther Unger and Elsa Goveia. Most of those names became the intellectual apparatus of the English speaking Caribbean over the following twenty years, and several of them, Rodney above all, went on to change how the African diaspora in the Americas wrote its own history. Best treats the room as the moment at which a regional intelligentsia assembled itself out of a colonial university.