A month of national gratitude turns into a carnival of blood

Duvalier declared 22 April to 22 May 1963 a Month of National Gratitude to himself, announced as a carnival of flowers and joy. Diederich calls what followed a carnival of carnage, with more real and imagined enemies hunted down and killed, and describes a national palace where guinea hens and cocks had replaced the flamingos on the lawns and which Haitians regarded as a house of horror. On 26 April, one of the bloodiest days of the dictatorship, the dam burst. The palace blamed an attempt on Duvalier's children on Lieutenant Benoit, an army marksman sheltering in the Dominican embassy, although the act was later shown to be the work of the former secret police chief Clement Barbot. Soldiers violated the Dominican chancellery, and only President Bosch's warning that it would be an act of war stopped them entering the ambassador's residence and killing those who had taken asylum.

The Congo became independent from Belgium in June 1960 and the Belgian administrators went home. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold set up the Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo, which spent four years recruiting French speaking professionals from around the world to keep the country's services running. Hundreds of Haitians went, as teachers, professors, engineers and doctors. By 1962 Haitians formed the second largest national contingent of United Nations staff experts in the Congo. Maurice Dartigue was chief of the Africa Division of UNESCO. Athemas Bellerive, once director general of health in Haiti, ran the World Health Organisation medical team. In 1963 the military force of the operation was commanded by Max H. Dorsinville of Haiti. Large numbers of Haitians also worked in United Nations programmes in Benin and Cameroon, and an estimated 7,500 Haitians were living in African countries. Haitian migration is usually written as a movement towards New York, Montreal and Paris.

In West Africa constitutional change had been shifting power toward African representatives. In Kenya the British treated white settlers as the territory's future and designed multiracial councils that guaranteed those settlers a majority. Rural violence began in the late 1940s and by the early 1950s included the killing of prosperous Kikuyu as well as white farmers. The fighters were mostly Kikuyu, with Embu and Meru among them, bound to each other by oaths, drawn from squatters pushed off land and from the urban poor, and operating in the forests and hills of southern-central Kenya. In 1952 Britain declared a state of emergency, arrested the leadership of the Kenya African Union including Jomo Kenyatta, and brought in the army. Villages were targeted and indiscriminate sweeps put thousands of Kikuyu into detention camps. The brutality drove more young men into the forest, while Kikuyu loyalists were armed as a home guard. The revolt was suppressed by 1956 and never built a base beyond the Kikuyu, and the world read it through British reporting as tribal savagery. By the middle of the decade officials were questioning whether the settlers belonged at the centre of Kenyan politics.

The Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best, who lived from 1934 to 2007, opened one of his central essays by taking stock. Since 1962, he wrote, the region had been shown two pictures of its future, and neither had survived contact with the world. One turned out to be an illusion. The other became a nightmare. Those who put forward the first told the islands to make what they ate. The essay is titled on independence and responsibility, with self knowledge treated as an imperative rather than a luxury. The date is chosen deliberately: 1962 is the year Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent states and the year the West Indies Federation collapsed. Best is describing the position of a Caribbean intellectual who has to work out what to do when both available scripts for the future have already been tried and have already failed. Haiti had been in that position since 1804.