Barbot fights a private war and the order goes out to shoot black dogs

With his wife and children safe in the Argentine embassy, Clement Barbot took the field alone. He ambushed militiamen and soldiers and killed them in tens. He knew the telephone system well enough to open a line to the president's private white handset, and used it to warn Duvalier that his coffee had been poisoned; the reply was that Barbot would bring him his own head. He raided Fort Dimanche and emptied the armoury. When pursuers found his hiding place at Martissant they took a weapons cache and saw a black dog leave in the dark, which confirmed for many Haitians that he could change shape whenever he chose. An order went out to shoot black dogs on sight. Barbot's answer was to leave a note on the president's desk inside the palace. On 14 July, low on ammunition and betrayed by a peasant, he and his brother were surrounded in a cane field at Cazeau. The soldiers set the cane alight and shot them as they came out.

The first Haitian refugee boat detected in Florida arrived in 1963. Its passengers asked for asylum, were refused and were sent home. Ten years passed before another sailboat reached the state. Richman takes the dates from Alex Stepick, and those isolated arrivals stand at the head of a movement that later became the defining image of Haitian migration. Through the first half of the twentieth century Haitian workers had gone instead to Cuba, to other parts of Haiti and to the Dominican Republic, following North American investment in capitalised agriculture. In the second half of the century they went to the United States and Canada, with New York the principal destination, and also to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Quebec, Boston and Chicago. One wooden boat turned away in 1963 sits at the beginning of a sequence that put more than two hundred thousand Haitians in South Florida within two decades of the first large crossings.

The Algerian war entered its worst phase in 1956 with bombings in Algiers and a French army doubled to around half a million men. Ahmed Ben Bella, who had escaped from prison, organised the FLN abroad and kept the weapons moving, with Nasser's Egypt as the important ally. The fighting in Algiers through 1956 and 1957 was savage on both sides. Negotiations failed, and French settlers made their own attempts to seize the colonial administration. De Gaulle's offensives at the end of the decade destroyed a great deal and settled nothing, while opposition to the war grew inside France. In 1960 the United Nations recognised Algeria's right to self determination. After more failed talks and more atrocities the French withdrew in July 1962 and independence was recognised. Up to a million European settlers left with the administration, having lost about ten thousand dead. Algerian dead numbered a million or more. Frantz Fanon wrote Les Damnes de la Terre out of this war.

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.