Duvalier tells the OAS that he is the personification of Haiti

The commission of the Organisation of American States reached Port-au-Prince on 30 April 1963 and found the city packed with a hundred and fifty thousand peasants brought in for the occasion, with drums going and vaksin sounding. Duvalier sat without moving or blinking for a quarter of an hour while a militiaman with a cocked weapon stood behind each ambassador. He then spoke to them in Creole and went on answering their French in Creole. A man capable of embodying an ideal appears once in forty years, he told them, and he was the personification of Haiti, no bullet capable of frightening him had been manufactured, he took orders from no foreigner, he was continuing the work of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines. Then he walked them onto a balcony to look at the crowd. Washington had orders ready to land marines if his term ended on 15 May in the massacre his ministers were promising. On 15 May the roadblocks vanished, the radio played Choucoune, and the president held a calm press conference among fresh roses.

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 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.