Six new paragraphs recast Toussaint's error as a tragedy

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.

Early on 26 April 1963 an attempt was made on Jean-Claude Duvalier and his sister Simone as they were being driven to school. It failed. Radio announced the attack and called on all duvalierists to take up arms. Macoutes and members of the presidential guard made Thursday 26 April the bloodiest day of the Duvalier years. A manhunt ran through the streets at random. Anyone with the face of an opponent could lose his life for being in the wrong place, or, like the Benoits, for carrying a compromising name. Duvalier had named as authors of the attack a list of potential enemies headed by Lieutenant Francois Benoit, who had recently distinguished himself in the marksmanship competition of the Americas. Every member of the Benoit family was struck. Days earlier Jacques Fourcand, the president's adviser and new head of the Red Cross, had publicly promised a Himalaya of corpses. A year later the allied Duchatelier family disappeared.

Most of British and French tropical Africa reached independence with little organised violence. Kenya was the exception, because land dispossession and urban poverty had made its political situation explosive by the early 1950s. Its decolonisation falls into three stages. From about 1945 to 1952 the crisis built until the colonial government declared a state of emergency. From 1952 to 1956 came the main period of Mau Mau fighting, which the British defeated militarily while learning that neither their own position nor the settlers' could be sustained. From the mid 1950s into the early 1960s, with the emergency lifted in 1959, the settler polity was taken apart and the colony moved toward the independence it received in 1963. The rebellion failed as a military campaign and achieved what decades of petitioning had failed to achieve. It demonstrated that dispossession would keep producing violence, and that holding white privilege in place would cost Britain more than the privilege returned.

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.