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A catechism teaches that Duvalier is five founding fathers at once

1964 · year only · Haitian

The 1900sAnba Chèf0 sources
1964 · Haitianyear only

A catechism teaches that Duvalier is five founding fathers at once

Jean M. Fourcand's booklet turns loyalty to the president into a religious obligation.

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In 1964 Jean M. Fourcand assembled a Catechisme de la revolution, a question and answer book on the model used to teach children the Catholic faith. Its central claim was that Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, Christophe, Petion and Estime, the men Haiti counts as its founders, were all present and completed in the person of Francois Duvalier. Devotion to the president therefore carried the weight of a religious duty. Governments that rule by fear still spend heavily on stories about themselves, and this one produced a whole shelf of them: catechisms, breviaries of the president's sayings, slogans painted on walls. Trouillot's reading is that the effort failed at the level that mattered. Duvalierist language never reached the moral centre of the way Haitians reasoned about right and wrong. People repeated the formulas where the formulas were required and went on judging the government by older standards. The state could compel the words. It could not make them mean what it wanted.

Jean M. FourcandFrancois DuvalierMichel-Rolph Trouillot Haiti
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Meanwhile, and next door

1964 · Diasporayear only

A Midlands election makes race the official programme of a major party

Peter Griffiths took Smethwick on immigration and unseated a Labour minister.

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In the general election of 1964 Peter Griffiths won the seat of Smethwick in the English Midlands with a campaign built on black immigration, defeating a Labour minister to do it. It was the first occasion on which racism was taken up into the declared policy and programme of a major British party and used openly as an appeal to white voters. The result showed how far the argument had already travelled inside the organised working class and its own institutions. Two years earlier Parliament had passed the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, in 1962, imposing controls on the movement of black people into the country. A White Paper on immigration from the Commonwealth followed in 1965, establishing that the number of arrivals was itself the problem and setting the terms of policy for years afterwards. Further acts came in 1968, using explicit racial categories, and in 1971, bearing down on the dependants and families of black and Asian workers already there.

Peter Griffiths SmethwickBritain
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1954 to 1962 · Africanspan

A million Algerians die and France leaves in July 1962

Ben Bella ran the arms supply from outside while the French army grew to half a million men.

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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.

Ahmed Ben BellaCharles de GaulleFrantz FanonGamal Abdel NasserFront de Liberation Nationale AlgeriaAlgiersFranceEgypt
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26 April 1963 · Haitian

An attack on two schoolchildren costs the Benoit family everything

Radio called duvalierists to arms and the day became the bloodiest of the regime.

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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.

Francois BenoitFrancois DuvalierJean-Claude DuvalierJacques Fourcand Port-au-Prince
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