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

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.

Early in 1964 army officers began passing round petitions asking that Francois Duvalier hold the presidency for life. A commission produced the text. It gave him the office for as long as he lived and the power to name his successor, and it called him the Sovereign throughout. He installed himself on 1 April and explained that a revolutionary of his kind turns up once in fifty or seventy five years. The ballots handed to voters were printed in advance with the word Oui on them. Two point eight million came back in favour. Three thousand two hundred and thirty four people found a way to vote against, and most of them were arrested for defacing a ballot. Official decrees began capitalising the pronouns that referred to him. A magazine ran a picture of Christ with a hand on Duvalier's shoulder, captioned as a statement that this was the chosen one. Paul Blanchet issued a catechism in which the five founders of Haiti were declared to be one man, and the man was the president.

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.

UNESCO, the United Nations Children's Fund and the civilian branch of the Congo operation set up a Centre de Production at Limite, about fifteen miles outside Leopoldville, the city now called Kinshasa. It was a printing plant. In its first two years it turned out over half a million educational and instructional items for a country whose school system had lost the Belgians who ran it. Roger Ade, a Haitian, supervised the plant and worked directly with the Congolese trainees learning the machines, and was photographed there in October 1963. Raoul Peck, whose father Hebert went to the Congo with the first Haitian contingent, has described the ordinary conditions of that work. For a whole year his father had no car, lived on the outskirts rather than in the good part of town, and rode the crowded local buses to work every morning with everyone else. Maurice Dartigue was meanwhile demanding equal rank and equal pay for Haitian teachers from United Nations headquarters.