Bishop Voegeli is expelled in the drive to make religion Haitian

In April 1964 the Haitian government expelled Alfred Voegeli, the Episcopal bishop of Haiti, with no ceremony and very little notice. The stated grounds were that he had plotted with opponents of the president and interfered with the work of the Haitian priests under him. The expulsion belonged to something wider. Duvalier had spent years pushing foreign clergy out of the country and replacing them with Haitians who owed him their positions, a policy he described as returning the churches of Haiti to Haitians. The Catholic hierarchy was the main target and several bishops had already gone. The Episcopal church was led from abroad as well, so it was reached by the same campaign. The argument for a national clergy was old and serious. Haiti trained almost no priests of its own while French orders staffed its parishes. What the regime did with that argument was convert an anticolonial demand into a way of putting loyal men in every pulpit.

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.

The Algerian war of decolonisation ran from 1954 to 1962 and ended with the country's liberation, which is dated to 1961 in the sequence set out here. Malik Bennabi, who lived from 1905 to 1973, wrote through those years and through the earlier decades when Algeria was ruled first from Istanbul and then from Paris. His two short works on the question of ideas in the Muslim world were conceived in late 1960 and 1961 and published a decade later. He was asking why ideas go dead in the societies that hold them, and what bilingualism does to a people who think in one language and are governed in another. Anyone whose body came into the world before 1961 and lived through that war carried a different set of intellectual and political concerns from anyone who did not. Haitian writers under the American occupation had made the same observation about themselves thirty years earlier.

C. L. R. James remarked at the time that the region was proceeding to independence as if to a funeral. Best quotes the line about 1962 and joins it to James's account of his own schooling at Queen's Royal College in Trinidad before 1932, where the masters, the curriculum and the code of morals all started from the position that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and where the pupil's job was to admire, to wonder, to imitate and to learn, with success measured by how close he came to a standard he could never reach. Best's claim is that the same problem of imperial education was as strong among the region's decision making class in 1962 as it had been in that classroom thirty years earlier. James was appalled by how little theoretical and philosophical work was being attempted at the university. The absence of a philosophy department was the smaller matter.