Rome and Washington both come back, and the tobacco monopoly keeps paying

On 22 May 1964 an American ambassador presented himself in Port-au-Prince for the first time in four years, and Lyndon Johnson told the new Haitian envoy in Washington that he looked forward to close cooperation. The economic pressure Kennedy had applied began to lift. The Inter-American Development Bank found money for waterworks and the United States Navy resumed shore leave. Foreign aid ran above five million dollars a year. Duvalier was separately taking in about ten million a year through accounts that appeared in no budget, fed by the Regie du Tabac, a tobacco monopoly grown to cover cement, flour, sugar, milk, cars, textiles, matches and much else, with the cash moving through a private bank. No government or lender ever challenged those accounts in public. In late 1965 Duvalier opened talks with the Vatican and named his price, which was a Haitian bench of bishops in place of the French one. Paul VI agreed in August 1966, lifted the excommunication and sent a nuncio back.

Changes to United States immigration law after 1965 encouraged millions of Caribbean immigrants to come, and the decades that followed produced substantial educational and economic gains among them. Shared ideas about equality had already given way to the American civil rights movement and to Caribbean independence in the 1960s, so the new arrivals entered a country that had just rewritten its own rules. Some historians and sociologists point to Caribbean advances that run ahead of those of African Americans and read them as a breach in the diaspora unity of the earlier twentieth century. The comparison is contested. Winston James argued against it in 2002, examining Afro Caribbean social mobility in the United States and rejecting the standard explanation built on it. What is not in dispute is the scale. A region that had been sending tens of thousands began sending millions, and cities from New York to Miami were remade.

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.

Statistics kept by the Haitian Ministry of Education for 1964 traced how many children entering public primary school were still present at each later stage. The figure at the end of the sequence was 0.65 percent, which is fewer than seven pupils in a thousand of the school population completing the secondary cycle. The rate of enrolment was falling rather than rising. Between 1960 and 1967 the school age population of Haiti grew from about one million to about 1.8 million, while the number of children actually enrolled went from 249,000 to 300,113. What the school did in Haiti was mark a threshold. Passing through it meant crossing from the condition of a cultural laggard to the status of a civilised person, and the crossing was made in French, a language almost nobody in the country spoke at home.