The flag goes back to black and red

In 1964 Francois Duvalier replaced the national flag. The blue and red bands Haiti had flown since the early nineteenth century, laid horizontally in the design associated with Alexandre Petion, gave way to black and red set vertically. The regime said it was restoring the colours of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and of King Henry Christophe. Colour in Haiti has never been a matter of paint alone. Blue and red carried the republic of the south and the long hold of its mulatto elite on the state. Black and red were claimed for the majority who had been governed by that elite for a century and a half. Duvalier presented the change as a consummation, the moment the black masses finally displaced the men who had run the country in their own interest. He was strong enough by 1964 to do it without argument. The flag stayed black and red until his son fell in 1986, and the old design returned within weeks.

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.

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.

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.