Thirteen men land at Dame-Marie and the town of Jeremie pays for it

In June 1964 twenty five men trained across the border came ashore east of Saltrou under Captain Fred Baptiste. They fought in the pine forest and on Morne la Selle for weeks, ambushing the units sent after them, then withdrew to the Dominican Republic because the peasants around them were too hungry to feed anyone and their weapons never arrived. On 5 August thirteen young men of Jeune Haiti landed at Cap Dame-Marie. Most came from Jeremie and from families the regime called mulatto. Their leader, Gusle Villedrouin, was twenty four and the son of an officer Duvalier had killed the year before. They marched more than two hundred miles along the spine of the southern peninsula, fought at least ten engagements, brought down an aircraft and walked through a hurricane. On 26 October the last three died at Ravine Roche near l'Asile, throwing stones once the ammunition was gone. Their heads were carried to the palace and photographed for the newspapers. Duvalier then turned the militia loose on Jeremie. The Villedrouin, Drouin, Guilbaud, Laforest and Sansaricq families were marched through their own town and shot. At least a hundred people died. The government called it nationalisation.

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 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.

The West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues was founded in the October term of the 1960 to 1961 academic year at Mona in Jamaica. Best names among its founders Walter Rodney, Orlando Patterson, Norman Girvan, David Beckles, David Dabydeen, Eric Abrahams and Adlith Brown. Around them he lists the people already teaching and researching on that campus: M. G. Smith, R. T. Smith, George Cumper and David Edwards at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, soon joined by Alister McIntyre and Archie Singham, and on the faculty Roy Augier, Esther Unger and Elsa Goveia. Most of those names became the intellectual apparatus of the English speaking Caribbean over the following twenty years, and several of them, Rodney above all, went on to change how the African diaspora in the Americas wrote its own history. Best treats the room as the moment at which a regional intelligentsia assembled itself out of a colonial university.