Fewer than seven Haitian pupils in a thousand reach the end of school

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.

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.

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.