Haile Selassie spends a single day in Port-au-Prince

In April 1966 Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia came to Haiti. The visit was short and he did not stay the night, and it was still one of only two state visits Duvalier received in fourteen years in power. The government made everything it could of it. Ethiopia was the African state that had never been held as a colony, and Haiti was the first black republic. Putting the two heads of state on the same balcony let Duvalier present himself as a partner in the leadership of the race, a claim he had been making in print since the 1930s among the writers around the review Les Griots. The value of it was mostly domestic. Haitians had spent years being told the world despised their country, and here was an emperor at the National Palace. A government that could not feed people could still stage the argument that Haiti counted for something, and for one day in April it had a witness.

Haitians reaching New York in the 1960s found no government or civic body set up to receive them. The Catholic Church filled the space, sponsoring centres that offered help with employment, immigration paperwork, housing, literacy and English classes. Lyderick Bonaventure, a trade union leader and political activist pushed out of Haiti, founded and directed one of the first of them in 1967. The Haitian Neighborhood Center, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, became a place immigrants went for counselling, for news from home, or simply to meet other Haitians. Similar centres followed in Brooklyn and Queens, among them Charlemagne Peralte and Haitian Americans United for Progress. The people running them were educated, comfortable in American institutions, and had generally held prominent positions in Haiti before the Duvalier government forced them out of the country.

Belgium gave up the Congo in 1960 after years of unrest, and moved so fast that the nationalists themselves were caught unready. Parties multiplied, most of them regional and built on one language group. Patrice Lumumba tried to hold a national coalition together while the army mutinied under him and Katanga, which held the copper, declared itself separate. Americans, Russians, Chinese and Belgians all involved themselves. The United Nations sent its first large African force, and the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, died when his plane came down in Zambia in September 1961. Peacekeepers brought Katanga back under central control by 1962. Lumumba was gone by then, kidnapped and killed, with American knowledge and to American satisfaction, since Washington feared both his politics and his ability to hold a crowd. The army commander Joseph Mobutu, backed by the Americans, took power outright in 1965 and kept it for thirty two years. He renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and the West paid the bills until the Cold War ended.

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.