A father dies at Fort Dimanche to bring a daughter home

After the executions of June 1967 Colonel Max Dominique and his wife Marie-Denise, the president's favourite daughter, were allowed to leave Haiti for an invented post in Europe inspecting embassies. The president's wife had asked for it. Before the aircraft carrying them was out of sight, Dominique's driver and two bodyguards were seized and shot. His elderly father was arrested at home and died of the treatment he received at Fort Dimanche. Duvalier is reported to have cabled his son in law: give me back my daughter and I will give you back your father. With the Latin American embassies full of Haitians who had run to them for protection, the government took a further step on 1 August and renounced the treaties by which Haiti recognised the right of asylum. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked that year for information about political prisoners and killings and was ignored, as it had been every time before.

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.

Settlers in Southern Rhodesia held self government from 1923, more power than settlers ever won in Kenya, and successive white administrations copied South African segregation. In 1953 the territory was joined to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the Central African Federation, whose purpose was to place the regional economy, above all the Northern Rhodesian copper belt, under a single white authority. African nationalists opposed it as the guarantee of their permanent exclusion. Protest was already organised. Workers' movements ran a crippling general strike in 1948, and rapid expansion of white farming radicalised the countryside. Joshua Nkomo, a trade unionist, founded the African National Congress in 1957, which became ZAPU in 1962. Nkomo held back from harder tactics, and in 1963 Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe broke away to form ZANU, a split running along the line between Nkomo's Ndebele support and ZANU's Shona base. After the white government in Salisbury declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965, ZANU took up arms and launched its first guerrilla attacks the year after.

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.