A union leader in exile opens a centre on the Upper West Side

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.

In 1955 agricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar and sisal made up 88 percent of the total volume of Haitian exports. By 1977 they made up 46.7 percent. Assembly plants in the towns grew over the same years, and yet three million four hundred thousand people still lived from farming, on holdings divided and divided again. The mechanism behind the fall was the marketing chain. Two separate networks carried goods from the most distant mountain garden to Port-au-Prince and abroad, one for export commodities and one for food eaten inside the country. On export crops the intermediaries, the importers, the speculators and the state took up to 50 percent of the value, which is why peasants lost interest in growing coffee, the principal crop. On food crops a very large number of intermediaries took 25 percent between them, and nobody attended to the food side at all.

Dunduzu Chisiza was building the first economic plan for the territory about to become Malawi. He had drawn in experts from across the world to prepare an ambitious five year programme of economic recovery. One night in September 1962, racing home from a meeting in Blantyre, he drove into the abutments of a high level concrete bridge and was killed. Mourners came from the whole country to the funeral. He had been part of the group that did the practical work of government through 1962, when Kamuzu Banda formally held only the ministry of lands, natural resources and local government yet decided policy, approved legislation and directed the other ministers. In those months they widened secondary schooling, remade the native courts, improved conditions for agricultural labour, reformed the marketing of produce and replaced chiefs with elected district councils. The one man who could argue with Banda about the economy was gone two years before the country became independent.

The play version of James's history was first performed at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Hogsbjerg contrasts its ending sharply with the 1934 script. Where the earlier play closed with the birth of a national flag, the later one ends with Dessalines toasting his position as emperor after personally betraying Toussaint to the French, and has the condemned Moise dismiss Toussaint as an old man with a dream of an impossible fraternity. Two other shifts are noted. The crowds are given even greater weight, with stage directions specifying that they say little but are powerfully felt at every critical moment, and the experience of women during the revolution is treated more directly. The editor accepts a contemporary judgement that the later play, for all its scale, lacks the earlier one's spark.