Nineteen officers are made to shoot nineteen officers at Fort Dimanche

Near midnight on 8 June 1967 the head of the Haitian armed forces, General Gerard Constant, was woken and called to the palace with eighteen other senior officers. Duvalier kept them waiting two hours, then appeared with an escort of militiamen carrying submachine guns. The officers were put into a truck and driven to Fort Dimanche. At the rifle range they found nineteen of their own colleagues tied to stakes, ten of them from the presidential guard and most of them close to Colonel Max Dominique. Each senior officer was handed a rifle loaded with a single round and made to stand in a firing squad with a gun at his own back. The president, dressed in black, watched from the side. After the volley he had the executioners walk slowly past the bodies and look at them, then sent them home. By sunrise Haitians were climbing the walls of the Latin American embassies. Nearly two hundred had taken asylum before the month ended.

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.

The new Malawian flag, red, green and black, was raised over the stadium at Zomba shortly after midnight on 6 July 1964, ending British rule in what had been Nyasaland. The night was bitterly cold. Independence had been won by politicians who spent years organising for it and going to prison for it, among them Henry Chipembere, Kanyama Chiume and the Chisiza brothers. By the time the flag went up, the state they had built carried a flaw at its centre. Kamuzu Banda had been taking every decision affecting party and government for some time. In early 1963, before Chipembere was let out of prison, Banda demanded and was given absolute discretion over the affairs of the Malawi Congress Party and its members, and declared the party supreme. Julius Nyerere did the same in Tanzania soon afterwards and Kenneth Kaunda did it in Zambia ten years later. Malawi got a flag and a man nobody could contradict.

In the second edition of The Black Jacobins, published in 1963, C. L. R. James gave the chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery this reading: the singers swear to destroy the whites and everything they possess, and to die rather than break the vow. The line has been quoted ever since as proof that the religion of the enslaved carried a revolutionary programme. James had taken the words, without attribution, from a book brought out in Paris in 1814 by the planter Drouin de Bercy, where they were attached to a second chant altogether and were already wrong there. The chant Moreau wrote down is in Kikongo, a language of the western Congo basin, and it calls on the deity Mbumba to render harmless the blacks, the European and the witches. It was sung when a new member was initiated into a cult, and its enemies are supernatural as much as human.