Price-Mars refuses to reduce Haiti's divisions to colour

In 1967 a public argument broke out between Rene Piquion, a writer close to the government, and Jean Price-Mars, who was then in his nineties. Price-Mars had done more than anyone to make Haitian scholars take the African inheritance of their own country seriously. His book of 1928 taught a generation to stop being ashamed of the peasantry, and the noiriste politics that carried Duvalier to power claimed descent from it. In the dispute Price-Mars said that the social question in Haiti could not be reduced to the question of colour, and that class, land and money were doing work of their own. Government circles came after him at once. The regime had built its case on the proposition that colour explained everything, because that proposition made a black president the answer to every Haitian problem. Hearing the objection from the man whose authority it had borrowed was intolerable. Price-Mars died two years later.

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.

Uganda reached independence in 1962 through a short lived alliance between Milton Obote's UPC and Kabaka Yekka, the party of the Ganda monarchy, brokered in part by the British. The kabaka became executive president the following year. As Obote's own support grew he stopped needing the Ganda, pushed through a constitution in 1966 that made himself executive president, and sent the army against the kabaka's palace. The monarch fled into exile and Buganda lost its special status. Nothing underneath had been settled. In Nigeria decolonisation was slowed because the Northern People's Congress, the Yoruba Action Group and the NCNC could not agree on a constitution. The Muslim north expected to be dominated by Europeanised southerners, and the Christian south was itself split between Yoruba and Igbo. A federal system was the compromise, and Nigeria became independent in 1960 under Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The north controlled the first federal parliament while each region ran its own affairs, which left large minorities under whichever group was locally biggest.

The Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best, who lived from 1934 to 2007, opened one of his central essays by taking stock. Since 1962, he wrote, the region had been shown two pictures of its future, and neither had survived contact with the world. One turned out to be an illusion. The other became a nightmare. Those who put forward the first told the islands to make what they ate. The essay is titled on independence and responsibility, with self knowledge treated as an imperative rather than a luxury. The date is chosen deliberately: 1962 is the year Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent states and the year the West Indies Federation collapsed. Best is describing the position of a Caribbean intellectual who has to work out what to do when both available scripts for the future have already been tried and have already failed. Haiti had been in that position since 1804.