Duvalier commissions a statue of the slave who ran

In 1968 the government of Francois Duvalier commissioned a statue for Port-au-Prince to commemorate the enslaved people who had revolted against France during the Haitian Revolution. It is called Neg Mawon in Haitian Creole and Le Negre marron in French, and in English it is usually given as the unknown maroon. The figure is a slave whose chains have been broken, holding a conch shell to his lips. A maroon was a person who left a plantation and lived outside it, in the hills or the woods, and the word carries the whole idea of flight as a political act. Duvalier had held the presidency since 1957 and governed on a doctrine placing the black majority at the centre of the nation. Ordering this figure allowed a government that jailed and killed Haitians to present itself as the heir of Haitians who had broken their own chains. The statue is among the most reproduced images of the country.

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.

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.

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.