Michel-Rolph Trouillot leaves for Brooklyn at nineteen

In 1968 Michel-Rolph Trouillot left Haiti for Brooklyn to get away from the Duvalier regime. He was one of a great many student activists who went that decade, into a New York that was becoming the second city of Haitian intellectual life. He came from a family of historians and had grown up inside the argument about what his country was. In exile he trained as an anthropologist, and the books he wrote afterwards changed the terms in which Haiti could be described. Haiti: State Against Nation set out the Duvalier state as a system rather than a personality. Silencing the Past asked why Western historians had treated the Haitian revolution as an event that could not have happened, and it is now read in universities that teach nothing else about Haiti at all. He held a chair at Chicago and died in 2012. The dictatorship that drove him out produced, at one remove, the historian who explained it.

In 1969 the International Monetary Fund estimated that the annual income of the Regie du Tabac et Allumettes came to about 50 million gourdes. In 2019 money that is roughly 68 million United States dollars, and at the time it stood at approximately 40 percent of Haiti's entire national budget. The Regie held monopolies on the distribution of cement and of dozens of other goods, among them flour, tomato paste, soap and beer, and it added a commission to each unit sold. Almost none of that revenue entered the public budget or paid for anything public. It went into personal accounts held by members of the Duvalier family, and bought cars, villas and shopping trips abroad. An American diplomat called the office an untouchable instrument of personalist rule. Its books were among the closest guarded secrets of the regime, so no full accounting of what passed through it exists.

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.