Radio Haiti puts the news into the language people actually speak

In 1968 Radio Haiti began broadcasting news in Kreyol. Every Haitian speaks Kreyol, and at that time only a small minority read or spoke French, which was the language of the newspapers, the courts, the schools and the state. A country where most people could not read was being informed in a language most people did not use. Jean Dominique, an agronomist by training, took over the station and sent reporters into the countryside to interview peasants in their own language about their own affairs, then put the results on the air. This was treated as a political act, because it was one. Kreyol on the radio meant a farmer in the Artibonite heard what a minister had said and could form a view about it. Dominique was driven into exile twice, under Duvalier and under the soldiers who came later. He was shot dead in the courtyard of his own station in April 2000 and the case has never been resolved.

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.

Belgium gave up the Congo in 1960 after years of unrest, and moved so fast that the nationalists themselves were caught unready. Parties multiplied, most of them regional and built on one language group. Patrice Lumumba tried to hold a national coalition together while the army mutinied under him and Katanga, which held the copper, declared itself separate. Americans, Russians, Chinese and Belgians all involved themselves. The United Nations sent its first large African force, and the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, died when his plane came down in Zambia in September 1961. Peacekeepers brought Katanga back under central control by 1962. Lumumba was gone by then, kidnapped and killed, with American knowledge and to American satisfaction, since Washington feared both his politics and his ability to hold a crowd. The army commander Joseph Mobutu, backed by the Americans, took power outright in 1965 and kept it for thirty two years. He renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and the West paid the bills until the Cold War ended.

The Haitian communists had only just combined into a single party when the regime came for them. On 14 April 1969 a gunfight between militiamen and communists at Boutilliers, on the slope above Port-au-Prince, opened into something larger, and within days Radio Moscow was reporting arrests and summary executions. At Cazale near Arcahaie the organiser Alix Lamaute was killed. At the Cap, according to a letter Graham Greene sent to the Times of London, the shooting took in poor residents of La Fossette who had nothing to do with any party. On 2 May soldiers and militia surrounded a house at Fontamara and fired into it with automatic weapons and grenades for about seven hours, killing at least twenty two people inside, among them Joseph Roney, who had led the student strikes of 1960. The bodies were displayed outside Fort Dimanche. More than two hundred cadres died. In July Nelson Rockefeller arrived from Washington and the last American reservations were dropped.