The Rodney riots open a period that closes the Caribbean mind

Best marks the years from 1968 to 1974 as a threshold in Caribbean intellectual life, opened by the Rodney riots in Jamaica and by the impulse toward repression that followed them in a political tradition already authoritarian. Through those years, until the oil shocks brought other worries, a hostility to philosophical speculation settled over the campuses and produced a climate of pragmatism and of opportunism among staff and students alike. Political activity did not stop, including radical political activity, and that is his point about it. Most of it was orthodox and comfortable, wary of plumbing foundations, oriented toward a Marxism, a crypto Marxism or a social democracy which relieved its adherents of the work of saying what they stood for, or of designing new concepts, new language, new media and new vehicles of selfhood. The elements arrived ready made, ideology and leadership and parties together, and the borrowing set the terms for what came after.

Francois Duvalier died on the evening of 21 April 1971, after dark, having tried to speak and failed to make himself understood. What happened next was arranged in the ounfo of the Cul-de-Sac plain. The rite is called desounen, and it separates the dead from the lwa that has ridden them in life. Edner Day is the oungan named. He traced a large cross in maize flour on the floor, the length of a body, then climbed onto the bed past the doctors and nurses, straddled the corpse under the sheet, and called on the met tet to withdraw and leave the dead in peace. Only when it has gone can the spiritual inheritance pass on, and it passed to Jean-Claude, standing silent at the foot of the bed with a candle. The body was seen to shift very slightly. The men in the room took that for the departure. Papa Doc had gone to Ginen.

Speaking in Havana in 1968, the Haitian poet Rene Depestre described the negritude of the Duvalier government as a delirious mystification. His argument was that the regime's language about race concealed an ordinary struggle for power between rival groups inside the Haitian propertied class, and that dressing it as the triumph of the black majority was a service performed for reaction. Depestre had grown up inside the intellectual world he was attacking. He had been a young radical in Port-au-Prince in 1946, expelled and exiled repeatedly, and he had argued with Aime Cesaire, for whom negritude meant something other than a state doctrine. From Cuba he broadcast two hours a day into Haiti in Kreyol. The charge carried weight because it came from the left rather than from the elite the regime liked to name as its enemy. It said that a black government could reproduce the same order under a different flag.

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.