A nineteen year old inherits Haiti and the capital starts building

Francois Duvalier died in 1971 and was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude, who was nineteen. The new administration understood that it had an image problem and set about rebranding the dictatorship. It released some political prisoners, loosened press censorship, invited politically harmless exiles home, courted foreign investors and encouraged tourism. Many Haitians read the peaceful handover as a real opening and allowed themselves to expect reform. Haitians abroad came back and put money into land and houses. Government figures record the construction sector growing by 12 percent in 1971, by 21 percent in 1972 and by 25 percent in 1973. United Nations reports described a wave of building that pulled along the production of rebar, sand, rock and cement, and created work for labourers, engineers and architects. The Port-au-Prince that stood on 12 January 2010 was largely built in this decade.

Tanbou Libete was founded in New York in 1971 by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and other Haitian activists. It was a theatre group and its purpose was political education. The plays and songs were in Kreyol, which meant they addressed the whole of the emigrant population rather than the small share of it schooled in French. New York by then held tens of thousands of Haitians, many of them people the Duvalier government had driven out, and it was one of the few places where Haitians could organise without the militia arriving. Groups like this one supplied what the country itself no longer had: a public argument, conducted in the language people actually speak, about who should govern and by what right. The work was cultural because nothing else was available. Trouillot became a historian, and the questions about power and silence that run through his later books were first worked out on those stages.

Duvalier survived three attempts to remove him, in 1968, in 1969 and in 1970. Part of the reason sat in his hangars. In September 1964, while the American economic squeeze was officially still running, the United States allowed military aircraft to be exported to Haiti, two T-28 trainers among them, and began helping to rebuild the Corps d'Aviation. It later licensed one more F-51 fighter and paid in some fashion for commercial overhauls in Miami of every Haitian F-51 and of other planes that had been sitting grounded. In November 1970 the Nixon administration gave up the pretence of an arms ban altogether, issuing licences to private dealers for light weapons and six patrol boats for the coastguard. By 1971 more than a million dollars of private American arms sales to Haiti had been approved. None of it passed through Congress. Duvalier voted with the United States against Cuba at the Organisation of American States, and that was the service being paid for.

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.