Nine farms in ten are under three hectares and carry most of the country

Haitian figures for 1971 show 91 percent of farms measuring no more than three hectares. Those farms together held 62 percent of the cultivated land and supported 88 percent of the rural population. The number of peasants with no land at all, and of those with almost none, rose every year, since expropriation in the countryside was routine. A household in that position needed cash, could not delay the sale of its harvest, owed rent to the state and to large landowners, and borrowed from speculators and merchants on terms that took half the crop or a piece of the land itself. On top of that it paid the heaviest taxes. The low price of farm produce inside Haiti gave the local bourgeoisie and international capital a labour force available at one dollar sixty for a day of work, which was the point of the arrangement.

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.

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.

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.