The nineteen-year-old is sworn in and promises no pardons

Jean-Claude Duvalier was sworn in on 22 April 1971, in a private ceremony his mother organised and at which she held the list of cabinet appointments. He was in shock, and palace doctors were giving him tranquillisers on Simone Duvalier's orders. He did not walk in his father's funeral procession. A day later he met the foreign press, introduced by Fritz Cineas, the new information minister and Cambronne's man, read a short statement in French asking for objective coverage, shook hands and left. He then toured police stations, army posts and militia posts around the capital, where the declarations of loyalty were emphatic; Constant's removal had been noted. On the Thursday he addressed the assembly, speaking so quietly that parts of the chamber could not hear him, a trick his father had used to keep people guessing. There would be no pardons and no tolerance of communists, he said, and the United States could count on Haiti.

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.

In the 1970s a man named Turenne Deville was held by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, which decided to send him back to Haiti. On hearing it he hanged himself in his prison cell. What happened to him is one instance of a government telling a person where he may and may not be. The French and American authorities routinely expel people classed as aliens whose school age children hold citizenship by birth. Deville's death sits beside the wager made by the thousands of Haitians who put out for Florida in small boats, betting against the sharks, the waves and the Coast Guard on the reckoning that the odds at sea were the better ones. Deportation is normally discussed as an administrative act with a file number and a form. For the person named on the form it works as a sentence, and Deville treated it as one.

From the early 1960s both superpowers took part in African wars directly, and hardly a conflict on the continent stayed local. John F Kennedy launched a doctrine of counter insurgency, and the CIA played a large part in raising Joseph Mobutu. The energy crisis of 1973 made central Africa more urgent still. Angola and Mozambique carried rival guerrilla armies with rival paymasters, and South Africa took Western weapons on the argument that the ANC leaned to the left. By the early 1970s the map divided cleanly. The United States held security agreements with Kenya, Zaire, Ghana, Liberia and Senegal. The Soviet Union supplied Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda, and signed friendship treaties with Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. China had arrangements with Cameroon, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania, Cuba with Congo Brazzaville, Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Government without accountability was funded by both blocs rather than merely tolerated, and African leaders in turn used the foreign backing to keep bankrupt administrations upright and to jail their own opponents.