The only Haitian succession by blood that ever held

Francois Duvalier died in Port-au-Prince on 21 April 1971 and his nineteen-year-old son took the presidency, which a rewritten constitution had reserved for him. Haitian rulers had tried this before and failed. Dessalines was assassinated. Christophe shot himself and his heir was killed within days. No president between them managed to pass the office to a relative. Jean-Claude was born on 3 July 1951, had been a poor student, showed no appetite for politics and did not want the job. He left the running of the government to his mother Simone and his elder sister Marie-Denise. His father had been called Papa Doc in fear. The son was called Baby Doc as a joke. The dictatorship lasted another fifteen years anyway, which is the part worth holding onto: the terror did not depend on the man at the top, because by 1971 it had been built into institutions that ran without him.

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.

Haiti Observateur, the oldest newspaper of the Haitian community in New York, was founded in 1971. In that first year it carried seven classified advertisements. By 1978 it averaged more than fifty. Pierre-Louis reads the count as a measure of an exile population turning into a settled one, with businesses to advertise and customers to reach. The same years produced the Bottin, a Haitian business directory published from the 1970s into the 1990s, and L'Heure Haitienne, a radio programme broadcast every Sunday from Columbia University with offices in Flatbush, which became the flagship entertainment of the exiles. The Haitian Fathers, Holy Ghost priests expelled by Francois Duvalier in the early 1960s, taught Kreyol classes and published a magazine written entirely in that language. Cultural associations wrote songs about a Haiti that would be beautiful once it was free.

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.