The palace spokesman insists there is no story

Foreign reporters began arriving in Port-au-Prince early in April 1971 because the president had not been seen. De Catalogne, who spoke for the palace, told them there was nothing to report: the president was resting, he was quiet, everything was in order. Then he added a line that reads differently now. Duvalier was president for life, and five minutes before his death he would still be president. The sixty-fourth birthday fell on 14 April and the state staged its usual celebration, with Jean-Claude standing expressionless on the balcony. His father did not appear and sent no radio message, which had never happened before. De Catalogne kept talking. He saw the president every day, he said, and had told him to rest and to work less, though whether he would listen was another matter. None of it was true. Francois Duvalier was dying upstairs and the men around him were arranging what came next.

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.

Rulers of the new African states held power the way a man holds a rope in a current, tightly and for his own. Office went to relatives, to men from the home province, to allies who spoke the same language, and any opposition was treated as a conspiracy. Between the 1960s and the 1980s Mobutu held Zaire, Idi Amin held Uganda, Bokassa crowned himself emperor in the Central African Republic, Kenya passed from Kenyatta to Moi, Rawlings took Ghana and Banda had himself made president for life in Malawi. Several of them had sponsors. Britain regarded Amin as preferable to the left leaning Obote. France favoured Bokassa at the start. In Ethiopia the removal of Haile Selassie in 1974 produced Mengistu and the Dergue, which ran a political terror, moved whole populations by force, deepened the war in Eritrea and presided over the worst drought in a century. From the 1980s populations pushed back, and states broken by debt had less capacity to hold them down. The foreign sponsors mostly stayed where they were.