Washington approves the son twenty days after the father dies

Richard Nixon's administration handled Haiti with fewer scruples than its predecessors and more clarity. Ambassador Clinton Knox repeated in his telegrams that Haiti had no democratic tradition, and that democracy, corruption and good governance therefore could not serve as measures for judging the Duvalier government. Nelson Rockefeller had come back from his own visit with recommendations along the same lines. Henry Kissinger proposed to Nixon a more open policy toward the country. On 21 April 1971 the United States approved the succession of Francois Duvalier by his son. Knox described what was arriving as a new Duvalierism deserving every form of official American encouragement. Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled until 1986. He promised an economic revolution to follow his father's political one. Under him the violence grew quieter, in order to improve the image of the regime and attract foreign lenders, and the machine still went out whenever the government judged itself threatened.

By 1965 Duvalier had won, and the country looked much as before. Time reported in 1966 that the telephones did not work, the lights flickered, the roads were holed or buried in mud, and business was stopping. A visiting African diplomat said that if his own country were in that condition in fifty years he would wish it had never taken independence. The ways out were the ones open to the enslaved in Saint-Domingue, death or flight. The new marronage was exile. By 1970 nearly 35,000 Haitians were in the Bahamas, and by 1976 there were 150,000 in New York City, with large communities in Montreal, Chicago and Washington. Rotberg found that by the middle of the 1960s four fifths of Haiti's qualified professionals were abroad. More than a thousand were working in the Congo. Over three hundred specialists went through the United Nations to jobs across Africa. By 1970 Montreal and New York each held more Haitian physicians than Haiti did, and Montreal had ten times the number of Haitian psychiatrists that Port-au-Prince had.

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.

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.