Roger Gaillard calls the building boom an implosion of the capital

In 1973 the Haitian author and editor Roger Gaillard described the flurry of construction around him as an implosion of the capital, and complained that the city was disintegrating, that people were building frantically, no matter where and no matter how. He was not alone. Haitian newspapers and journals of the period carried steady commentary on the changing face of Port-au-Prince. Writers warned about cement shortages and black markets in it, about the absence of zoning and regulation, and about a water supply and drainage system compromised as new neighbourhoods paved over the ground that had absorbed the rain. Some mourned the disappearance of the old wooden buildings and the tropical look that went with them. The complaints were accurate and had no effect, since the state had no interest in restraining the people who were doing the building.

Between 1968 and 1978 the Duvalier family took 265 million gourdes out of the sale of cement alone. The figure comes from combining Haiti's national cement production statistics with the distribution commission levied on every bag. Adjusted for inflation it is about 39 million United States dollars in 2019 terms. Those were the years of the building boom, so the money came from Haitians who were putting up houses. The mechanism ran the whole length of the chain. Ciment d'Haiti held the monopoly on making and importing cement, the Regie du Tabac et Allumettes held the monopoly on distributing it, and each stage added a margin that ended in private hands. The effect on the buildings was direct. Builders who could not afford the cement used less of it than the mix required, and the houses that went up during the boom were weaker for it.

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.

The National Party's laws after 1948 sorted South Africans by colour and fixed where each group could live, work and travel. A small African elite came through the system anyway and organised against it. In the 1950s the African National Congress, until then moderate and slow, was taken over by a younger group around Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. The defiance campaign of 1952 and 1953 brought mass breaking of the pass laws and mass arrests. By the middle of the decade African, Indian and coloured organisations had come together behind a demand for a democratic South Africa with no racial qualification at all. The alliance was fragile. Zulu crowds had attacked Indians in Durban in 1949, and inside the ANC some leaders resented the influence of white liberals and of communists. A breakaway group formed the Pan Africanist Congress at the end of the decade. A state that had spent ten years dividing people by colour had given them one thing to agree on.