the mid twentieth century · Haitianapproximate

Hurbon reads Vodou as the quiet refusal of the Haitian majority

He sets it beside Islam in colonial Algeria, where holding to a faith was the one refusal available.

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the mid twentieth century · Haitianapproximate

Manigat casts Salomon as the builder of a black civilisation

The National Party of the 1880s becomes, in this telling, a project of national regeneration.

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the mid twentieth century · Haitianapproximate

Salomon becomes a martyr and noirisme acquires an ancestor

Max A. Antoine writes the fallen president into a line of black leaders betrayed by the mulatto elite.

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1950 to 1951 · Haitianspan

A sound currency, a growing population and Boyer's tax system

Seventy percent of Haitian revenue came from import duties that peasants paid in the end.

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1950 to 1953 · Haitianspan

Peligre, three hundred miles of road and a forty million dollar plan

The dam was meant to water eighty thousand acres and light a country with almost no power.

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1950s to 1960s · Africanspan

Where the colonial power refused to talk, the wars began

The MPLA formed in 1956, FRELIMO in 1962, and the FLN opened fire in November 1954.

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1950s · Africandecade

Apartheid produces the alliance it was designed to prevent

Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu took over a cautious organisation and put it in the streets.

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1950s · Africandecade

Kenneth Dike takes a doctorate built on what people remembered

The same decade produced Things Fall Apart, the pass laws and the war in Algeria.

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1950s to 1960 · Africanspan

De Gaulle offers a choice and only Guinea takes independence

Paris cancelled every franc of aid to Sekou Toure and watched Moscow and Accra replace it.

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1950 · Haitianyear only

The census of Kenscoff counts more wives than husbands

Two hundred and thirty seven widows against seventy four widowers in one commune.

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1950 · Haitianyear only

Saint Philomena appears on a beach and asks to be carried up the coast

A village with no money builds her a chapel and finishes it in three years.

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April 1950 · Haitianmonth known

Forty four Haitian women's associations meet in one room for the first time

Six months later women camped at Gonaives while the constituent assembly sat.

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May 1950 · Haitianmonth known

The officers who made Estime president unmake him

Business and the Church backed the removal of a government they judged too black in its sympathies.

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May to 3 August 1950 · Haitianspan

The junta writes an interim constitution and Magloire runs

Dantes Bellegarde chaired the council that set the rules, and one general resigned to compete under them.

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10 May 1950 · Haitian

Estimé is ousted weeks after promising Haitian women the vote

The Women's Congress had left the delegates expecting suffrage within months.

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29 June 1950 · Diaspora

A Haitian scores the goal that beat England in the World Cup

Fourteen years later the same man was taken off a Port-au-Prince street and never seen again.

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1950 · Haitianyear only

A fair for the capital's bicentennial launches Caribbean tourism

Estime's exposition marks two hundred years of Port-au-Prince and opens an industry.

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1950 · Diasporayear only

A sailor who lost his camera stays and starts an English weekly

The Haiti Sun began in 1950 and became the paper of record for a decade of foreign visitors.

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2 October 1950 · Haitian

Alice Garoute dies and Port-au-Prince marches for her unbidden

Within hours of her death women of every class and colour were in the streets.

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8 October 1950 · Haitian

Magloire wins ninety nine percent and Papa Legba gets three votes

Someone in Port-au-Prince wrote the lwa of the crossroads onto a ballot paper.

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4 November 1950 · Haitian

Article 8 gives Haitian women over twenty-one the national vote

A constitutional assembly at Gonaïves ratified suffrage a month after Garoute's death.

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15 November 1950 · Haitian

The constituent assembly recognises equal rights for Haitian women

Dantes Bellegarde told the chamber the objectors were arguing exactly like the old colonists.

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6 December 1950 · Haitian

Magloire enters the palace in dress blues and a new constitution

The charter adopted a week earlier dropped the clause barring serving officers from office.

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6 December 1950 · Haitian

Women get the vote in 1950 if their husbands agree

Magloire's constitution widened the franchise and attached a condition to the new part of it.

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1951 to the 1960s · Haitianspan

The only white man at Obin's Last Supper is Judas

Painting started on the cathedral walls in the autumn of 1951 and the arguments started with it.

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January 1951 · Caribbeanmonth known

Jamaica refuses to let a deposed Haitian president off his boat

Bustamante had to intervene before Dumarsais Estimé and his family could land.

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July 1951 · Haitianmonth known

An article argues that aid fails when it ignores how people live

Catts Pressoir wrote up the psychology of American assistance for the historical society.

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Autumn 1951 to the 1960s · Haitianspan

The Holy Trinity murals, and the only white man in them is Judas

Trained artists upstairs, primitives downstairs, and a Last Supper that made its own argument.

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1952 to 1992 · Indigenousspan

Pottery styles are made to stand in for the movement of people

Irving Rouse drew provinces on a map of the Antilles and later work has been undrawing them.

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1952 to 1954 · Haitianspan

Haitian weekends become fashionable and the Oloffson fills with writers

Tourism tripled in four years and Noel Coward, Truman Capote and Graham Greene came through.

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1952 to 1971 · Haitianspan

The boy in the palace did not want to be president

Jean-Claude Duvalier was five when his father took power and had known no other government.

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1952 to 1966 · Africanspan

Two federations enter independence carrying their own fault lines

Obote sent the army into the kabaka's palace in 1966; Nigeria's regions never agreed on a charter.

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summer 1952 · Caribbeanseason

A Jamaican higgler spends over a pound before she sells anything

Mrs N. left her village on a Sunday truck and reached the Kingston market at midnight.

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summer 1952 · Caribbeanseason

Brown's Town retailers sell a tin of sugar on a week of credit

The maker's price was fixed on the day of sale, so the seller alone carried the risk.

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20 December 1952 · Diaspora

A singer three months pregnant is jailed and driven out of Haiti

Cuba took her in, and Haitians heard nothing from her for thirty four years.

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1953 · Caribbeanyear only

Bananas take forty five per cent of Dominica's exports

A plant grown for centuries in peasant gardens became the island's export crop in a decade.

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1953 · Haitianyear only

In 1953 a newspaper accuses two historians of laundering colours

Timoleon Brutus prints that Madiou and Ardouin misrepresented the one contemporary description of the flag.

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December 1953 · Haitianmonth known

Price-Mars credits a novelist with putting Vodou into literature

Antoine Innocent had written Mimola in 1906 and was dead before the tribute appeared.

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1954 to 1962 · Africanspan

A million Algerians die and France leaves in July 1962

Ben Bella ran the arms supply from outside while the French army grew to half a million men.

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1954 · Haitianyear only

Hurricane Hazel puts a blacksmith in a Belair household for twenty years

A man who lost everything in the storm was taken in until he could rent, and stayed.

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1954 · Datasetyear only

A hurricane takes forty percent of the coffee and half the cocoa

It arrived the same year coffee prices fell hard, after a very small harvest the year before.

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1954 · Haitianyear only

Haiti's first cement plant opens holding a monopoly on cement

The concession came with a payment to the president in person.

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1954 to 1962 · Africanspan

Algeria fights eight years to end French rule

Malik Bennabi wrote through it, asking why ideas die in the societies that hold them.

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1 to 4 January 1954 · Haitianspan

Peasants storm a re-enactment to make sure Dessalines wins

Marian Anderson sang at Sans Souci and three thousand guests danced at the palace.

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4 January 1954 · Haitian

Farmers with cutlasses join a staged battle and finish it themselves

At the sesquicentennial re-enactment the crowd stopped watching and stormed the wall.

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4 January 1954 · Diaspora

A newsreel sells Vertieres to Americans as a sequel to 1776

The narration turned the indigenous army into patriots continuing the war the United States began.

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1954 · Haitianyear only

A Marxist reading of Haiti puts class underneath colour

Etienne Charlier set an economic base beneath the national story and Emmanuel Paul answered him.

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1954 · Haitianyear only

Two historians accuse each other of colour prejudice in the press

The quarrel ran in Le Jour and Le Nouvelliste and was about who owned 1791.

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21 August 1954 · Diaspora

Greene first lands in Haiti in the year of its 150th anniversary

He came for a Broadway musical set in a Port-au-Prince brothel and stayed three weeks.

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11 October 1954 · Haitian

Hurricane Hazel takes forty percent of Haiti's coffee bushes

A prosperous village outside Port-a-Piment came out of it as a lagoon a mile long.

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18 November 1954 · Haitian

A new bronze monument becomes the place where ancestors are addressed

Residents of Cap-Haitien gathered before it with poems, songs and speeches ten months after the re-enactment.

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the 1950s · Haitiandecade

A 1950s song makes Dessalines the enemy of the Ibo nation

The same figure liberates the country in one version and hunts a people in another.

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1955 to 17 May 1956 · Haitianspan

Schoolboys fight the police in the corridors of the Lycee Petion

The argument was over the date Magloire's term expired, and it was settled in the streets.

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1955 to 1963 · Africanspan

Britain buys a million acres in Kenya and sells them to the prosperous

Hola Camp made Macmillan doubt the empire; land reform left the landless where they were.

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1955 · Haitianyear only

Mangones asks for an independent urban planning commission

He wrote weekly in Reflets d'Haiti that the capital would turn into a monster.

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the 1950s · Diasporadecade

Historians place Haiti inside a single Atlantic revolution

Godechot and Palmer read 1789 as one part of a movement that took in the whole western world.

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1955 to 1977 · Haitianspan

Coffee, sugar and sisal fall from 88 percent of exports to 46.7

Middlemen took up to half the value of the export crop.

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1955 · Africanyear only

Twenty nine countries meet at Bandung and name a third road

Neither capitalism nor communism: the conference put decolonisation on the table as an option.

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27 January 1955 · Haitian

Magloire addresses Congress and the Artibonite bill keeps rising

Peligre was projected at eighteen million dollars and finished at forty with no generators.

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8 and 23 June 1955 · Caribbean

A Kingston columnist calls Jamaica's market women uneconomic

Two columns in one month accused higglers of taking too much and of charging too little.

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1955 · Diasporayear only

A Haitian president is asked in Washington about American segregation

Magloire visits Eisenhower after the desegregation ruling and predicts the bad dream will end.

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1955 · Haitianyear only

Alexis puts the 1937 massacre into a novel of the marvellous real

Hilarion walks from a Port-au-Prince jail to the cane fields where Trujillo's soldiers wait.

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1956 to 1957 · Africanspan

Nasser takes the canal and Britain leaves Africa within years

The last European invasion of Egypt collapsed under American pressure and took an imperial order with it.

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1956 · Haitianyear only

The Peligre dam is finished and the hills above it keep washing in

American engineers, a Texas contractor and Haiti's best farmland, undone by silt within a generation.

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1956 to 1975 · Haitianspan

Infant deaths rise in Port-au-Prince while the countryside improves

Almost two hundred babies in every thousand died in the capital in the early 1970s.

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1956 to 1957 · Haitianspan

Nine hundred households are counted in the Kenscoff mountains

The survey ran house to house in the season when no holidaymaker was present.

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July 1956 · Haitianmonth known

A study names Price-Mars as the father of Haitian negritude

Henock Trouillot published the survey while the doctor was alive and still writing.

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5 September 1956 · Haitian

A country doctor calls at the newspaper to ask about Washington

Duvalier came in wearing his hat, sat down and asked about the Americans before declaring his candidacy.

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November to 6 December 1956 · Haitianspan

Bombs go off in the market and an ambassador tells Magloire to go

The bomb factory found at Martissant in April 1957 pointed back at Doctor Duvalier.

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November 1956 · Diasporamonth known

Greene loses at Scrabble by the pool and moves to the Oloffson

The hotel he adopted on this visit became the Trianon of his novel ten years later.

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December 1956 · Haitianmonth known

Magloire leaves and says he is handing over a lit cigar

Ten months and five claimants followed before anybody held the palace for long.

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December 1956 to 1957 · Haitianspan

Five governments rise and fall inside six months

Work stopped on the new abattoir the day Magloire left, and the frame stood rusting for years.

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6 to 13 December 1956 · Haitianspan

Magloire carries a submachine gun he has no intention of using

Seven days of shuttered shops and empty markets ended a presidency the army had just extended.

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12 December 1956 to 4 February 1957 · Haitianspan

A judge lasts fifty five days and resigns into a general strike

Bombs at a margarine factory and at the legislature, squads called commandos, and a capital at a standstill.

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13 December 1956 · Haitian

Women marching on the cathedral are gassed at the corner of rue Pavee

The city hall had opened voter registration for the coming election and left women out of it.

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December 1956 · Caribbeanmonth known

Magloire lands in Jamaica and predicts an explosion

The general said Haiti had been on fire when he left and was now going to blow up.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier removes the houngans who will not concede his occult rank

Vodou priests held real authority in towns and villages, so the president took it away from them.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier names Price-Mars as his teacher and later deletes him

The credit stood in 1957 and had been cut from the official reprints of the same speeches by 1967.

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1957 to 1963 · Haitianspan

Unions are tolerated for six years and then reduced to one kind

After a run of strikes, the only organisations still allowed to meet were the ones backing the regime.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Four men run for the presidency and one of them is underestimated

A planter, a technocrat, a street orator and a country doctor with a theory of Haitian blackness.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

By 1957 the drive to Jacmel takes nine hours instead of two

Heinl sets the year against 1827 and finds the ruin of the 1820s the closer match.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier's team runs from Price-Mars to a Cuban explosives man

Griots, communists, bankers, bagmen, a foreign legion, and a former schoolteacher named Clement Barbot.

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1957 to 1963 · Haitianspan

A senator is made ambassador to a country where Haiti has no embassy

Duvalier expelled more heads of mission than every previous Haitian government put together.

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1957 to 1961 · Haitianspan

Washington sends forty million dollars and gets a survey ignored

Rusk's expense account allegedly read: lunch with the Haitian foreign minister, 2,800,000 dollars.

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1957 to 1970 · Diasporaspan

More Haitian doctors practise in Montreal than in Haiti

Of 246 medical graduates between 1959 and 1969, three could be found working in the country.

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1957 to 1967 · Haitianspan

Cement output falls forty three percent in the decade of development

The United Nations found Haiti the only country on earth with virtually no growth in two decades.

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1957 to 1971 · Haitianspan

Peligre finally makes power and the capital swells toward a million

Quickie divorces at 1,200 dollars, 14 million in remittances, 7,000 factory jobs, the tobacco monopoly intact.

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1957 to 1960 · Africanspan

Belgium calls local elections and gets a nationalist movement instead

Lumumba was the only Congolese leader building anything that covered the whole territory.

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1957 · Caribbeanyear only

A Mexican historian calls America a European invention

Edmundo O'Gorman argued there had been no America there to be discovered in 1492.

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1957 to 1976 · Haitianspan

The numbers game returns from Cuba and the state takes a cut

Borlette reached the Port-au-Prince slums under Duvalier and ended up paying tax.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Belair votes for Fignole and is given three macoute offices

The oldest quarter of Port-au-Prince backed the populist and was policed for it.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

A girl of eleven dies on a bench at the Kenscoff dispensary

Her employer left her in the queue for the doctor and drove back to the capital.

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1957 to 1971 · Haitianspan

Papa Doc leaves his dead at Titayen where no family can bury them

In a faith built on tombs and offerings, refusing burial was itself the punishment.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Carrefour-Dufort is a nest of fignolistes and stays one

A Leogane village kept faith with an exiled leader through thirty years of macoutes.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

The postwar boom stops in 1957 and the cement plant runs at half capacity

Planes left Haiti fuller than the planes that arrived.

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1957 to 1979 · Haitianspan

Twenty years of Duvalier rule leave a million Haitians outside the country

Repression as a daily practice, built up into a system of government.

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February 1957 · Haitianmonth known

A provisional president is accused of arranging Duvalier's win

Sylvain took the caretaker job in February 1957 and the army removed him before any vote was held.

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7 February to 2 April 1957 · Haitianspan

A bomb factory in Martissant ends a presidency in fifty two days

Duvalier was stoned at Jacmel, the palace was stormed in March, and explosives finished the president.

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April to 25 May 1957 · Haitianspan

Port-au-Prince gets its first air raid and the bomb does not explode

A DC-3 rolled an unfused bomb over the barracks while three old guns shelled the bay by mistake.

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25 May 1957 · Haitian

Soldiers fight each other in the capital and Fignole gets the palace

The armed forces split into rival camps, and the settlement they reached was a new provisional president.

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26 May to 14 June 1957 · Haitianspan

Fignole raises army pay and is gone before the film ends

Nineteen days after a cutaway coat and an inaugural speech, officers walked into the cabinet room.

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June 1957 · Haitianmonth known

Fignole is removed after three weeks and put on a plane

General Kebreau ended the provisional presidency and cleared the ground for September elections.

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14 to 16 June 1957 · Haitianspan

A false rumour of an execution sets the slums against the army

Bel Air and La Saline rose on the word that Fignole was dead, and half-tracks came into the alleys.

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16 June to 22 September 1957 · Haitianspan

The dead are counted three ways and the electoral field is cleared

Official fifty, Maurepas Auguste over five hundred, Diederich and Burt a thousand, then a state of siege.

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1957 to 1971 · Haitianspan

Duvalier repaints the flag to install himself as Dessalines's heir

A dictator captures the founder by repainting the national colours.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

A constitutional article gives the army its own day of ancestors

Duvalier made 18 November a full holiday for the army and the heroes of the battle at once.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Five provisional governments, then Kebreau picks Duvalier

The army, not the noiriste politicians, decides the succession after Magloire falls.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier builds a private militia to shrink the army

The Volontaires de la sécurité nationale existed to make the presidency structurally unremovable.

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1957 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier keeps the concentration and changes the owners

Monopolies became the standard reward for economic elites who worked with the dictatorship.

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September 1957 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier calls the roll of every commune and La Gonave votes anyway

An island of a few hundred people delivered eighteen thousand votes and was not named in the speech.

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22 September 1957 · Haitian

Kebreau spends four months arranging the election Duvalier wins

Four provisional governments, one exiled president and a vote settled before it was held.

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22 September 1957 · Haitian

Duvalier wins 679,000 votes in an election the army ran

Trouillot reads the result as the outcome of a long quarrel between the Haitian state and the nation.

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22 September 1957 · Haitian

Duvalier wins under fixed bayonets and quotes a proverb on betrayal

Depi nan Ginen neg ap trayi neg was the private motto of the man who had just been elected.

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22 October 1957 · Haitian

François Duvalier takes office

A country doctor the elite thought they could manage. Run the Soulouque tape again.

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October 1957 · Haitianmonth known

A Haitian priest is made education minister as a signal to the Church

Duvalier's first cabinet included Pere Jean-Baptiste Georges, chosen to court the native clergy.

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October 1957 to 12 March 1958 · Haitianspan

The business strike is broken and never used against Duvalier again

Steel shutters cut open, goods redistributed to the needy, and thirteen guns fired for a new chief.

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22 October 1957 · Haitian

Duvalier picks the twenty second and sits in the chair Soulouque feared

A Te Deum, an amnesty that freed only his own people, and a New York publicist on 150,000 dollars.

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22 October 1957 · Haitian

The doctor who beat yaws takes the palace dressed as the loa of death

Duvalier was inaugurated on 22 October 1957 and had built the Tonton Macoutes within a year.

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1958 to 1980 · Indigenousspan

Caribbean archaeology borrows its ages from somebody else's continent

Willey, Phillips and Rouse gave the islands a Lithic and an Archaic stage built for North America.

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1958 to January 1959 · Haitianspan

The nationalist who praised Peralte asks for the Marines back

He wanted American uniforms standing beside him and a militia that answered to nobody but the palace.

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1958 to 1963 · Haitianspan

Every union is dead by 1963 except the one Duvalier built himself

La Phalange was the last opposition paper, and businesses needed permission to go bankrupt.

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1958 to 1962 · Haitianspan

Duvalier answers the army with a militia in the red sashes of Ogoun

The military academy closes, a colonel is killed at Hinche, and Sonthonax goes up on the walls.

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1958 to 1969 · Haitianspan

Peasants stone Jacques Alexis to death on the president's order

The novelist landed to liberate a peasantry that tied him up and handed him to the garrison.

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1958 to 1964 · Africanspan

Nyerere persuades the settlers to back him and Tanganyika goes free

TANU wins the 1958 elections, Zanzibar's Arab government falls in 1963, and Tanzania follows.

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1958 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier names his militia after the bogeyman with the sack

Twenty five thousand men in dark glasses, carrying machetes, amnestied for anything done in his name.

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1958 · Haitianyear only

A Rara band in Bizoton writes down its fines

Two gourdes for arriving late, three for turning up without the yellow shirt.

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1958 · Haitianyear only

Cite Simone starts with a handful of houses by the airport

By the nineteen nineties four hundred thousand people were living in it.

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1958 · Diasporayear only

Street violence in Notting Hill and Nottingham announces a home grown racism

An organised fascist element, a transitional district, and a press that called it hooliganism.

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1958 · Haitianyear only

Twenty nine million dollars go into the Artibonite and no power station appears

Three quarters of the target area was irrigated, and the generating plant was never started.

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6 January 1958 · Haitian

Cagoulards take Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel from her house at half past eleven

The first known victim of the new regime was a feminist journalist who had backed Dejoie.

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January 1958 · Haitianmonth known

A journalist is taken from her house and left for dead above Delmas

Her paper had named the general who was arranging Duvalier's rise to power.

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January 1958 · Caribbeanmonth known

The West Indies Federation launches and Mona fills with argument

Lloyd Best reached the university in the same month and found almost unbridled hope.

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February 1958 · Haitianmonth known

An ethnographer argues that Vodou made the 1791 rising possible

O. Mennesson Rigaud made the case in Presence Africaine, the Paris journal of the black world.

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March 1958 · Haitianmonth known

The general who made Duvalier president leaves through an embassy

Kebreau was retired in March 1958 and took refuge with the Dominicans within hours.

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30 April to 28 July 1958 · Haitianspan

A bomb factory at Mahotieres buys Duvalier a state of siege

Dejoie reaches Cuba, the Jumelles take to the hills, and a Key West fishing boat sails for Haiti.

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May 1958 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier offers the Americans missile bases in Haiti

He asked for a Marine Corps mission in the same breath, seven months into his presidency.

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June 1958 · Haitianmonth known

The son of Price-Mars becomes Duvalier's foreign minister

Louis Mars carried a name that lent the government intellectual standing it had not earned.

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28 June 1958 · Haitian

A boat cleared for lobster fishing lands invaders near the capital

Ten months into Duvalier's rule, a small exile force crossed six hundred miles from the Bahamas.

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July 1958 · Haitianmonth known

Former officers and hired Americans seize the Dessalines barracks

The raid briefly held army headquarters, and the president directed the fight from the palace himself.

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July 1958 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier proposes teaching children in the language they actually speak

A bill for primary instruction in Kreyol, attached to a great crusade against illiteracy.

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1958 · Haitianyear only

The Macoutes announce themselves with the rape of a journalist

Yvonne Hakime-Rimpel had backed the losing candidate and written about it in public.

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28 to 29 July 1958 · Haitianspan

Eight men take the army headquarters in a borrowed taptap

A blue camionnette painted Malgre Tout carried the invaders through the main gate of the barracks.

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July 1958 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier turns a failed exile landing into anti-communist credit

An invasion from Cuba is crushed, and the survivor claims Castro is exporting revolution.

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29 July 1958 · Haitian

The eight are killed and their bodies are shown at the palace

Duvalier received the press in an army helmet, beside a bust of Petion shot through the forehead.

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29 July 1958 · Haitian

Three exiled officers attack and Duvalier builds himself a militia

The barracks raid of July 1958 gave the regime its reason for arming civilians.

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October 1958 to 11 April 1959 · Haitianspan

Police seize Clement Jumelle's coffin on the way to the church

Two brothers shot asleep in their beds, and the third buried at St Marc in a shallow grave.

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October 1958 to March 1959 · Haitianspan

A hedge of pegwe keeps animals out of a Haitian yard

Every house plot on the Fond des Negres plateau was walled with living plants.

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December 1958 · Haitianmonth known

The island's two tyrants meet once, on a salt flat, and never again

Duvalier kept Trujillo waiting more than an hour in the heat before signing a peace pact.

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December 1958 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier changes the colour of the army one promotion at a time

Merceron replaces Flambert at the top while the officers rising underneath him come from black families.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

The militia gets a legal name and stops needing the army

With the VSN on the books, Duvalier held armed force that no general had any claim on.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

Every oungan in the Cul-de-Sac is trucked to the palace at midnight

Duvalier met the priests in the blood red robe of the Secte Rouge and told them who their master was.

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1959 to 1962 · Africanspan

Belgium hands Rwanda to the majority it had spent decades ranking below

A Hutu uprising in 1959, the monarchy abolished in 1961, and a fault line running to 1994.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

Comhaire-Sylvain makes housing the index for studying Haitian women

Twenty years of fieldwork with girls and young women led her back to the roof over their heads.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

She designs a method no visitor could pick up in a single season

The sources were scattered and incomplete, and urban Haiti was far more layered than anyone had said.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

She numbers the social classes so the words cannot pass judgment

Caste and sub-proletariat carried verdicts inside them, so she used letters and figures instead.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

Port-au-Prince is cut into four zones by density, parish, housing and work

The letters were meant to widen the description of the city rather than flatten it.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

Half of Port-au-Prince lives in Zone IV and builds its own houses

In LaSaline she took 2,721 questionnaires and found owners who could not read and women in trade.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

The Foyer sits where the class zones overlap, which was the point

Zone III mixed more kinds of people than any other part of the city, so the league built there.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

Zone II is sixteen percent of the city and the state is its employer

No temples, no Protestant churches, and a phrase Comhaire-Sylvain would only write in quotation marks.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

Comhaire-Sylvain puts her own family into Zone I of her map

Under ten percent of the city held the property, the degrees, the banks and the medicine.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

The servant is the bridge between the zones that the map never draws

Women were the majority of Port-au-Prince and the only people crossing its class lines daily.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

The class the Foyer taught is the one that carried Duvalier into power

Comhaire-Sylvain called Zone III the most vigorous in the city, then named what it had elected.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

A priestess in Jacmel marries the spirit of love and then marries two more

Three weddings to three Ezili, each with her own colour, scent and temper.

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1959 · Haitianyear only

No plough, no terrace, and four years of fallow

Land on the Fond des Negres plateau was cleared with a machete and burned.

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April 1959 · Haitianmonth known

The teachers' union president goes to prison and the campus is next

The university was the last place in Port-au-Prince still able to organise anything.

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May 1959 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier falls ill and Barbot runs Haiti for several weeks

The man who built the macoutes held the whole state in his hands and then gave it back.

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24 May to 22 August 1959 · Haitianspan

A Cuban platoon lands at Les Irois and is hunted for ten days

Duvalier lay in coma for nine hours in May, and the bombing of the capital reached its peak.

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12 August 1959 · Haitian

A decree dissolves the teachers' union for communist infiltration

The government tied schoolteachers to the bombs that had been going off around the capital.

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16 August 1959 · Haitian

Two French priests are expelled over a name left out of prayers

The head of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Haiti and the cure of St Marc were put on a plane.

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16 August 1959 to 10 January 1961 · Haitianspan

The archbishop is flown out with one dollar and no teeth

Macoutes clubbed a praying congregation in the cathedral, and Rome answered by excommunicating him.

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