1960 · Haitianyear only

Claude Souffrant finds the fatalism in the hymnbook and not the drum

Creole hymns taught the poor to bear their suffering, and the blame was going to Vodou.

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1960 · Haitianyear only

Laennec Hurbon reads Vodou as the peasant's kept African identity

He asked Christians to extend it the respect they already give the other world religions.

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1960 · Haitianyear only

The state won fear from Haitians and never won respect

Militia violence became routine government, and the one thing the regime wanted was withheld.

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1960 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier's men wreck Bellegarde's library and scar a doctor for life

The most respected historian in Haiti was held at gunpoint in his own front room.

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1960s to 1970s · Africanspan

Angola's war of independence becomes four countries' proxy fight

Portugal fought the rising, then Moscow, Washington and Pretoria each picked a movement.

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1960 to 1965 · Africanspan

Belgium quits the Congo in months and the state falls apart

Lumumba was dead inside a year and the officer Washington backed ruled for thirty two.

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1960 to 1994 · Africanspan

Police shoot demonstrators in the back at Sharpeville

Thirty four years run from that morning to an election open to everyone.

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After 1960 · Africanspan

1994 gives Africa the rainbow nation and the Rwandan genocide

Independence inherited a militarised nineteenth century along with the colonial borders.

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1960s to 1990s · Africanspan

Independent Africa inherits an economy built to ship things out

The boards bought low from African farmers and sold high abroad, and every railway ran to a port.

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1960s to 1990s · Africanspan

African states agree in 1963 that the colonial borders are permanent

Every line drawn in Europe after 1880 was frozen to avoid a generation of war over all of them.

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1960s to 1990s · Africanspan

Mobutu, Amin, Bokassa and Banda each keep power inside a family

Britain preferred Amin to Obote and France installed Bokassa, so the list had sponsors.

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After 1960 · Africanspan

Sharia divides politics in the north while the south stays local

In Nigeria and Kenya the argument is about access to power. In Algeria and Sudan it became war.

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1960s to 2000s · Africanspan

Africa becomes the ground where other people's wars are fought

African governments tried to work the rivalry between Washington and Moscow and were worked by it.

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1960s to 1990s · Africanspan

Scarcely an African war after 1960 stays outside the arms race

By the early 1970s the CIA had raised Mobutu and Moscow had treaties with Ethiopia and Angola.

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1960s to 2000s · Africanspan

Wars in independent Africa are mostly fought inside the borders

The exceptions are large: the Ogaden twice, Tanzania into Uganda, Ethiopia against Eritrea.

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1960s to 2010s · Africanspan

Vaccination cuts infant deaths while the schools lose their money

Adult illiteracy south of the Sahara is the highest in the world and rural girls carry most of it.

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1960s to 2010s · Africanspan

African debt runs from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion in 1997

Aid of twelve billion a year bought the donors a voice in how sovereign states were run.

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1960s to the present · Africanspan

African history enters the curriculum and stays an optional extra

Courses exist at many universities. Almost no history student is ever required to take one.

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1960s · Diasporadecade

The modern Haitian diaspora starts with people leaving Duvalier

Five thousand Haitians in the United States in 1960 and thirty thousand by 1970.

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1960 · Haitianyear only

A labour code finally counts child servants as workers

Haiti set a minimum age of fifteen and required schooling for children who were paid nothing.

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1960 · Haitianyear only

Five poets found Haiti Litteraire and write around the censor

Under Francois Duvalier the group turned metaphor into a working method.

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the 1960s · Haitiandecade

Duvalier builds a model town while the people who build cities leave

An airport, a dam and a modernist showpiece named after himself.

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June 1960 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier blames Washington for Haitian poverty in the Cri de Jacmel

He warned that thin American aid might push the republic to reconsider its place in the West.

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25 June 1960 · Haitian

Duvalier asks Washington for a massive injection of money

The Jacmel speech offered anticommunism and requested dollars in the same breath.

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July 1960 · Diasporamonth known

A Haitian doctor arrives in a country with no Congolese doctors

Bellerive found emptied hospitals, cut telephone lines and people dying where they lay.

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July 1960 · Haitianmonth known

Barbot goes to Fort Dimanche for having been too useful

The man who built the macoutes had grown powerful and friendly with the American embassy.

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October 1960 · Caribbeanmonth known

A student society at Mona gathers the next generation

Walter Rodney, Orlando Patterson and Norman Girvan inside one founding group.

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November 1960 · Haitianmonth known

A student strike ends with the university replaced by a state one

Martial law, twelve hours to go back to class, and a new campus under government control.

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22 November 1960 · Haitian

Martial law answers a student strike in November 1960

Two communiques in one day, and six thousand militiamen on the palace lawns.

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24 November 1960 · Haitian

Archbishop Poirier is expelled and Rome answers with excommunication

He was accused of financing communist student groups in the month the university went on strike.

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1961 · Haitianyear only

Washington objects to a second Duvalier term and loses ambassadors

The answer to American disapproval was to declare its diplomats unwelcome.

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1961 · Haitianyear only

A model town at Cabaret is built out of monthly shakedowns

Businessmen paid five thousand dollars each, and one cancelled cheque came back endorsed by a mistress.

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1961 to 1964 · Haitianspan

Vacant parishes go to priests who say mass wearing a pistol

The Jesuits were thrown out in 1964, two centuries after Saint-Domingue expelled them first.

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1961 to 1963 · Haitianspan

The marine mission refuses to train the militia and the alliance breaks

Washington used money, pressure and the CIA. Duvalier absorbed all three and stayed put.

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1961 · Haitianyear only

Every student needs a certificate saying he is no communist

A strike shut the schools, and Duvalier answered by breaking up the students' association.

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1961 · Diasporayear only

Haitian bodyguards die in the crash that killed Hammarskjold

Elizabeth Wilson wants a monument in Kinshasa for people no record names.

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9 January 1961 · Haitian

The last independent newspaper in Haiti is closed in January 1961

La Phalange objected to new decrees on the schools and the government shut it that week.

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10 January 1961 · Haitian

The man running the archdiocese is arrested and put on a plane

Remy Augustin lasted one day longer than the Catholic newspaper.

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April 1961 · Haitianmonth known

Jacques Stephen Alexis lands at Jean Rabel and is killed for it

The best Haitian novelist of his generation came ashore and found nobody waiting.

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8 April to 9 May 1961 · Haitianspan

Duvalier re elects himself by 1,320,748 votes to nothing

The ballots arrived from the printer with his name already at the top of every sheet.

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June 1961 · Haitianmonth known

Washington decides to live with Duvalier and keep Haiti in its camp

The Alliance for Progress talked about democracy while the State Department counted votes.

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1961 · Haitianyear only

Rome excommunicates a president and Haitians are not told

The first excommunication of a head of state in the hemisphere since Peron in 1955 went unreported at home.

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1962 · Haitianyear only

Haiti's vote helps expel Cuba from the Organisation of American States

Duvalier sold an anti communist vote at Punta del Este while quarrelling with Washington.

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1962 to 1963 · Haitianspan

A watchman is wound in barbed wire and hung up to bleed

Two of the bloodiest years in Haitian history opened with a chalice of pig's blood.

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1962 · Diasporayear only

Haitians are the second largest group of UN experts in the Congo

Teachers, doctors and engineers went out to Leopoldville by the hundred.

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1962 · Diasporayear only

A Haitian exile runs UNESCO's Africa division and hires Haitians

Dartigue left Haiti in 1946 and spent twenty five years placing other people abroad.

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1962 · Caribbeanyear only

James says the West Indies went to independence as to a funeral

The imperial schooling he met in Trinidad before 1932 was running the new states.

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1962 · Caribbeanyear only

Two futures were offered to the Caribbean and both failed

Lloyd Best called the first an illusion and the second a nightmare.

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June 1962 to March 1963 · Haitianspan

Duvalier cancels seventy scholarships and makes a charm for Kennedy

A marine battalion landed at the wharf without warning, and the answer was made in the palace.

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1962 · Caribbeanyear only

Haiti's vote helps expel Cuba from the Organization of American States

The return on American aid is a reliable hand raised at hemispheric meetings.

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1962 · Haitianyear only

An American report calls the Haitian peasant incapable of acting together

The sentence shaped three decades of environmental policy and project design.

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September 1962 · Africanmonth known

Malawi loses its economic planner on a bridge outside Blantyre

Dunduzu Chisiza drove into a concrete abutment two years before independence.

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November 1962 · Haitianmonth known

A bishop who destroyed Vodou objects is accused of collecting them

The published charge against Paul Robert was looting his own diocese.

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November 1962 · Haitianmonth known

Bishop Paul Robert of Gonaives is expelled from Haiti

He had campaigned against Vodou for years and the state that removed him claimed to defend it.

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November 1962 · Haitianmonth known

The militia is given a legal name by decree in November 1962

The tonton macoutes had been operating for five years before the state wrote them into law.

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7 November 1962 · Haitian

A presidential order gives the macoutes a legal existence

The order was published in the official gazette eight days after it was signed.

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1963 to 1967 · Haitianspan

Geneva jurists find that terror has taken the place of law in Haiti

Two reports four years apart describe a state with no programme beyond its own survival.

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1963 to 1980 · Africanspan

The Central African Federation breaks and Rhodesia holds out for fifteen years

Malawi and Zambia reach independence quickly while the settlers south of the Zambezi fight on.

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1963 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A famous translation of a slave chant belongs to another song

C. L. R. James printed words swearing to destroy the whites, and they came from a different text.

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1963 · Diasporayear only

The first Haitian refugee boat reaches Florida and is sent back

Asylum refused, passengers returned, and ten years before a second sailboat arrived.

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1963 · Haitianyear only

A clandestine women's organisation forms inside the anti Duvalier front

Anonymity protected them, and losing it usually meant losing the ability to protest.

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10 February to 26 April 1963 · Haitianspan

Students write on the walls in February and are shot in a basement

Ten weeks separate the graffiti from the ambush on the car carrying the president's children.

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26 to 30 April 1963 · Haitianspan

A family is machine gunned and burned because of a surname

Duvalier guessed wrong about the marksman, and three thousand Dominican troops massed at Dajabon.

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26 April 1963 · Haitian

A month of national gratitude turns into a carnival of blood

Duvalier decreed a month of thanks to himself, and on 26 April the dam burst.

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26 April 1963 · Haitian

An attack on two schoolchildren costs the Benoit family everything

Radio called duvalierists to arms and the day became the bloodiest of the regime.

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30 April to 15 May 1963 · Haitianspan

Duvalier tells the OAS that he is the personification of Haiti

He filled the capital with peasants brought in for the day and answered their French in Creole.

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May to 14 July 1963 · Haitianspan

Barbot fights a private war and the order goes out to shoot black dogs

He opened a line to the president's white telephone and told him his coffee was poisoned.

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May 1963 · Haitianmonth known

Macoutes storm the Dominican embassy and Kennedy pulls Americans out

A breach of diplomatic immunity becomes a regional crisis and Washington pushes Duvalier to resign.

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June 1963 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier burns a strip of his border and calls it a sanitary cordon

Greene renamed it the Voodoo Curtain; anyone found inside it was to be shot on sight.

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July 1963 · Haitianmonth known

Clement Barbot is shot dead after months underground

The man who had run Haiti during Duvalier's heart attack ended as its most hunted fugitive.

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1963 · Diasporayear only

Six new paragraphs recast Toussaint's error as a tragedy

A revised edition adds the passages that recast the hero's error as enlightenment failing.

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1963 · Diasporayear only

A 1963 footnote splits Toussaint's camp from his rank and file

James likened the men who rose against Toussaint to the sansculottes and Toussaint himself to the Jacobins.

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14 to 20 July 1963 · Haitianspan

A young man holds out in a cave while his mother is used as a shield

Riobe's revolt followed Barbot's death by two days and ended in silence after three days of fire.

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August 1963 · Haitianmonth known

A writer close to the palace threatens Washington with the other camp

Les prisons de la Democratie was a price list dressed up as an essay.

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August to September 1963 · Haitianspan

A severed head is packed in ice, flown to the palace and questioned

Cantave's raids from the border failed and the border became three miles of scorched earth.

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August 1963 · Haitianmonth known

Belair militiamen are called out when rebels invade

One neighbourhood office kept five hundred volunteers on a list for exactly this.

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September 1963 · Haitianmonth known

A 1963 law puts Haitian history and African origins into the schools

The preamble told teachers that national pride and African descent were the object.

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29 September 1963 · Diaspora

Greene calls Duvalier's Haiti a nightmare republic in London

After a two-week visit he cast Papa Doc as Baron Samedi in top hat and dark glasses.

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October 1963 · Diasporamonth known

A printing plant outside Leopoldville turns out half a million items

UNESCO, UNICEF and the Congo operation built it at Limite and Haitians ran it.

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17 November 1963 · Haitian

The regime's paper insists that the battle has never actually ended

Nelson Bell wrote that Vertieres continues to win victories for the suffering masses.

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22 November 1963 · Haitian

Kennedy's death in Dallas rescues the Duvalier government

Washington had spent three years trying to remove him. His successor decided to live with him.

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December 1963 · Haitianmonth known

The trade union federation is dissolved during a general strike

After December 1963 the only legal unions in Haiti were the ones that backed the government.

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1964 to 1966 · Haitianspan

Rome and Washington both come back, and the tobacco monopoly keeps paying

An ambassador returns, the excommunication is lifted, and ten million a year stays off the books.

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1964 to 1971 · Haitianspan

Washington quietly rearms the man it had cut off

Aircraft in 1964, overhauls paid for in Miami, and a million dollars of licensed weapons by 1971.

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1964 · Diasporayear only

A Midlands election makes race the official programme of a major party

Peter Griffiths took Smethwick on immigration and unseated a Labour minister.

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1963 to 1964 · Haitianyear only

The army outspends school building by thirty nine million gourdes

In one budget year, capital spending on education trailed the military by that amount.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

Fewer than seven Haitian pupils in a thousand reach the end of school

Enrolment was falling while the school age population nearly doubled.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

Schoolchildren swear a daily oath naming where the ancestors died

From 1964 the flag pledge sung every morning fixed Vertieres and Crete-a-Pierrot in the school day.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier writes himself into the presidency for the rest of his life

The legal step tidies the paperwork of the dictatorship and settles none of the argument about it.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

A catechism teaches that Duvalier is five founding fathers at once

Jean M. Fourcand's booklet turns loyalty to the president into a religious obligation.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

A rewritten Lord's Prayer puts the president where God had been

Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life: liturgy borrowed for a state religion.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

The flag goes back to black and red

Duvalier drops the blue and red of Petion and calls the change a victory for the black majority.

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April 1964 · Haitianmonth known

Bishop Voegeli is expelled in the drive to make religion Haitian

The Episcopal church loses its foreign bishop to the campaign that emptied the Catholic hierarchy.

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June to 26 October 1964 · Haitianspan

Thirteen men land at Dame-Marie and the town of Jeremie pays for it

Two exile landings end in the hills, and then whole families are killed by name in one town.

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12 November 1964 · Haitian

Two survivors are shot on television and the schools are emptied to watch

Numa and Drouin die at the cemetery wall in Port-au-Prince, rebroadcast daily for a week.

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1 April 1964 · Haitian

Two point eight million ballots arrive with the answer already printed

A referendum with one option makes Duvalier president for life and lets him name his heir.

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1964 · Haitianyear only

The professional class leaves and the country cannot replace it

Life presidency, expelled bishops and a hurricane in one year, with the trained generation gone.

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6 July 1964 · African

Malawi's flag goes up over Zomba just after midnight

A red, green and black flag rose in a freezing stadium, and one man already held everything.

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11 July 1964 · Haitian

A priest's whole family is taken from a lit house on Bois Verna street

Macoutes came the night after a radio broadcast named the exiled Bajeux in Santo Domingo.

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Summer 1964 · Haitianseason

Twenty seven members of three Jeremie families go into one pit

Thirteen young men landed near Dame-Marie and the town paid for it all summer.

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August 1964 · Haitianmonth known

The Kamoken burn a sawmill and overrun a border post in one week

Fred Baptiste's guerrillas crossed back into Haiti on 5 August and raided for a fortnight.

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after 1965 · Diasporayear only

Immigration law changes and millions of Caribbean people arrive

Their gains became an argument about whether racism explains African American outcomes.

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January 1965 · Diasporamonth known

Three men drive the border and a novel gets its last chapter

Greene, Diederich and the exiled priest Bajeux crossed Hispaniola on a three-day pretext.

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1965 · Haitianyear only

The maroons are declared the true beginning of independence

Duvalier attacks the free coloured class of the colony and puts the runaways at the origin.

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October 1965 · Haitianmonth known

The seminary reopens under a Canadian order

Haiti trains priests again, on terms the palace has set and France no longer controls.

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c. 1966 · Haitianapproximate

The virus later blamed on Haiti arrives from central Africa

Genetic dating puts the introduction near 1966, fifteen years before anyone had a name for it.

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1966 · Haitianyear only

A communist guerrilla comes home and ends at Cazale

Students who had left their studies in Europe returned in secret and were betrayed.

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January 1966 · Diasporamonth known

The Comedians appears and gives Haitians a voice Papa Doc had removed

Greene wrote that Duvalier's rule was not invented and not even blackened for dramatic effect.

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January 1966 · Haitianmonth known

The only copy in Haiti sits on Papa Doc's desk beside his revolver

An aide handed him the novel calling it worthless, and Duvalier laughed at the title, then stopped.

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1966 · Haitianyear only

The Vatican concedes a Haitian bench of bishops

Rome ends a century of French appointment and Duvalier gets a say in who wears the mitre.

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1966 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier tells the legislature he defends Christian civilisation

The speech is aimed at Washington, where anticommunism was the credential that counted.

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April 1966 · Haitianmonth known

Haile Selassie spends a single day in Port-au-Prince

The visit gives the regime a photograph it uses for years and a claim it had made since the 1930s.

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October 1966 · Haitianmonth known

Ligonde becomes the first Haitian archbishop of Port-au-Prince

A quiet settlement with Rome puts a Haitian in a chair French priests had held since 1860.

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November 1966 · Haitianmonth known

A papal nuncio returns to a president Rome had excommunicated

Duvalier reads a diplomatic ceremony as the highest moral authority on earth agreeing with him.

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1966 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier announces that the explosive phase is over

Roadblocks come down, the curfew lifts, and reporters are told the country is a democracy.

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Late 1960s · Haitiandecade

Ecce homo appears under Duvalier's photograph in the capital

The words Pilate used to present Christ to the crowd were printed beneath a living president.

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Late 1960s · Haitiandecade

Every car carries the sentence that makes Duvalier into the country

To wish to destroy Duvalier is to wish to destroy Haiti, printed and driven around the republic.

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1967 to 1970 · Haitianspan

A law of 1969 makes communist belief a crime against the state

Spoken or written, in public or at home: the statute reaches what a person says in his own house.

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1967 · Diasporayear only

A union leader in exile opens a centre on the Upper West Side

The first Haitian arrivals in New York found no institution waiting to receive them.

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the late 1960s · Haitiandecade

Three writers in Haiti name a movement after the spiral

Franketyen, Philoctete and Fignole stayed in the country through the whole dictatorship.

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1967 · Diasporayear only

At Ibadan, Dessalines is played as a tyrant who sold Toussaint out

The later Nigerian play ends with a corrupt emperor rather than a victorious liberator.

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1967 · Haitianyear only

Price-Mars refuses to reduce Haiti's divisions to colour

The elder of Haitian ethnology contradicts the regime's ideologist and is attacked for it.

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1967 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier's sayings are printed as a pocket breviary

Gerard Daumec edits the president's utterances on the model of Mao's little red book.

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1967 · Haitianyear only

Slogans give Duvalier alone the power of the Peligre dam

A concrete wall on the Artibonite becomes evidence that one man commands nature.

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14 to 15 April 1967 · Haitianspan

A bomb in an ice cream cart is a quarrel inside the family

Two sons in law compete over Duvalier's birthday carnival and four people die on the route.

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8 June 1967 · Haitian

Nineteen officers are made to shoot nineteen officers at Fort Dimanche

The army's senior command forms the firing squad and is sent home to bed afterwards.

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June to 1 August 1967 · Haitianspan

A father dies at Fort Dimanche to bring a daughter home

Duvalier exiles his son in law, kills the men around him, and closes the embassies as a refuge.

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1967 · Diasporayear only

Six o'clock mass is broadcast from a studio on Madison Avenue

Raymond Joseph reads Haitian news in Kreyol from New York and Duvalier buys jammers for it.

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1 November 1967 · Diaspora

An embassy formally protests against a motion picture

Haiti's mission in Washington attacked the film on official letterhead, possibly a diplomatic first.

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1968 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier commissions a statue of the slave who ran

The Neg Mawon stands with a chain already broken and a conch shell at his lips.

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1968 to 1974 · Caribbeanspan

The Rodney riots open a period that closes the Caribbean mind

Best dates the retreat from speculation to the years between the riots and the oil shocks.

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1968 to 1973 · Haitianspan

Cement demand in Haiti triples in five years

The plant that had idled at half capacity ran out of room in 1972.

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15 January 1968 · Haitian

Haiti's foreign ministry publishes a book to prove Greene is a spy

A circular to every mission abroad called him a secret agent working under cover of being a writer.

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1968 · Diasporayear only

Michel-Rolph Trouillot leaves for Brooklyn at nineteen

A student in danger joins the exodus that gave Haitian scholarship a second home in New York.

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1968 · Diasporayear only

Depestre calls the regime's negritude a delirious mystification

From Havana a Haitian poet argues that race talk is covering a fight between two elites.

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1968 · Haitianyear only

Estime is reburied and Duvalier claims the inheritance

Vodou symbols at the ceremony and an attack on the elite's habit of facing Europe.

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December 1968 · Haitianmonth known

The unknown maroon is unveiled and the schools close for the day

A bronze runaway blowing a conch kneels opposite the palace and becomes the national image.

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1968 · Haitianyear only

Haiti declares four days of mourning for Martin Luther King

An avenue in the capital is renamed while Fort Dimanche stays full.

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20 May 1968 · Haitian

An invasion of Cap-Haitien fails and fifty seven hostages are shot

Leaflets nobody untied, a plane that did not come back, and a supply ship allowed to sink.

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1968 · Haitianyear only

Radio Haiti puts the news into the language people actually speak

Jean Dominique broadcasts in Kreyol to a country whose media had addressed it in French since 1804.

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1968 to 1978 · Haitianspan

The Duvaliers take 265 million gourdes out of cement alone

The money came from Haitians who were putting up houses.

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1969 to 1970 · Haitianspan

An American ambassador becomes an honorary Tonton Macoute

Washington warms to Papa Doc, baseballs get sewn in Port-au-Prince, and macoutes shear returning students.

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1969 · Haitianyear only

Duvalier receives Oral Roberts at the national palace

The president who made his name defending peasant religion courted its loudest enemies.

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1969 · Haitianyear only

The state monopoly office takes in forty percent of Haiti's national budget

An American diplomat called it an untouchable instrument of personalist rule.

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1969 · Haitianyear only

Rockefeller carries word that American aid to Haiti will resume

A governor's visit reopens the relationship and sets up the closest years of the Duvalier era.

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14 April to 2 May 1969 · Haitianspan

The communist party is destroyed in the space of three weeks

Boutilliers, Cazale and a seven hour siege at Fontamara, timed for a visit from Nelson Rockefeller.

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4 June 1969 · Haitian

One old aircraft empties Port-au-Prince by accident

Colonel Leon's firebombs fail, and in the panic the tax office loses the day's takings.

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1 July 1969 · Haitian

Rockefeller is photographed holding a dying president upright

Heart failure in May, secret surgery in the same month, and an American envoy propping him up in July.

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