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

Work on the walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral began in the autumn of 1951 and immediately opened a rivalry at the Centre d'Art between the trained painters upstairs and the self taught painters downstairs. Philomé Obin, Castera Bazile, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud and others covered the walls with a biblical cycle set entirely in Haiti: a black Christ, a Haitian Nativity, a Last Supper in which the only white figure in the room is Judas. Alongside it Liautaud was cutting sculpture out of oil drums, Jasmin Joseph was making figures that look Etruscan, and André Pierre was painting as an oungan rather than about one. The murals were destroyed in the 2010 earthquake and three fragments were saved. Everything in that paragraph is one argument stated in paint: the sacred is local, the artist need not be trained abroad, and the betrayer is the one who came from outside.

The Suez Canal had offended Egyptian nationalists since it opened in 1869, and Gamal Abdel Nasser meant to remove every remaining Western hold on Egyptian sovereignty. Britain agreed in 1954 to pull its troops out. Two years later Britain, the United States and the World Bank withdrew the money promised for the Aswan Dam, and Nasser answered by nationalising the canal company. Britain and France invaded with Israeli help and the operation failed completely. Condemnation was worldwide and the loudest of it came from Washington. London and Paris backed down. Anthony Eden resigned as British prime minister soon afterwards. Nasser had won a victory for pan-Arabism, and Africans read it as something wider, the postcolonial state proving stronger than the empires that had ruled them. No European power had been humiliated on African soil on that scale since Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Within a few years Britain and France were retreating from the continent altogether. The remaining question was when Africa would be free.

In 1954 a French construction conglomerate opened Ciment d'Haiti, the country's first domestic cement plant, and the government granted it a formal monopoly over both the manufacture and the import of cement. Total market control with protection from competition was a standard inducement Haitian administrations used to attract foreign industry, and it reliably meant higher prices for anyone buying a bag. The price of such a concession was often a large sum paid to the president personally. In this case the beneficiary was Paul Magloire, the Haitian president who preceded Francois Duvalier. During the 1970s journalists and some officials opened investigations into how the company used its position, and found among other things that it sold low quality cement at high prices inside Haiti while selling better cement abroad more cheaply. Every bag used in the capital for the next three decades came through that arrangement.

Hazel came up from the south on 11 October 1954 with winds of eighty knots. It struck the coast at Port-a-Piment, tore past Les Cayes, wrecked most of Jeremie, flattened villages, killed at least a thousand people, stripped forty percent of the country's coffee bushes, destroyed the new banana plantations Magloire had sponsored and uprooted half the cacao trees. Nan Mapou, a well off village near Port-a-Piment, was left as a lagoon a mile long. Help arrived fast. The Saipan was off the coast within a day, and money came from the Red Cross, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, Ghana, Guadeloupe and the United States, whose grants eventually reached nearly five million dollars. Some of it reached the people it was sent for. Visitors to the back country found relief stores stacked in army depots, prefectures and private shops for years afterwards. The word entered Creole with a second meaning. Mink wraps on the wives of officials were known as les Hazels.