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

In November 1956 Diederich found Greene bent over a Scrabble board by the pool at the El Rancho with Catherine Walston, consulting a dictionary at his feet and losing. They were on a six week Caribbean holiday. Greene disliked being photographed and agreed to one frame on condition it ran only after they left, which it did on the front page of the Haiti Sun on 2 December, with a caption listing his three discoveries, the shared taxi known as la ligne, the painted taptap and the camionette. Diederich persuaded them to spend their last two days at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread villa built in 1887 for the son of a Haitian president and used by the marines as a hospital during the occupation. Both visitors took a keen interest in the Haitian painters, and Walston asked whether the artists would exhibit in London.

Having survived an attempt to take the barracks, Duvalier raised the Militia of Volunteers for National Security in 1958. Nobody used that name. Tonton Macoute is Uncle Knapsack, the figure from Haitian storytelling who carries disobedient children away in a sack, and the militia was known by it from the start. Recruits came from the poorest and least schooled black families in the countryside, and eventually there were more than twenty five thousand of them. They wore paramilitary dress and dark glasses at any hour. They carried pistols and preferred machetes, a weapon that reminded Haitians of the massacre of their people on the Dominican border in 1937. Anything done in the president's service was pardoned before it happened. Victims were left in public as notices. The macoutes encouraged the belief that they were Vodou demons, so that political fear and spiritual fear arrived together. Their strength came to match the army's, and for three decades they kept the Duvalier family safe from the generals. Soulouque had done the same thing with his zinglins a century earlier.

After the disturbances in the Gold Coast, the British appointed the Coussey Commission to find out what had gone wrong in their model colony. It recommended more African representation and constitutional reform, and officials hoped this would strengthen the moderate elite of the United Gold Coast Convention. They presented Kwame Nkrumah as a dangerous radical and J. B. Danquah as the safe alternative. In the 1951 elections Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won heavily, and the British released him from prison and worked with him because there was nothing else to do. He became leader of government business and pushed decolonisation along steadily, arguing in private that a settlement was the only guard against disorder while speaking in public as a radical. Internal self-government came in 1954 and full independence in 1957, the first anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Two things produced it: mass protest that forced constitutional concessions, and a campaign of strikes and boycotts that made governing expensive while giving the troops nobody to shoot at. The habit of one commanding figure standing for a whole movement shaped what these new states became.

Arriving at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica one day after his ouster, the Haitian military president Paul Magloire remarked that when he left Haiti it was on fire and that it was now going to explode. Smith builds his conclusion on that line, arguing that in Haiti the removal of a hated ruler has usually opened a long and halting march toward change rather than concluding one, and that Magloire's comment applies as well to 2004 and 1986 as to 1956. What distinguishes the most recent instance in his account is the continuing support for Lavalas, obscured by heavily armed gangs in the capital with unreliable political allegiances, a long list of contentious presidential candidates, the drug trade, and the ambiguous role of the bourgeoisie and the army.