Magloire lands in Jamaica and predicts an explosion

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.

Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, founded in 1934. She had taken part in the parliamentary debates and the women's demonstrations of 1946 and 1950 for political rights and the vote. She wrote for La Voix des Femmes from 1935 and started her own twice-weekly paper, L'Escale, in 1951. She had supported Louis Dejoie in the 1957 election and began criticising the new government at once. On 6 January 1958, at half past eleven in the morning, armed men came to her house. Officers of the military household and civilians including Clement Barbot, Elois Maitre and Luc Desir beat her two daughters in front of her and took her away. At Delmas the group raped her in turn and beat her with rifle butts. Her fingers were broken and she was left for dead in a ditch. Rape entered Haitian state practice as a political weapon at that moment.

France ran its African policy after 1954 in the shadow of Algeria, and the fear of a second Algerian war shaped everything decided in Paris. The plan had been a Greater France in which the colonies stayed inside the republic, an idea that assimilated West African elites supported until it became clear that full citizenship was never on offer. Reforms in 1956 gave internal self government while Paris kept the army, foreign policy and economic planning. As Algeria worsened, de Gaulle put a straight question to the colonies in 1958. Keep the link to France and keep the money, or take complete independence and lose all of it. Almost every African leader chose the link. Guinea under Ahmed Sekou Toure chose sovereignty. De Gaulle cancelled all assistance, withdrew French staff and had the equipment carried out. Guinea survived on Soviet and Ghanaian support. Within two years the rest of Francophone Africa had followed it, and in 1960 the French colonies of west and equatorial Africa became independent states.

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.