Nine hundred households are counted in the Kenscoff mountains

Between 1956 and 1957 a household survey covered the bourg of Kenscoff, the settlements nearest to it, and the higher region of Furcy. Every plot of land occupied by peasants was canvassed systematically, and only a few families who happened to be away were missed. The count was made in the months when no holidaymaker from the capital was present, so errors could be corrected on the spot. It produced 917 households: 468 in the bourg, 198 in the neighbouring communities and 251 around Furcy. Household size rose with distance from the town. The bourg averaged 4.5 people, the nearby settlements 5.8, and Furcy 6.7. So did the shape of the household. Father, mother and children living alone made up 47 per cent of households in the bourg and 74 per cent at Furcy, while widows, widowers, separated people and young men starting out on their own were 26 per cent in the bourg and 8 per cent at Furcy.

Portugal did not negotiate. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau the administration hardened its racial policy through the 1950s and left nationalists no route except force. The MPLA was founded in Angola in 1956 and rode a peasant rising of the early 1960s against forced labour and compulsory cotton growing, practices the British and French colonies had given up years before. FRELIMO formed in Mozambique in 1962 and began a long war of its own. The worst of these wars was in Algeria, which French opinion counted as a province of the mother country. Reform schemes were half hearted and colonial officials sabotaged them. Younger nationalists set up the Organisation Secrete in 1948 to prepare armed struggle, and when it collapsed a handful of its members founded the Front de Liberation Nationale. The FLN went to war in November 1954 and fought on two fronts, guerrilla operations inside Algeria and diplomacy outside it at the United Nations and among the non aligned and pan Arab 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.

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.