The Peligre dam is finished and the hills above it keep washing in

The Peligre Dam was completed in 1956 on the Artibonite River, the largest hydroelectric dam on Hispaniola. The United States Army Corps of Engineers designed it, the Export-Import Bank paid for it, and the Texas firm Brown and Root built it. Behind it rose Lake Peligre, the second largest lake in Haiti, holding water for the rice fields of the Artibonite valley, the best farmland in the country. Three turbines came on line in 1971 and for a time supplied most of the electricity used in Port-au-Prince. Then the capacity fell by half. Part of that was mismanagement. The larger part was the hillsides above the reservoir, stripped of trees, sliding into the water as silt and filling the space the engineers had measured. This is what mid century development looked like in Haiti. Foreign engineering was applied to Haitian geography, produced real benefits for a while, and then decayed at the speed set by an environmental collapse that no government had any interest in stopping.

Destin records that Magloire reached celebrity status in the United States when Eisenhower invited him for a state visit, having made the cover of a national magazine the year before. The tour was received with publicity, especially over his views on race in America. As a guest in the wake of the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision, the leader of the first black republic was interviewed about the case and predicted that discrimination in the United States would soon be a bad dream. He received an honorary doctorate of law from a black sociologist serving as a university president, and further honours in New York. Destin sets the visit inside the period called the golden age, when coffee prices were high and the country was the only one in the Caribbean where the tourist industry was controlled by nationals.

White settlement in Kenya took the best farmland out of African hands and pushed the people who had worked it into crowded reserves. Colonial officials then blamed African methods for soil erosion and imposed farming rules that made the reserves harder still to live in. Those who left for Nairobi joined a growing urban poor the authorities treated as a criminal class. In 1947 the Kenya African Union was founded under Jomo Kenyatta and expanded quickly into a mass movement, run by moderates and filling up with people who owned nothing and were prepared to fight for land. Killings in the countryside began at the end of the 1940s and became sustained war through 1951 and 1952. The Kikuyu split along the same line. Kenyatta wanted peaceful change. The leaders of the landless wanted land and freedom. When the fighting spread across the White Highlands the British banned the KAU and imprisoned Kenyatta, who had had almost nothing to do with it.

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.