A false rumour of an execution sets the slums against the army

Kebreau finished the job the same night. The cabinet went to jail along with twenty Fignolist organisers. At half past ten the next morning, with the guns of Fort National firing, the general told the press that the army had taken charge, that soldiers were the fathers of the family and not politicians, and that they wanted order and elections. On the night of the sixteenth the hammering on lamp posts started after the eight o'clock curfew and then turned into a sound people compared to the sea. Word had gone round that Fignole had been secretly executed. It was false. The slums came out anyway, breaking the street lights as they went, and the darkness was followed by fire. The fire brigade had its engines wrecked and its hoses cut. Fort Dimanche answered the attack from La Saline with machine guns. Then the army came in behind half-tracks and light tanks, firing into the alleys and into whole blocks of plank houses. This was the last time the poor of Port-au-Prince acted on their own account for thirty years.

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 second half of the 1940s was a good stretch for Haitian exports, with coffee and sisal prices rising, and the boom around the Korean war in 1950 and 1951 kept coffee high and demand for sisal strong. From late 1951 to the summer of 1952 sisal prices halved. The coffee harvest of 1953 was very small, and the following year coffee prices fell sharply. In the same year, 1954, Hurricane Hazel struck Haiti and destroyed forty percent of the coffee harvest and fifty percent of the cocoa harvest. By 1955 coffee still accounted for over sixty five percent of total export value, followed by sisal at almost sixteen percent, sugar at more than three and a half, cocoa at about the same, and essential oils at three percent. Plantation Dauphin, once the largest sisal producer in the world, gave up the crop in 1971 after synthetic fibres undercut it.