A senator is made ambassador to a country where Haiti has no embassy

Duvalier held foreigners at arm's length as a matter of doctrine and enjoyed showing that he was strong enough to harass white ambassadors. In fourteen years at the palace he never gave a diplomatic dinner. He expelled more foreign heads of mission than had been expelled in the whole previous history of Haiti. By 1963 the list of those thrown out or hurried away included the papal nuncio and the chiefs of mission of Great Britain, Chile, Cuba, Venezuela, the Netherlands and the Dominican Republic, along with two American ambassadors, with the resident representative of the United Nations still to come. Foreigners who managed to see anything of the country beyond Port-au-Prince tended to be asked to leave soon afterwards. The method extended to Haitians. When Senator Jean David let his criticism of the government run away with him, he was handed an economy class ticket, a diplomatic passport and a commission as ambassador to Tokyo, where Haiti had no embassy.

The Suez Canal had offended Egyptian nationalists since it opened in 1869, and Gamal Abdel Nasser meant to remove every remaining Western hold on Egyptian sovereignty. Britain agreed in 1954 to pull its troops out. Two years later Britain, the United States and the World Bank withdrew the money promised for the Aswan Dam, and Nasser answered by nationalising the canal company. Britain and France invaded with Israeli help and the operation failed completely. Condemnation was worldwide and the loudest of it came from Washington. London and Paris backed down. Anthony Eden resigned as British prime minister soon afterwards. Nasser had won a victory for pan-Arabism, and Africans read it as something wider, the postcolonial state proving stronger than the empires that had ruled them. No European power had been humiliated on African soil on that scale since Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Within a few years Britain and France were retreating from the continent altogether. The remaining question was when Africa would be free.

Haitians reaching New York in the 1960s found no government or civic body set up to receive them. The Catholic Church filled the space, sponsoring centres that offered help with employment, immigration paperwork, housing, literacy and English classes. Lyderick Bonaventure, a trade union leader and political activist pushed out of Haiti, founded and directed one of the first of them in 1967. The Haitian Neighborhood Center, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, became a place immigrants went for counselling, for news from home, or simply to meet other Haitians. Similar centres followed in Brooklyn and Queens, among them Charlemagne Peralte and Haitian Americans United for Progress. The people running them were educated, comfortable in American institutions, and had generally held prominent positions in Haiti before the Duvalier government forced them out of the country.

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.