Belair votes for Fignole and is given three macoute offices

Upper Belair, the oldest neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince and a quarter with a reputation for trouble, supported the populist Daniel Fignole during the election campaign of 1957. Once Francois Duvalier held power the neighbourhood was kept under tight control, and the political offices of the tontons macoutes there were created after that campaign. There were three of them, one inside the slum and two on its edge, each reporting to a different office outside. One was tied to the prefecture and the mayor's office; another had a member with a direct line to the president. They did not deal with one another, which meant no single office could organise the district. Inside each one, senior men manoeuvred to depose the leader and junior men competed to be his favourite, so nobody spoke against the government in front of anyone else. One office had been a literary society before Duvalier came to power.

Belgium and Portugal lost control of events once fighting broke out in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and the Congo. Britain and France were shaken by war in Kenya and Algeria, both places where large European settler minorities pushed for confrontation. France conceded to the Algerian rebels. Britain destroyed the Mau Mau insurgency in the field and then handed Kenya to a moderate African elite. Across most of the rest of British and French sub-Saharan Africa, power changed hands through long and intricate constitutional negotiation. The old imperial reflex had one final outing in 1956, when British and French troops seized the Suez Canal zone after Nasser nationalised it and were forced into a humiliating withdrawal under international pressure. Settler governments in South Africa and Rhodesia dug in. Conflicts among ethnic, regional and religious groups were often nineteenth century contests sharpened by colonial rule and now fought inside a national arena the colonisers themselves had supplied. The departure was improvised at roughly the speed of the original partition.

Greene arrived at Bowen Field on 21 August 1954, invited from Jamaica by the stage director Peter Brook, who was turning Truman Capote's story about a Port-au-Prince brothel into a Broadway musical. The Haiti Sun announced his arrival on 29 August, after he had already left on the twenty seventh. Diederich sets the moment in a country enjoying its share of the Caribbean tourist boom under President Paul Magloire, who had appeared on the cover of an American news magazine and been received at the White House, and which was marking the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its independence. Greene attended a Vodou ceremony that ran until three in the morning and wrote his impressions to Catherine Walston the next day, asking her to keep the letter in case he needed it. Diederich notes that the rite he saw was of the kind staged for tourists.

Having survived an attempt to take the barracks, Duvalier raised the Militia of Volunteers for National Security in 1958. Nobody used that name. Tonton Macoute is Uncle Knapsack, the figure from Haitian storytelling who carries disobedient children away in a sack, and the militia was known by it from the start. Recruits came from the poorest and least schooled black families in the countryside, and eventually there were more than twenty five thousand of them. They wore paramilitary dress and dark glasses at any hour. They carried pistols and preferred machetes, a weapon that reminded Haitians of the massacre of their people on the Dominican border in 1937. Anything done in the president's service was pardoned before it happened. Victims were left in public as notices. The macoutes encouraged the belief that they were Vodou demons, so that political fear and spiritual fear arrived together. Their strength came to match the army's, and for three decades they kept the Duvalier family safe from the generals. Soulouque had done the same thing with his zinglins a century earlier.