Carrefour-Dufort is a nest of fignolistes and stays one

In 1957 Carrefour-Dufort and the western part of the Leogane plain were described locally as a nest of fignolistes. Light-skinned families in the east of the plain backed Louis Dejoie. Notables in Leogane town divided according to whom they knew in Port-au-Prince. In Carrefour-Dufort itself Daniel Fignole recruited across every peasant class. People there said he was of humble rural origin, that he spoke Creole the way ordinary people spoke it, that he stood against the merchants of the Port-au-Prince waterfront and against the rural speculators, and that he talked about social justice and a legal minimum wage. Households in the poor and middle peasantry had relatives in the fignoliste quarters of the capital such as Bel-Air. Once Duvalier held power and his militiamen framed the district, everyone became a duvalierist in public. Some families emigrated to New York and Montreal to escape trouble over their loyalties, and stayed loyal to a leader exiled in New York.

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.

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.

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.