Duvalier names Price-Mars as his teacher and later deletes him

In 1957 Francois Duvalier named Jean Price-Mars among the decisive influences on his early life and thinking. Price-Mars was the ethnologist whose work had taught an educated Haitian generation to take the culture of the Haitian peasantry seriously, and claiming descent from him gave the new president an intellectual pedigree. By 1967 the two men had broken, and the name was quietly removed from official reprints of the very speeches in which it had appeared. Nicholls points at the editing rather than at the quarrel. A government that reissues its own past with names cut out of it is telling you what kind of government it means to be. The Duvalier regime did this with texts, with photographs, and with the history of the Duvalierist revolution itself, and the practice started early. The teacher was useful while he conferred legitimacy on the pupil and was erased on the day he withheld it.

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.

Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, founded in 1934. She had taken part in the parliamentary debates and the women's demonstrations of 1946 and 1950 for political rights and the vote. She wrote for La Voix des Femmes from 1935 and started her own twice-weekly paper, L'Escale, in 1951. She had supported Louis Dejoie in the 1957 election and began criticising the new government at once. On 6 January 1958, at half past eleven in the morning, armed men came to her house. Officers of the military household and civilians including Clement Barbot, Elois Maitre and Luc Desir beat her two daughters in front of her and took her away. At Delmas the group raped her in turn and beat her with rifle butts. Her fingers were broken and she was left for dead in a ditch. Rape entered Haitian state practice as a political weapon at that moment.