Duvalier's team runs from Price-Mars to a Cuban explosives man

The simple country doctor, as he still described himself to foreign reporters, had gathered a peculiar coalition. In the light stood the griots led by Jean Price-Mars, and medical colleagues like Aurele Joseph, who had fought yaws beside him in the 1940s. There was a brain trust with Roger Dorsinville and Lucien Daumec, his brother-in-law and speechwriter. There were communists, the brothers Jules and Paul Blanchet, Herve Boyer, and Rene Depestre until 1960. Major Jacques Laroche ran a Duvalierist cell inside the army. Clemard-Joseph Charles, who had produced the forty six thousand dollars that paid off Cantave's soldiers in May, handled money, and so did a young deputy from Cabaret called Luckner Cambronne. Behind them stood a Cuban explosives technician, a Dominican agent who came and went on Trujillo's orders, and assorted foreigners. Above all of them was Clement Barbot of Saint-Marc, a former schoolteacher who had been caned as a boy by a French priest for calling Dessalines the greatest of Haitians. Barbot never forgot it, and the revolution would eventually eat him.

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.

In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau formed the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale with nine other women: Georgette Justin, Maud Turian, Esther Dartigue, Alice Téligny Mathon, Marie Corvington, Olga Gordon, Fernande Bellegarde, Thérèse Hudicourt and Alice Garoute. They attacked gender inequality in Haitian politics directly and made suffrage the test of whether the country meant its own founding claims. Two decades of petitions, marches, essays and letters to legislators followed. In 1950 the Constitutional Congress amended Article 8 and granted women of twenty-one and over the right to vote in local and national elections. Haitian women cast ballots in a national election for the first time in 1957. The achievement belonged to a small professional class of women who kept insisting that the democratic promise of the first Black republic in the hemisphere was still outstanding. Their charge against the founders was specific. The men who won independence at the end of the eighteenth century wrote women out of full citizenship, and nobody corrected it for a hundred and forty-six years.