Fignole raises army pay and is gone before the film ends

Daniel Fignole took office on 26 May 1957 in striped trousers and a cutaway coat, a long way from Pestel where he was born. He asked ten thousand followers for democracy and unity, and the heroes he named were Soulouque, Goman, Acaau and Rameau, men the Haitian elite had spent a century treating as warnings. To take hold of a divided army he chose Colonel Antonio Kebreau, a friend of Rafael Trujillo and of Francois Duvalier, which nobody weighed at the time. Fignole got the shops open. He also ordered officers transferred from the palace instead of through Kebreau, commissioned his own men, and went on campaigning for a full term while his supporters demanded six years for him with no election at all. Then he announced a hundred percent pay rise for enlisted men without consulting the general staff. On the evening of 14 June, while the garrison watched a new Western at the barracks, officers led by Kebreau opened the council chamber door and marched the president out. He signed a resignation and was flown to Miami.

Portugal did not negotiate. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau the administration hardened its racial policy through the 1950s and left nationalists no route except force. The MPLA was founded in Angola in 1956 and rode a peasant rising of the early 1960s against forced labour and compulsory cotton growing, practices the British and French colonies had given up years before. FRELIMO formed in Mozambique in 1962 and began a long war of its own. The worst of these wars was in Algeria, which French opinion counted as a province of the mother country. Reform schemes were half hearted and colonial officials sabotaged them. Younger nationalists set up the Organisation Secrete in 1948 to prepare armed struggle, and when it collapsed a handful of its members founded the Front de Liberation Nationale. The FLN went to war in November 1954 and fought on two fronts, guerrilla operations inside Algeria and diplomacy outside it at the United Nations and among the non aligned and pan Arab states.

Arriving at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica one day after his ouster, the Haitian military president Paul Magloire remarked that when he left Haiti it was on fire and that it was now going to explode. Smith builds his conclusion on that line, arguing that in Haiti the removal of a hated ruler has usually opened a long and halting march toward change rather than concluding one, and that Magloire's comment applies as well to 2004 and 1986 as to 1956. What distinguishes the most recent instance in his account is the continuing support for Lavalas, obscured by heavily armed gangs in the capital with unreliable political allegiances, a long list of contentious presidential candidates, the drug trade, and the ambiguous role of the bourgeoisie and the army.

Athemas Bellerive had been director general of health in Haiti. He reached the Congo in July 1960, weeks after independence, as a malaria specialist directing the World Health Organisation emergency team. He described the situation as dramatic. There was not one Congolese doctor in the country. Almost every foreign doctor had left. Fighting between groups was under way, telephone links between the provincial capitals had been cut and the roads no longer carried traffic. Patients had walked out of the hospitals because the hospitals had turned dangerous, and those without the strength to leave died in them. His answer was to build a Congolese medical profession rather than staff the system permanently with foreigners. More than a hundred Congolese who had worked as assistants to expatriate doctors were selected, sent to Europe with their families, and given theoretical and practical training leading to a medical diploma. A French colleague on the Leopoldville team later called that his most important achievement.