By 1957 the drive to Jacmel takes nine hours instead of two

The American occupation ended in 1934, and the obvious comparison then was with 1804. Twenty three years later the better comparison was with 1827. That year had been summed up as general ruin. Dead fields. The bridges and roads left by the French gone, seaports decayed, the army rotting, politics deadlocked, noir and mulatre at each other's throats. By 1957 exports had fallen a fifth in a decade and were still falling. The roads and bridges the Americans built had ceased to exist. In 1934 a car went from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel in under two hours, and in 1957 a jeep took nine in good weather. The telephones were dead, the harbours silted and blocked by wrecks, the docks crumbling. Patients lay on the floors of stinking hospitals. The president-elect himself said the country was rotting in poverty, hunger, nudity, sickness and illiteracy. Heinl's verdict is that the Americans modernised everything except Haiti and the Haitians. Infrastructure had been laid over a society whose internal arrangements nobody touched, and it decayed at the speed those arrangements dictated.

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.

Mrs. N. farmed with her husband on about four acres near Brown's Town in Jamaica and had five children, four of them still at home. She decided the local market paid too little and began travelling to Kingston. Each journey took planning. She borrowed or saved capital, guessed at demand, bought eggs, avocados, soursop, pumpkins and fowls in her own district, loaded them on a donkey and met a truck on the road on Sunday afternoon. Her daughter walked the donkey home and took charge of the baby. The truck cost twelve shillings out and six back. The market opened at midnight and charged a gate fee and a handcart fee of one shilling sixpence each. More than a pound sterling went on transport and fees before she made a single sale, and about three pounds more had gone on the produce itself. She chose light goods with a high unit price because fares rose with bulk. Her capital was often borrowed from market butchers at a shilling per pound for three days. Losses on a few successive trips could end her business.