A boat cleared for lobster fishing lands invaders near the capital

Diederich tells Greene about the invasion attempt of summer 1958, when rumours of an exile landing were circulating everywhere and Duvalier had been in office only ten months, with several bomb plots already behind him and officers such as Captain Alix Pasquet in exile. The party left Key West aboard the Mollie C claiming to be going after lobster, with the cabin packed with arms and ammunition and fuel drums on deck. They stopped at Nassau, where Duvalier's new consul entertained them, then ran six hundred miles under a full moon and on the afternoon of 28 June entered La Gonave Bay, anchoring in a cove at Deluge some forty miles north of Port-au-Prince. He notes that the national penitentiary was already full of suspected opponents and that Fort Dimanche later became Duvalier's principal prison and killing ground.

The end of colonial rule did not clear the board. African states came out of it carrying colonial administration, colonial economies and colonial borders, and at the same time older arrangements returned that colonial rule had only held down. A large share of what gets called a postcolonial problem is a nineteenth century one, above all the militarisation of politics that spread across the continent before any European army settled there. The Cold War made this worse, starting some conflicts, extending others, and giving Western governments a stated reason to fund rulers they could not otherwise have defended. Economic weakness ran back further, through colonial extraction to the terms of nineteenth century legitimate commerce and behind that to the Atlantic slave trade. Government by patronage drew on precolonial practice while distorting it. One year holds the whole ambiguity. In 1994 South Africans of every description voted together for the first time, and in the same months about eight hundred thousand people were killed in Rwanda in a hundred days.

In November 1956 Diederich found Greene bent over a Scrabble board by the pool at the El Rancho with Catherine Walston, consulting a dictionary at his feet and losing. They were on a six week Caribbean holiday. Greene disliked being photographed and agreed to one frame on condition it ran only after they left, which it did on the front page of the Haiti Sun on 2 December, with a caption listing his three discoveries, the shared taxi known as la ligne, the painted taptap and the camionette. Diederich persuaded them to spend their last two days at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread villa built in 1887 for the son of a Haitian president and used by the marines as a hospital during the occupation. Both visitors took a keen interest in the Haitian painters, and Walston asked whether the artists would exhibit in London.

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.