An ethnographer argues that Vodou made the 1791 rising possible

In February 1958 O. Mennesson Rigaud published an article in Presence Africaine on the part Vodou played in the Haitian struggle for independence. Her argument was that the spiritual unity the religion supplied was a primary reason the rising of 1791 succeeded. The claim had been available for a century and a half and had rarely been made in print by a scholar with an audience in Paris. Presence Africaine was the journal of the francophone black intellectual world, read from Dakar to Fort-de-France, and putting the argument there placed the Haitian revolution inside a wider account of African religion as a political force. Nicholls notes the article partly because the position it took was becoming official in Haiti at the same moment. A president who claimed occult authority of his own had every reason to welcome scholarship making Vodou the engine of independence. The argument and the regime that found it useful arrived together, and the argument outlasted the regime.

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.

Where no single ethnic group was large enough to dominate the others, a colony could build a politics that belonged to the whole territory. Tanganyika is the clearest case. The African Association had existed there since 1929 and came into its strength only in the early 1950s, when renewed economic interest in the territory pushed Africans off land wanted for white settlers and colonial officers began forcing changes on African farming. Terracing orders produced riots in 1955. Out of the Association came the Tanganyika African National Union in 1954, led by Julius Nyerere, who like Kwame Nkrumah had studied abroad and had watched what the Convention People's Party achieved in the Gold Coast. Nyerere widened TANU through the mid-1950s until it reached the villages, and he did it in Swahili, a language spread by nineteenth century caravan trade and then adopted by the colonial state for schools and offices. Nigeria and Uganda had no such common tongue and their nationalisms fractured along ethnic lines. Nyerere hinted at violence and never used it, which left the British nothing to answer.

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.