Duvalier offers the Americans missile bases in Haiti

In May 1958 Francois Duvalier offered to host United States missile bases on Haitian soil and asked Washington for a Marine Corps mission to train his army. He had been president for seven months. The offer tells you what he thought he had to sell. Haiti had no money and no strategic weight of its own, and what it did have was position, a short flight from Florida in a Caribbean the Americans watched closely. Duvalier proposed to rent it out. A Marine Corps mission would have brought equipment, training and an American stake in the survival of his government, which was the point of asking. That Marines had occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, and that Duvalier's own political formation came out of resisting them, slowed him down not at all. Nicholls sets both moves down as bids for diplomatic support. Within four years the same president would be trading his vote at Punta del Este for American aid dollars.

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.