A journalist is taken from her house and left for dead above Delmas

Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel was born in Port-au-Prince in 1906, married at fourteen against her will, and educated herself afterwards by reading and by attending the law school. She was among the founders of the Ligue feminine d'action sociale in 1934 and among the leading writers of its review. On 1 April 1951 she founded Escale, a paper she ran for six years as manager, editorial writer and chief contributor. During the 1957 campaign Escale published a piece exposing the manoeuvres by which General Kebreau was securing power for Francois Duvalier. In January 1958 half a dozen armed men broke into her house at night, beat her two daughters, left the children on the pavement and drove her away. She was found the next day on a quiet road near Petionville, half conscious and stripped of most of her clothes. Her treatment took nearly ten hours of surgery and two months in hospital. She never wrote again.

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.

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.

Destin records that Magloire reached celebrity status in the United States when Eisenhower invited him for a state visit, having made the cover of a national magazine the year before. The tour was received with publicity, especially over his views on race in America. As a guest in the wake of the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision, the leader of the first black republic was interviewed about the case and predicted that discrimination in the United States would soon be a bad dream. He received an honorary doctorate of law from a black sociologist serving as a university president, and further honours in New York. Destin sets the visit inside the period called the golden age, when coffee prices were high and the country was the only one in the Caribbean where the tourist industry was controlled by nationals.