She numbers the social classes so the words cannot pass judgment

Comhaire-Sylvain's quarrel with other researchers was less about who they were than about what they had failed to do, which was to see, count or locate Haitian women at all. She objected in particular to the labels then in use. Writers reached for caste to describe Haitian social divisions, and for sub-proletariat to describe the people at the bottom of them. She refused both and used impersonal markers, letters and numbers, for the classes she mapped. Sub-proletariat was the worst offender because of the judgment folded into it. The masses, she wrote, hold to standards the upper classes reject, and that is not a mark of inferiority. Caste implies a divinely fixed order and sub means less. Choosing neutral nomenclature was itself a political act: it refused to let the vocabulary of class quietly reproduce the hierarchy the vocabulary was supposed to be describing. She was writing in the year Duvalier consolidated a regime built on exactly that vocabulary.

Brussels intended to hold the Congo. Local elections in 1957 and 1958 were meant to satisfy the demand for reform, and instead they gave Congolese politics a structure it had lacked. Nationalist parties multiplied. The broadest of them formed around Patrice Lumumba, who in most respects was the only Congolese leader trying to build an organisation covering the entire territory rather than one region or one ethnic base. Political rallies in 1958 and 1959 turned into riots and the violence spread. The Belgians started losing control. They had delayed elections too long to manage the transition on their own terms or even in an orderly way. The colony had been run first as Leopold's personal estate and then as Belgium's, and it entered independence with almost no trained administrators and no political machinery of its own. The chaos that swallowed the Congo after 1960 was already implied in the way the last three years were handled.

On 28 July 1958 three officers dismissed from the army and driven into exile, Captain Alix Pasquet and Lieutenants Philippe Dominique and Henry Perpignan, attacked in Port-au-Prince. The next day a militia answerable to Francois Duvalier alone was constituted. It took over from the hooded squads the regime had already been using to silence opponents. Recruited from civilians of the poor classes, it became the body known officially as the Volunteers of National Security and popularly as the tontons macoutes. The American doctrine of national security, current in those Cold War years, served the same regime twice, first as an argument for military aid from Washington and then as cover for an order of terror. The army was purged, weakened and broken in. Its weapons came under the direct control of the president. It had to live alongside a second armed body that existed to limit its privileges and to make any move against the regime unworkable.

Greene spent August 1963 in Haiti and found the Oloffson almost empty, with an Italian casino manager and an elderly American couple as the only other guests, a scene he transposed almost unchanged into his novel. The gossip columnist Aubelin Jolicoeur announced his arrival on 13 August and became the model for Petit Pierre. A New York paper ran a piece on 18 August noting that Greene was thinking of writing an entertainment beginning with a hotel keeper who returns to find only two guests. His own article appeared in a London Sunday paper on 29 September 1963 under the title Nightmare Republic, a bleak account of a people living under a strange curse in which he cast Papa Doc as the Vodou spirit Baron Samedi, a figure in top hat and tails haunting the cemeteries in dark glasses with a cigar. Diederich later learned Greene had been watched day and night throughout the visit.